The founding of
Signs in 1975 was part of the early development of the field of
women's studies, born of the
women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The journal had two founding purposes, as stated in the inaugural editorial: (1) "to publish the new scholarship about women" in the U.S. and around the globe, and (2) "to be
interdisciplinary." The goal was for readers of the journal to "grasp a sense of the totality of women's lives and the realities of which they have been a part." Joeres explored the "paradox" of how a journal can be both an "agent for change" and regarded as "respectable in the academy," and concluded with the hope that
Signs could retain its activist roots and transform the academy. The history of
Signs is explored extensively in Kelly Coogan-Gehr's 2011 book
The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. Coogan-Gehr uses
Signs as a case study to complicate what she calls the "stock narrative of feminist field formation". She argues that dominant histories of the development of
academic feminism, in focusing solely on the women's movement and other radical movements of the 1960s, fail to take into account the role of "changes the Cold War produced in higher education." In the book, she calls
Signs a "premier academic feminist journal". == Feminist Public Intellectuals Project (FPIP) ==