To challenge Uni/Prof re Canon?

[Harriedharriet]

I am doing a few courses in Uni at the moment. They are history courses and the University is well known and respected. In both courses women are not mentioned before the 19th C. They did not exist it seems. Actually, apologies, prostitutes did.
I understand the issues and to some degree accept why there is not much more than a minor nod to women in the Canons/course work. However, I think there needs to be academic compensation, a caveat in ALL courses that state why that is.

A lecture on the laws, rules and regulations that were in place at the time to limit the participation of women would go a long way to compensate in my opinion.
AIBU to challenge the ProfA. (V intimidating prospect. 😬)

The last bit of history I studied was OLevel 1760 to 1914, social and political. Apparently there were no women at all in those days (well there might have been a sentence about Victoria being queen).

Really? If that is really true, you were simply taught badly. How about Catherine the Great, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, Caroline Herschel, the Pankhursts, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskill, Ada Lovelace, Catherine Booth, Mary Kingsley, Beatrix Potter, Marie Curie, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie Stopes, Clara Barton, Margaret Bondfield, and many more?

Maybe ilovesooty, maybe so.
I wondered if the OP was in the UK because students where I work take units on a course and have to gain a certain amount of marks to pass. I was interested what the actual degree was in.
Courses take an awful lot of time, knowledge and hard work to put together. Does the OP know what the course entails next year? It's only just induction week at the moment so early days yet.

Yeah think that's the point Lady Constance!

Surely, how marvelous that sounds.

I've been trying to work if it was just the teachers (at a mixed sex school with male head of history dept).

But I think it was the curriculum: you'd have failed the exam if you didn't understand the Factory Acts and had never heard of the women's suffrage movement.

Well, no, it isn't the point, StVincent. The fact that one school taught one period of history badly doesn't say anything about the teaching or study of history generally. When I did the same period for O level history, the contribution of women certainly was not ignored.

Lady - exactly!

Harried it was utterly marvellous and I've been an enthusiastic amateur social historian ever since.

I know a lot of my classmates would have preferred to do political history, but I'm ever grateful to the dept head for choosing to do the social & economic syllabus.

I assume OP is in the US given she's studying a course on the history of New York - I can't imagine there are many places outside the US (New York, actually) that would devote a whole course to that.

OP sorry to come back to the same thing as before but you say there is definitely no mention of women in this course but presumably it's only just started and most of it hasn't been taught yet (if you are in the first semester in the US), so how do you know? Just because the role of women in NY history isn't covered as a distinct topic doesn't mean that women will be written out of the subject (hard to imagine a course dealing with the industrial side of NY history that doesn't address the Traingle Shirtwaist fire, for example).

Actually I think our syllabus must have run to 1918, not 1914, because I think we covered the munitionettes.

So I know more about the home front than about the grand politics leading up to the First World War.

To be honest OurBlanche for an academic you come across as very complacent and unquestioning, very satisfied with the status quo To be equally honest Tinkly I suspect you have misinterpreted my posts!

See - you managed it! Saying that at some point during a course wouldn't actually kill a teacher, especially if it's likely that not all students have studied in this specific field before. Rather than the weird "pretend women just didn't exist" thing The point would be that 'pretend women just didn't exist' isn't anything I have come across, or many others here, it would seem! As OP hasn't been very illuminating it is impossible to be specific!

And yes, the newspaper thing was patronising, my apologies, it was a badly pharsed afterthought, came after my previous posts about written documentation and the lack of literacy in both make and females throughout history... more of a social class thing than a gender thing!

I agree with others that I was initially confused by the way the OP expressed it, but I think she has a point. buffy is right: this is an issue that is very well known in academia, and there is a lot of work on it.

It's tricky: on the one hand, I do know of academics who still manage to run courses without thinking about women and/or why women don't feature more.

On the other, I also find - sorry, OP - that students can sometimes be very ready to think they're the first to notice these imbalances.

I am a medievalist, mostly in English Lit, but obviously it is historical and we think about history too. In my department, there are several of us with interests in women's literature and history. In fact, I've sometimes looked at the gender balance and found that the majority of teaching is by women academics who work on women's literature. That's remarkable when you consider how few named women writers there are in the medieval canon.

Many of us explicitly teach 'against' the canon, discussing how it was formed and how it excludes women.

I still find students who come to me insisting that there's a problem, and we need more women, and why haven't I considered this from my safe position in the ivory tower?

Often, it's because they don't realise their perception is anticipated by the course. For example, I don't teach that women were prevented from participating 'by law', because I know more about medieval law than my students. Initially, you said:

A lecture on the laws, rules and regulations that were in place at the time to limit the participation of women would go a long way to compensate in my opinion.

Ok - so do you know those laws already? If so, you don't need the lecture. You should already be discussing them. Or, do you think you know these laws restrict women - but you're not sure what they are? In that case, sure, the lecture sounds a great idea, but it might be it would surprise you.

My students, for example, commonly assure me that women in medieval England were the property of their fathers and could be married off against their will. They claim women couldn't work outside the home, and that laws allowed men to do whatever they wanted to their wives (they often don't know, however, that marital rape was legal until very recently).

I don't blame my students for having an inaccurate perception of the legal situation and the ways it influenced women's participation in that historical era, but I do think it is often much more complicated that students first expect.

Surely and Lady Constance

Well I was taught to the curriculum (got an A) but certainly nothing about any of the women mentioned. It was all the Industrial Revolution, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraely, revolution, enfranchisement (for men) and the Napoleonic wars. I don't even recall any suffragette stuff.

Amelia, all I meant was that there are plenty of male academics who specialise in women's history and/or gender history. I work with some of them! I don't think we should assume this is the preserve of female academics only (or that they are easier for students to speak to).

TBF it's hard to mention women in a history of art module

There was a great series by Amanda Vickery recently, which introduced some female artists (other than the obvious ones such as Elizabeth Vigee le Brun, Mary Cassatt, Frieda Kahlo, Judy Chicago, Tracy Emin ...).

...Berthe Morisot, Gwen John, Bridget Riley, Barbara Hepworth

Ooh, yes! I remember that talk, buffy.

I'm a historian and we teach a module on the history of New York City in my department. (I thought the OP was a student in my department for a moment, but we don't teach any art history).

History departments still have their fair share of mysoginistic fuckwits & I've no doubt that this is reflected in their teaching.

I did a history degree in the early '90s, and there were loads of women from the outset. There was Elizabeth Lilburne and other women in the Leveller movement, many of the others mentioned up thread. It wasn't new to me, either - we covered the role of women in the Industrial Revolution, in the Reformation, in Weimar and the Third Reich. It would have been weird to leave it all out. And at uni, we covered some American history, too.

I think you should raise it with your tutors - not confrontationally, but wanting to find out about half the population. We do seem to be going backwards.

Agree with you, EBear.

Also, isn't it about how women are mentioned? Which I guess is sort of what the OP is saying.

You have to think laterally. Often, I can't mention ten women and ten men who did x. I can mention maybe 18 men and two women.

But I can talk about how those 18 men interacted with women, how they thought about women, how the contemporary laws and social history of women informed their lives, and so on. I can make it clear that women were there.

I also find it telling that this debate is all about the primary sources. What about women historians? Frankly, I would find a course on Elizabeth I taught entirely with reference to the Starkey school rather misogynistic.

"I understand the issues and to some degree accept why there is not much more than a minor nod to women in the Canons/course work. However, I think there needs to be academic compensation, a caveat in ALL courses that state why that is."

Please allow me to state hogwash here. First, there is NO reason why women cannot be included in history. I have been in the university for thirty years and what they are doingif indeed they claim that women were not "involved" in historyis whitewashing it. Women in the Arabo-Islamic world were extremely actively in political, social and cultural life from the Maghreb through Andalusia, all the way through the Mashriq. Go over further east and you will find more and more women, and so on. The real problem in this country is that syllabi and courses are largely male-dominated and nobody really does anything aside from paying lip service to them.

When I make up my syllabi, I ensure that at least 50% of the writers on there are female. That it is a challenge at times is my duty to find the texts and expose my students to this. This also promotes publishers to publish more women! So I would take this up with your professor but the dean as well. I would ask that they employ a policy much like the acquistions policy at the Tate today: 50% female.