ABSTRACT
Women’s Studies aimed to change the classroom and believed it would change the university-often as a prelude to changing the world through knowledge. In this chapter we look at the classroom, its practices, and their relationship to citizenship. What was the thinking behind both the assertion that change is and was needed in the world at large and that Women’s Studies was the program that would bring about such change? We want to consider some of the goals of citizenship for women and the ways in which Women’s Studies pedagogy and classroom practices are central to the cause of women’s citizenship. Finally. this chapter points to contentious issues in Women’s Studies classrooms and tries to look at them from different angles. The objective in this part of the chapter is to subject our fervently held beliefs to a variety of challenges and to build critical skills that can be used when faced with difficult issues both in the university and in public life. Women’s Studies, it is often believed, is an exercise in developing civic skills, whether for the classroom community or the broader one. In this chapter we also consider whether Women’s Studies
should reflect feminist politics both explicitly and implicitly. From the beginning, as we have seen, feminism was connected to Women’s Studies. Feminism sparked the commitment to do research on women, and in the early years there was hardly a scholar of
women who wasn’t a feminist. Some increasingly saw problems with this situation given that knowledge under the scientific method was supposed to be above politics. If one were going to be a scholar, could one be politically committed to feminism at the same time? Even more daunting was the question of whether one could actively advocate on behalf of women in the classroom or in the university and still uphold standards of impartiality. This was especially pressing, as we have seen, because members of the university community charged Women’s Studies with not being a group of impartial scholars but with being political before being scholarly. As we have seen in our consideration of feminist methodology, there are other solutions. That is, different locations will produce different questions and
different answers to the questions of feminism, pedagogy, and citizenship and these differences will produce contentious classrooms. Some will be happy with explicit feminist strivings for equality. Others will aim for solidarity with men and take that as their main concern in the classroom. Still others will explicitly reject all that is Western, especially the clear-cut aspirational goal to be valued as equal when the deck is stacked against people of non-male gender, non-white race, the impoverished, those with a non-normate body, and those of different sexualities. There will be some who will for these reasons believe feminism to be less than helpful. We believe that the classroom is one place to articulate both rejections and optimism. The feminist classroom should lead to thoughtfulness and reflection and if possible dismantle some of the “controlling images” that segment us by race, ethnicity, class, religion, and gender. Another difficult question is whether Women’s Studies has to be
“relevant.” That is, does Women’s Studies have an obligation to address current social and political problems facing women or can it look on women’s lives more broadly? For example, can Women’s Studies look at women authors of fiction from the nineteenth century even though they may not address today’s issues? People debate whether Women’s Studies professors need to shape the curriculum to be contemporary in outlook instead of examining women’s writing for the sheer beauty it might offer. Could one simply admire women’s paintings or sculpture as works of art, or do sexual politics need to be the most important consideration in
studying artistic creations? Couldn’t we simply investigate with the goal of finding a bias-free truth distinct from politics? Finally, the question arises of whether teachers needed to create a
feminist classroom based on the values of the feminist movement. One tenet of feminism is that women should be appreciated for their talents in the same way that men have been valued. Other values of feminism have been leaderlessness-that is, a non-hierarchical approach to social groups and an explicit acknowledgment of the power dynamics that might be at work in the classroom. But because feminism is now open to question, especially given the multiple sites of power and disempowerment, there are many vantage points from which different kinds of knowledge can radiate. The idea was also to have feminist processes in the classroom whereby the sharing of ideas would prevail over the kind of slashing critique of others’ ideas that often characterized the male ideal, but perhaps that is passé. It may be that more not less critique is necessary. The class will discuss processes to be used in critical discussion as much as it considers the content of those discussions.
