From the issue dated October 6, 2000
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Will the Real Feminists in Academe Please Stand Up?By DAPHNE PATAIWhat's going on in women's studies? The sociologist Joan D. Mandle relates a telling anecdote in her recent book, Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists?: Memoirs of a Campus Struggle. In the mid-1990's, some female students from Colgate University attended a conference on global feminism at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
In women's studies these days, Mandle counts as a heretic. She believes that all kinds of faculty members ought to teach women's studies, and all kinds of students ought to study it. Her approach is inclusive and outreaching. What could make such nice liberal ideas heretical? Only the context in which they are offered. For six years (1991-97), Mandle was director of the women's-studies program at Colgate, before, she tells us, being replaced, without notice, while away on leave. What were her sins? Rejecting the proposition that separatist "safe spaces" and so-called therapeutic classrooms are legitimate academic goals, she tells us. Believing that women's studies should reach out to members of sororities, to men, to all parts of the university without restriction. Above all, insisting on high academic standards and exhibiting a low tolerance for feminist orthodoxies. Mandle's book is important because it gives us a more accurate, less idealized version than the vast majority of accounts of the sorts of struggles that have -- and continue to -- beset women's-studies programs. Such struggles are not so much against grudging outsiders as among women for whom the overriding bone of contention has often been the question: What sort of feminists are we? A "founding mother" of Sociologists for Women in Society in 1972, Mandle arrived at Colgate with a background in civil-rights and New Left activism. Unafraid of leadership and responsibility, unapologetic about using "I" instead of the politically preferred feminist "we," critical of the "consensus" model that can paralyze an organization, impatient with the constant appeals to "community" and "support," she was bound to arouse hostility. She was also enormously successful in making women's studies a major presence at Colgate. When ideological purity is the name of the game, however, academic success doesn't count for much. Thus, Mandle's narrative is a troubling story of how the self-created marginalization and isolation of some women's-studies scholars have served to affirm their identity as "real" feminists and made them fiercely resentful of any encroachment on their turf. Mandle shared with most feminists the belief that the disadvantages suffered by women justified a separate women's-studies program, and she urged students to develop the organizational skills they would need to go out and change the world. But that was not enough to salvage her position, as battles raged over who "owns" women's studies. Mandle incorporated the Women's Resource Center, run by students, into a new Center for Women's Studies, whose mission was to be primarily academic. She was critical of a feminist "theme" dormitory whose ever-dwindling members saw themselves as the only true feminists. Mandle's account of her talks with other women's-studies directors (in particular, at the meeting of the National Women's Studies Association in 1998, where a number of women acknowledged the internal difficulties besetting their programs) confirms the frequency of internal discord. At the time, what set Mandle apart from her colleagues was not her concerns, but her willingness to go public with them, defying the accepted adage that airing dirty linen in public would aid women's-studies' enemies. Most of the conflicts that Mandle discusses in her book concerned one essential question: Is women's studies an integral part of academe, or should it embrace permanent outsider status? That is far from an abstract matter. It raises such concrete problems as, Must women's studies adhere to the same standards and goals as those of the rest of the university? Should it create a noncompetitive alternative for women, in which the key values are promoting a sense of community and providing a nurturing environment? As Mandle rightly observes, it's one thing for young female students to be caught up in heated debates over identity and legitimacy, but quite another for female faculty members, supposedly wiser and more knowledgeable, to be forever embroiled in them. There's more than a touch of immaturity to be found in students' and faculty members' reinforcing in each other a combative understanding of feminist identity that, on the one hand, wallows in self-pity and vastly exaggerated perceptions of victimhood, and, on the other, makes grandiose claims to be creating a new and better world. The deep and contentious conflicts over who is what sort of feminist have been a staple of women's studies. Six months ago, on the women's-studies' e-mail list WMST-L, some critical remarks of mine were parried by the usual personal attacks and charges that I was misrepresenting the field. I was intrigued, therefore, that several women who followed the exchange chose to write to me privately about their own experiences. A literature professor who has published extensively on female authors wrote that she once dismissed criticisms of the current feminist movement as right-wing distortions of the extremist views of only a few. No longer. A graduate student who has been teaching an introductory women's-studies course for several years noted her dismay at being expected to disabuse her students of the notion (with which they all entered class) that they are fully equal to men, and to teach them, instead, that they are oppressed victims. She said the texts she works with are all slanted toward the view that gender is entirely a social construct; that too many courses focus on feminist ideology, playing down detailed research on women. An instructor in women's studies wrote of being tired of having her feminist credentials constantly scrutinized, and of having to defend her decision to allow men to speak up in her class. Clearly, the conflicts and unpleasantness experienced by Mandle in the early and mid-90's continue. Joan Mandle's depictions of the contentious milieu generated by feminists is confirmed by another recent book on women's-studies programs -- although nothing could be further from the book's intent. Excitement, exhilaration, nostalgia -- all are present in the just-published The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony From Thirty Founding Mothers, edited by the feminist dynamo Florence Howe, who this year is stepping down as head of the Feminist Press, which she cofounded 30 years ago. In many ways, this book about "scholars and activists in the patriarchal halls of 1970's academe" (as the back cover puts it) is an inspiring story of the individual commitment and institutional transformation that have fundamentally altered education in the United States. The recollections gathered here paint a vivid scene in which male allies and institutional receptivity allowed feminist activism to transform the academy through the creation of women's-studies programs. Why, then, do many feminists today insist that universities in the 1970's were (and still are) riddled by "systemic sexism"? We are now entering the fourth (or fifth -- if one starts counting from the late 1960's, when the first women's-studies courses were created) decade of the enterprise, but feminists still routinely refer to the "chilly climate" supposedly undermining women in schools and universities -- and this despite the extraordinary achievements not only of women in higher education but also of feminist scholarship. The remarkable fact is, indeed, that feminists -- black and white, gay and straight -- have succeeded spectacularly. The Howe book reminds us of some well-known statistics. Within the first decade (1970-80), about 350 programs -- that is, more than half of the currently existing women's-studies programs -- were set up. Resistance and opposition certainly occurred at times, but the "politics" of the book's title is rarely depicted by its authors, beyond axiomatic references to "patriarchy." Consider the testimony of Mariam K. Chamberlain, a former project officer at the Ford Foundation and the sole nonacademic in the Howe volume. She tells us that, between 1971 and 1981 (when she left Ford), the foundation gave grants totaling more than $9-million to support women's advancement, over half going to women's-studies programs. Why did patriarchy not defend its bastions? Clearly, the 1970's were a time and the American university was a site prepared for change and, in fact, embracing it. But the personal stories in Howe's book do not acknowledge that favorable climate, although they reveal its presence. Instead, they seek to convey struggle and effort -- on a heroic scale and against formidable and entrenched forces. Seldom is reference made to internal conflicts among female faculty members, or to the many women in academe, past and present, who wanted no involvement with women's studies. There's a tendency to oversimplify and to gloss over serious intramural conflicts concerning the meaning of feminism. The one exception is the complaint, which we hear a lot about, that women's studies was originally "white women's studies" (a charge several essays in the book actually suggest is unfounded). Most interesting are the authors' descriptions of steps taken to dismantle inequality and break down hierarchy. Classes sat in a circle; teachers overtly renounced their authority (though a few came to regret that later); teaching collectives and participatory-governance structures (made up of students and faculty, staff, and sometimes "community" members) were set in place; political conformity was promoted, often to something vaguely called "socialism"; experience, rather than knowledge, was given a place of honor; the need for role models was stressed. Above all, the authors in Testimony clearly placed great importance on developing in students the correct awareness of gender, race, class, and the ever-growing list of politically charged identities. Always, they emphasized that women's studies was not merely an intellectual or scholarly pursuit, but a program fervently committed to feminist activism. Only two or three chapters in the book (which, incidentally, contains no contribution by a scientist) present dissenting ideas. Inez Martinez, a professor of English at the City University of New York's Kingsborough Community College, writes of rejecting the posture of "no hierarchy" in her classroom, recognizing that if professors pretend to know no more than their students, there cannot be any education. Yet she, too, ends her piece by celebrating women's activism and the gains made by teaching students how victimized women have been. An even more unusual voice is that of Mimi Reisel Gladstein, an English professor and associate dean at the University of Texas at El Paso, who, as an Ayn Rand enthusiast, sees Rand as a positive model for women, even though Rand's opposition to collectivism has made her anathema to feminist academics. The lone contributor to criticize the key ideas and practices of women's studies is Nona Glazer, now retired, who was a professor of sociology at Portland State University. She says she disliked many aspects of feminist pedagogy. An advocate of liberal education, Glazer, by her own account, often went "against the grain of feminism." She disliked the drift of the program she cofounded at her university: the "vacuous psychologizing about men," the "whimpering," the "mixing psychobabble with social analysis," the tendency of many younger scholars simply to repeat earlier feminist work. She criticizes the antagonism to intellectual work heard at women's-studies conferences. And she declares herself reluctant to see women's studies, with its separatism, "become permanent and institutionalized." Instead, she looks forward to a time when we can have "people's studies." That sentiment puts her at odds with the many feminist faculty members worried that the feminist edge of women's studies might become muted as some institutions rename their programs "gender studies." Glazer is also the sole writer in this 400-page volume to question the feminist mantra of an "integrated analysis" of race, class, and gender and other group markers. ("I never worked through to my satisfaction how to talk or write cogently about gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and class simultaneously," she admits.) Still, she makes clear that, having distanced herself from her own women's-studies program, she invariably returned to support it in times of crisis. And, though she remains unhappy that feminism has not "produced an intellectual revolution" capable of completely transforming the curriculum, Glazer considers women's studies to have been her "salvation." Most tellingly, almost every author in the Howe volume prides herself on the political direction taken by women's studies, especially its close association with women's centers and support groups on campus. Joan Mandle would have found most of these founding mothers of women's studies siding with her opponents. The explicit use of the classroom for purposes of indoctrination is enthusiastically promoted in another recently published book: Paula S. Rothenberg's Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender. This is not a memoir in the conventional mode. It is a narrative locked into the iron grid of race, class, and gender. The author adopts an attitude of public self-criticism for the Invisible Privilege she has enjoyed in the first two categories, which contrasts with the lack of privilege she has experienced as a woman. Unlike Nona Glazer, Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at William Paterson University of New Jersey, judges the analysis of the "intersections of race, class, and gender privilege" to be an unfailing intellectual and political tool. She must be gratified to see that belief now officially inscribed in a large number of women's-studies "mission" statements and course descriptions, and indeed in many universities' general-education requirements. What emerges from Rothenberg's book is a world in which only group identity counts, and individuals, even those close to her, are of interest merely as exemplars of those groups. Invisible Privilege lacks human warmth, most shockingly in an epilogue in which the lingering deaths of Rothenberg's parents, treated and mistreated by nurse's aides and other women of color, are served up to make some closing comments about race, class, and gender. Given that Rothenberg is a prominent advocate of multiculturalism who has edited several widely used feminist and multicultural anthologies, it's disturbing that her avid defense of those isms comes down to a few fundamentally anti-intellectual and downright ignorant views. Consider her description of her own experience decades ago in a high-school English class, as rescripted from her present point of view. She and her fellow students were required to write book reports about English and American writers, which were supposed to end with "a mandatory discussion of the universal themes in the work." "In this way, we came to understand that novels and short stories about the trials and tribulations of well-to-do, white men were universal and timeless," Rothenberg tells us. "In this way, we came to own Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Samuel Butler, William Shakespeare, and a host of other similarly situated writers and adopt their Eurocentric and privileged male view of life and the world as though it were coextensive with reality." I can think of few more powerful indictments of Rothenberg's ideas about education and the curriculum than that confused statement, which makes a mockery of decades of serious feminist scholarship that attempts to get beyond such stereotypes. Among other objections, such language should raise the question of whether someone who lumps together the above-named writers as "well-to-do, white men" with a "privileged male view of life" should be teaching at all, let alone be director of the New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum and Teaching, which provides resources to all colleges in the state. In further illustration of her pedagogy, Rothenberg recalls an episode in which her black students, in an introductory college philosophy class, confessed to her that they could make no sense out of Descartes's radical doubt. The incident, she says, "proved to be another turning point in my intellectual life," because it taught her "to operate from the premise that their [the students'] discomfort was a sign of Descartes's inadequacy." Still, she didn't want to dismiss Descartes altogether. So she informed her students about his poor eyesight and the privilege reflected in his worldview. "By constructing a curriculum -- worse yet, a culture -- around such an idiosyncratic worldview and then calling it knowledge, we have privileged the distorted perspective of an infinitesimal fraction of the world's population," she writes. Her pedagogy, she believes, communicated ideas "in ways that empowered" students. Rothenberg goes on for pages about the "sham" of multiculturalism "undertaken to placate, not educate." She decries "curricular affirmative action" that amounts to giving little more than lip service to multiculturalism; she pleads for "another way" -- a "more inclusive curriculum" that "acknowledges the race, gender, and class differences that have shaped every aspect of the world we live in today." I agree that much of what is called multiculturalism is a pious fraud. However, this fraud, now perpetrated at virtually all levels of education, ought to be seen as a response to insistent demands like Rothenberg's for multicultural and multidisciplinary teaching in all courses, no matter how unsuitable. It is such demands that force teachers with scant or no training in what they must add to their courses to become purveyors of perfunctory and largely vacuous multiculturalism. Rothenberg -- like almost all of the authors in the Howe volume -- evinces no doubts about using the classroom for the promotion of political commitments. Add to that Joan Mandle's failed attempt to turn women's studies into serious education, and one can begin to see what's going on in women's studies today. Feminist faculty members and their sympathizers on campuses (some of whom may merely be afraid of crossing feminists) have done their best to dissolve the boundaries between education and indoctrination. Surely those should be sharply drawn in a democratic society. Far from being a small band making a brave stand against the patriarchal and racist university, many scholars in women's studies are, in fact, well-situated, influential, and very busy. What long-term impact they will have on student views and behavior remains to be gauged. Perhaps not much. But in the meantime, these feminists have succeeded both in remodeling the program of studies at many universities to conform to their often questionable aims, and in transforming -- not always for the better -- the environment for the men and women who learn and teach there. Daphne Patai is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A revised version of her 1994 book, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, written with Noretta Koertge, will be published by Rowman and Littlefield next year. Books Discussed in This Essay Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists?: Memoirs of a Campus Struggle, by Joan D. Mandle (University of Missouri Press, 2000) [How to buy this book] Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender, by Paula S. Rothenberg (University Press of Kansas, 2000) [How to buy this book] The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony From Thirty Founding Mothers, edited by Florence Howe (Feminist Press, 2000) [How to buy this book] http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education