This is how I replied to a comment from my Teen Feminists post. And the question of the day: Would a high-school course better serve the community (and the world, by extension) if it's called "Women's Studies" or "Gender Studies"? I'm voting for "Women's Studies." And you?
"Feminism" does put people on the defensive, but I still use it, and crack jokes and love men, to show people what a feminist can look like in the most positive way possible.
To an extent some history and literature reinforces male stereotypes, sure, but the fact that about 95% of the literature the kids read is written by men (I actually can't think of a single book written by a woman that's studied at our school, but that 5% is the benefit of the doubt), and the majority of main characters are men, they clearly see a wider variety of male experiences. Women are just side characters - wives, mothers, and girlfriends - except in some Shakespeare in which they have a more prominent role (funny that we seem to have gone backwards on that one).
And just the other day we joked in the staff room about making an assignment to find three important female Canadian figures in the text from the 1930s - and laughed at the futility of the assignment. (Not that they don't exist, but that they're impossible to find in textbooks. They jump right from Nellie McClung to Kim Campbell. We don't even have enough women in history texts to develop a stereotype or two!)
I completely agree that breaking gender stereotypes should include both genders. I'm all about convincing guys to be trend setters and start wearing skirts, but here's the thing... Now we're at a point in which, in many cases, girls actually have more options than guys. Girls have a wider variety of clothes to choose from for instance. They can paint their faces or not. They can work in construction or daycare. Guys' options are more narrow in that they'd be ostracized for wearing skirts or make-up, or working in daycare. That's sad. But the important point here, is the fact that the guys' options are more limited BECAUSE women's roles and values and options are devalued by society.
If everyone saw women's stuff as equally valuable as men's stuff, then men's options would open right up. SO, by studying women's issues, and teaching the value of women's stuff, it actually increases the options available to men. So it's good for everybody. I don't see it as "us vs. them" (even though many do) as much as it is "us vs. us." We all need an attitude adjustment.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
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16 comments:
I think you've made a very good argument to add more women writers and historical figures to the general curriculum.
Again, if you put them aside in a course labeled 'Women's Studies' then you have already basically given up putting them into the general curriculum.
Also, keep in mind that if you do include mention of women in history, you are going to see a whole lot of women doing traditional women things, because that's what most women did in history. If you are going to only single out women who went against gender roles, well, then you need to also highlight men who went against gender roles in history, and good luck finding any of them, either. But why not put both in a Gender Studies class?
History is generally nothing but a massive reinforcement of traditional gender roles for men. You read about generals and leaders, not about the man who stayed home with his kids. So again, history is not men's studies.
And women's choices are NOT devalued, if you attach a dollar value to it - because more money is spent on women's consumer goods than on men's consumer goods.
It is not that skirts are devalued, it is that men are ridiculed and locked into traditional gender roles because there was never any real movement to free them from them.
And it is laudable that you don't see it as 'men vs women' - but you must recognize that many other feminists, perhaps a majority, DO see it that way, and that certainly seems to be the perception of the public at large as well. I don't see that going away, either, rightly or wrongly.
You want to get more students to sign up? You want to get the majority of people out there to deal with breaking gender roles for men AND women, I think the best way to do that is take the divisiveness out at the very start, call it Gender Studies, and then get some results.
I mean, ok, I did sign up for Women's Studies in high school, but I was like one of three guys when I did it, and I'm not like most men to begin with - no interest in sports, and I stayed home for six months to take care of a baby while my wife worked.
Feminism now has a bad name, mostly due to overexposure of the more radical elements (IMHO), and Women's Studies just won't attract that many men, for that reason and others. And finally, if there is no 'Gender Studies' class, where will men learn about breaking male sexual stereotypes? It would seem misnamed to include that in a 'Women's Studies' class and if you did it in a 'Men's Studies' class, you'd have complaints all over the place about how they are all just MRAs or something.
I want to focus on your last paragraph: "If everyone saw women's stuff as equally valuable as men's stuff, then men's options would open right up."
While that may be true, how are you going to get "everyone" when by title you have already excluded half of the population?
Don't get me wrong - when women did not have political power (could not vote) and were not in political offices and boardrooms, there was a very strong reason to focus on women and getting power to women.
But now if the goal is to question gender stereostypes and open things up for both men and women, it seems lopsided to keep focusing on women alone. It also won't get many men to participate if it is called 'Women's Studies' - in fact, I can already hear the objections of some on the class (The RadFem, perhaps?) if a man in such a class opens his mouth to say how gender roles have trapped him as a man - he'll be told to 'shut up, this is a WOMYN'S STUDIES class, you can go talk about men somewhere else' - not saying that this is valid or that most would do it, but you know some RadFems, and a Women's Studies class is likely to have at least one, would say something like that.
And that's not to say you shouldn't have, for instance, a Women in History class or Women in Literature class (though it would be nicer if that were folded into just 'History' or 'Literature' wouldn't it?) But if you are talking about questioning gender stereotypes, that sort of study, I just think it isn't very useful to only approach it looking at one gender - you sort of need both - it would be like having a class on human reproduction that only showed the sexual organs and reproductive system of one sex. You can't have one gender role without the other.
Sage, I find all this labeling confusing. After reading most of the Feminism stuff in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I think that labels are as often used to distract from content as they are used to define it.
I think that Gender is a useful analytic term, and thus, that "gender studies" as another term for academic feminism is not living up to the promise of the term. I think Gender studies should focus on the gender relations and their consequences for social development. It should integrate research in social psychology, socio-biology, biology, anthropology, as well as all that is currently usually defined by the term - the more normative, partly philosophical part of it. That's what I think would be a research programme worthy of the term Gender Studies.
That, on the other hand, should, if anything, only liberate those who want to focus on a more specific subject - like woman's studies, or men's studies, or queer theory, or human mating psychology, or the political economy of the glass ceiling, etc, which are all logical subsets of "gender studies".
The name of the course should reflect the subject, in my opinion. So, if you're focusing mainly on women, women's studies seems like the appropriate choice to me.
About some things you say in the post...
Women are just side characters - wives, mothers, and girlfriends -
While I doubt anyone would deny that political and economic power was mainly in the hands of men for the bigger part of Western history (as well as in most other cultures), I do not agree that this makes wives, mothers and girlfriends "side characters" - I doubt they were "side characters" when they lived. Their more domestic role makes it hard for historians to assess their true importance, unfortunately. I believe there were far more Lady McBeth's than seems to be commonly believed today.
Written history being only one part of education, I think it is important to note that, at least in Germany, there are far more female teachers than male teachers, and some child psychologists are now blaming that fact (they use it as a proxy for alleged indoctrination of young boys with allegedly primarily female values) for male teenage development problems. I'm not so sure about this, but the predomniance of female teachers may be anecdotal evidence of your theory that women could be society's primary rulekeepers.
Guys' options are more narrow in that they'd be ostracized for wearing skirts or make-up, or working in daycare. That's sad. But the important point here, is the fact that the guys' options are more limited BECAUSE women's roles and values and options are devalued by society.
That is a fair point to some extent. But regardless of any speculation about any possible non-culture-dependent biological factor that could have independent behavioral results, in the aggregate, women can statistically shown to be attracted to slightly older men with a higher social and financial status. Whatever the reasons for this may be, it logically also limits men in their career choices due to their statistically observable need to achieve a higher status than their desired partner's.
Maybe this will change, but change is slow and thus often largely irrelevant for important individual decisions. So, trading bonds usually wins against writing poetry.
Having glibly skimmed the above comments like a 200-level textbook before a midterm, now it's time for MY awesome opinion!
I support the term Gender Studies. While the arguments for Women's Studies may be strong ones, I support a field of feminist-oriented scholarship that investigates gender as a broad and somewhat fluid category. Women's Studies, to me, sounds like the study of women as a sex. Society's inability to distinguish sex from gender always gets my goat and so I am immediately on the defensive when I hear Women's Studies.
Gender, on the other hand, applies to both sexes (and I think it is often forgotton how gendered men are, how socialized they are into their roles and identities). It also refers to the social construction around the sexes and because of this I feel that it covers more of the key issues of study, or key potential issues to study. Couldn't your objectives of women's studies be acheived under a broader category of gender studies?
I would favour Gender Studies for the simple reason that it would have a tendency to get more boys and/or men enrolled. Women's Studies may be better for all the reasons you sight but in the long run, we must try to understand one another and it is essential for young men to be exposed to the field. "Women's Studies" creates an early barrier which contributes to young men believing that the field is hostile to them. That in turn, provides energy to the gender divide.
DBB - I don't have the power or influence to increase the number of women in courses that I don't teach (or in departments I'm not part of, like English). I can only affect my own courses. Since I can't possibly force women writers in other courses (not likey in the remainder of my teaching career anyway), I have to put it all in this one course or it remains excluded from the school system.
History is the study of men primarily. We don't study men who stay home with kids, because that aspect of life isn't valued enough by society to be included in discussions. So, not all types of men are included, but it's mainly men who are studied.
In studying philosophy in university, one course that most people took was called, "Men in Western Thought." Even though the word "men" was in the title, and it was entirely a study of men, it wasn't seen as excluding women from taking the course - nor did it at all. Why will women take a course exclusively studying men, but men won't take a course exclusively studying women? I think that's part of the larger picture, ie. women's lives are undervalued. (And I wouldn't just be studying women home with kids because that's what most women did - there are women who stood out among the crowd - which is what we typically study in history.)
The only women's studies course I ever took was an art history course that filled in the women in art for me. The male profs who had a monopoly on the general studies course didn't see fit to add women artists to the curriculum. So they ended up as a footnote in another, much smaller course.
Put a race slant on the argument - Is a "Black Studies" or "Native Studies" courses excluding all whites? The majority of our curriculum focuses on white people in history and white writers. So it would be a great addition to have courses like this. But nobody would see them as only there for black or 1st nations people to take.
I don't know many feminist teens in my school, much less radfems who would be bold enough to tell a guy he's not allowed to talk about men in a women's studies course.
Tobias - on side characters - I meant specifically in the literature being read, not in life in general. e.g. In "Catcher in the Rye" we get a few girls he likes, and his sister plays a bit bigger role, but they're all there to help develop his character further. "Lord of the Flies" has a mention of moms here and there. "Of Mice and Men" has the wife who causes all the trouble for the guys by being attractive. There aren't any female leads in the books being taught at my school.
Rainbow - while I'm all for being inclusive, I'm also trying to balance out what's already offered - to fill in all the gaps; so it will be a course primarily focusing on women's lives in art, history and through literature. I do teach philosophy of gender as a unit in one of my courses, and we touch on the issues you're discussing. I'm not sure that's what this course will be about though.
Mark - this is the central dilemma for me. Do I name the course accurately to reflect the content, or choose a name to attract more students and just accept that most guys won't want to study anything about women (well, in a school setting anyway).
But maybe the course should change focus and not be just filling in the gaps.
Ah, see, I took this as a question about what one would name the course that deals with gender stereotypes (and pushes to break them) - not a course on history or literature that includes women. Because such courses would not be about gender stereotypes, they would be about specific women and what they did, just like regular history is not about gender stereotypes, it reinforces them by telling the stories of only men who fit the stereotypes.
If your curriculum bosses refuse to add women to history and literature main courses, then I could see adding a Women in History and a Women in Literature course, and calling them as such. And if you combined them, I'd call it 'Women in Literature and History' - but I'd still have a 'Gender Studies' course to deal specifically with analyzing and challenging traditional sex roles, something that would be outside the purview of a History or Literature course anyway.
I agree with all of you, actually, Sage included.
My department used to be called "women's studies" but a couple years ago it became "gender and women's studies", which was a good bridge, I think. We have classes called "gender and..." and we have classes called "women and..." and the focus is mostly directed along those lines: for eg, my "women and music" class focused mostly on major women musicians, but also talked about the structural barriers women face in participation in music, as well as things like gender encoding in music and lyrics. My "gender and development" class looked at differences in gender roles and how those differences could be best addressed by development agencies to make their programs most effective.
So my vote is for both: Gender AND Women's Studies.
see how easily we get stuck in binaries? I say, break it down right from the start, with an inclusive name.
TG and Sage-Both great points. I was thinking about Gender Studies at the university level, and I can see how at the high school level where the curriculum is so blatantly exclusive to women there is definitely a gap there needing to be filled.
At the university level, it is helpful to make that distinction. A course like Women and... could be slightly different in approach and content than a Gender and... Compare for example Women and Warfare with a Gender and Warfare class, which IMO would absolutely require a look at masculinities. Women and...is a useful term when the focus is on providing a previously untaught focus of the course.
Either way, exciting!!!!
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...this is the central dilemma for me. Do I name the course accurately to reflect the content, or choose a name to attract more students and just accept that most guys won't want to study anything about women (well, in a school setting anyway).
Sage, personally, I think more guys than you believe are interested in this subject. But I also believe that, certainly in a school setting, they might not value the gained knowledge as highly as the social risk involved in taking such a course. They might wonder if their presence is even considered desirable by their female peers taking the course, if their perspective might be listened to, and, certainly, what those in their peer group not taking the course would think about it. In general, it's certainly not a "sexy" subject from a male pupil's perspective, regardless of the title.
As a pupil, what I would have found really interesting would not really have been a course telling me about "great women in history" - I read my sister's copy of the book - but a course that would have bridged the huge gap between teenage social reality and teenage (individual) aspirations.
A course that used historical achievements of women or a discussion about their discrimination (one that would not start by telling the boys that they're guilty because of their anatomy) to allow girls and boys to express themselves and their hopes, dreams and (gendered) reality outside of immediate peer pressure would have been rather sexy indeed.
Tobias - great comment! Can you add more about the kind of course you'd like to see? What readings, exercises, assignments, film, etc. would be part of the course. The idea sounds great, but how do I teach "allowing girls and boys to express themselves"?
ANYONE? What should the content of a Women and Gender Studies (h/t to TG) be??
Hmm... difficult, don't forget that I'm not from the Anglosphere. But I'll try to think of something a bit more detailed tomorrow, tonight it's just too late for my brain to work at all.
I'll think about that.
Off the top of my head, I would think a starting point would be to discuss social construction and structural barriers to equality - break down the idea that equality has already been achieved, and break down the idea that men and women just ARE different, and so any negative treatment of that difference is justified. Perhaps a look at societies in which gender roles are reversed would be helpful - like a sociological perspective. Also, perhaps a look at legislation worldwide regarding equality for women, like which countries have signed and ratified CEDAW and which have not - and then just some cold hard stats about the gendered nature of poverty, economic inequality, HIV infection rates, violence against women, etc. as well as the exclusion of women throughout history in literature, politics, art, music, etc.
Overall, it would probably work best as a sociology class.
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Quite frankly, what Thinking Girl describes is exactly what I thought of as being "unsexy" from a teenage male perspective.
Discuss social construction as a starting point? Precisely at the time when biology strikes the hardest (during puberty) and hormonal differences are increasing?
Well, I don't know what kind of audience this is supposed to be for - what their overall cultural background is -, and most certainly I would be a horrible teacher for a non-academic students, but here I go...
I wouldn't *tell them* anything at first, but let them discover the differences and social dynamics themselves, possibly through literature. Does "Pride and Prejudice" has anything to do with gender roles, how about Flaubert's Mme Bovary, Ibsen's "Nora", or Theodor Fontane's "Effi Briest" - or Goethe's "Young Werther" for the description of an overly emotional man?
Do they feel their life is still determined to go down the same established ways? As a guy, I would like to hear from the girls how they feel about the expectations they feel to have to live up to, social, personal, peer pressure - and vice versa.
Not therapy-like, but as a way to discover the power of social dynamics for everyone's life.
That said, I don't think it's appropriate to teach pupils the power of social construction without mentioning that there are biological differences that have behavioral consequences when they are experiencing these differences every day in their own body.
Moving slowly away from their individual perspectives, a discussion of the existence of differences would open the "justice perspective" - equality in difference - how to deal with it, where would different standards be fair because of the differences, where would different standards be discriminatory. Should there be positive discrimination because some differences weren't dealt with justly in the past? Which differences aren't handled correctly today? What would gender-liberated utopia look like? Would they prefer a gender-free world?
Maybe that's the moment for some of the statistical elements mentioned by Thinking Girl.
I would not introduce feminism as a distinct movement and political philosophy before. At this point I would try to explain how the industrial revolution has freed both men and women from efficiency oriented gender roles, how culture needed time to adapt, how women progressively fought for direct social and economic participation and how the feminist movement of the last 40-50 years fits into the overall intellectual traditions of the 20th century.
Then I would present some of the key literature, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, but also some of the shriller voices, to document the variety of opinions and approaches. I would mention "patriarchy" as the term feminists have coined for the social system everyone lives in, and the varying degrees to which it discriminates against women - in history, today, abroad. (I would *not* tell the boys that they are guilty by affiliation until proven innocent.)
I would probably mention in the end that, while discrimination is real and should be ended, there are very few "safe facts" regarding the actual cause-consequence relationship of biology and socialisation.
At times it's a bad case of chicken and egg. Even biological differences are sometimes influenced by social processes. But, of course, they have probably somehow influenced the social reality before.
Just some thoughts. I've probably described the course I would have liked to attend - or would like to attend now, given my current interest spectrum, but imagining me 15 years younger ;)
Tobias and TG - thanks for the extensive input!
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