ABSTRACT
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion Anne Elliot, the central character, remarks that ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything’ (Austen, 1965). The quotation might well, and usefully, be placed above the entry to every university, to remind the incoming students, both female and male, that what they are about to study is not ‘natural’ knowledge, but constructed knowledge. Moreover, because what is studied in universities has been constructed by long years of male domination of academic life, the very assumptions of the academy-its claims to universal and generally applicable knowledge-have to be challenged.
