ABSTRACT
Feminist educators in the 1990s throughout the industrialized world face similar problems and issues. Despite national differences, they share a concern about the future of education for women in societies marked by the resurgence of rightwing ideology and the conservative control of the state. The chapters in this volume reflect differences in national circumstances, but all share a commitment to social justice and see education as a key arena of struggle for women and other excluded and oppressed groups. Like other progressive theorists in the 1990s, these writers have been faced with both theoretical and material challenges to left analysis in the rapidly changing circumstances of the late twentieth century. First, they have been affected by critiques of what is broadly identified as post-modernist and postcolonial theory. These theories have challenged the ‘master narratives’ of Western thought in general and the truth claims of Marxism and feminism in particular. Second, they have been faced with the realignment of politics following the success of neo-conservative forces in the 1980s, the ever more rapid growth of a world wide corporate capitalist economic system and the seeming collapse and ‘failure’ of socialism in Eastern Europe and Russia. It is possible to argue, as Madeleine Arnot has, that these developments have in a sense ‘freed’ the left from the legacy of social democracy, with its acceptance of capitalism and its strategy of reform from within (Arnot, 1991). But it is not at all clear what sort of politics will emerge to mobilize groups around a progressive agenda in this new world. In this chapter I would like to consider these questions with particular reference to recent developments in the United States.
