ABSTRACT
According to Sheila Rowbotham in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973), the concept of male hegemony, like that of female oppression, is not new, but then (as she also points out) it is one thing to encounter a concept, quite another to understand it. That process of understanding requires one to perceive the concept of male hegemony as a whole series of separate ‘moments’ through which women have come to accept a male-dominated culture, its legality, and their subordination to it and in it. Women have become colonised within a maledefined world, through a wide variety of ‘educational moments’ which seen separately may appear inconsequential, but which together comprise a pattern of female experience that is qualitatively different from that of men. These educational moments when collated can provide considerable insights into the collective ‘lived experience’ of women as women. For example, in the educational autobiographies of women edited by Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah (1980), what emerges is that in education women have ‘learnt to lose’ and, more than that, they have learnt how to lose, even though they may have had the ability to succeed academically. Through such experience they have learnt to accept that ‘the masculine man is one who achieves, who is masterful: the feminine woman is one who underachieves, who defers’ (Brewster, 1980, p. 11).
