ABSTRACT
The recent publication Educating Rita and Her Sisters: Women and Continuing Education collects together a series of articles about women’s education in Britain at the present time (Benn et al. 1998). Together with its subsequent review in Studies in the Education of Adults (Stalker 1999), it captures some of the contemporary dilemmas facing women’s education within the academy. Joyce Stalker’s review gives the collection one cheer on the basis of ‘a group of super women with whom I would love to spend more time . . . I can imagine that we would have energised discussions, with many points of agreement and of healthy disagreement’. But she withholds her other two cheers on the basis of the writer’s ‘vague’ analysis of neoliberal legacies and her disappointment with ‘the tone of the articles’. It seems to Stalker they lack
the essential energy of the women. There seems to be an unnecessary carefulness in each chapter; a reticence to be blunt for fear of being called reductionistic, to be sharp for fear of being called essentialistic, to be pointed for fear of being called simplistic.
