Academic attainment and feminism?

[suwoo]

I have wanted to start this thread all day but have been scared that it is stupid or I will be flamed. I want to ask if people feel there is a correlation between academic attainment and feminist principles. Is that a valid question?
I had no idea that I was a feminist. I knew I had these thoughts and principles but didn't know what they were or the significance of them until we did feminist literary theory this semester- it was like an epiphany and my whole world made sense

Had I not gone to uni at the grand old age of 35, maybe I would never had these revelations.

What do you think? Those of you that identify as a feminist, what level of education do you have?

Thanks for the references, dittany.

I take your point about the dating. It wasn't intended to suggest that things are "out of date"; I will re-consider that title, although it is also about setting it against the other movements of 1968.

Incidentally, my students always consider Freud old-hat and way past his sell-by date, without my even suggesting it to them...

They cover Wollstonecraft elsewhere on the syllabus, and other than Lysistrata (or rather, as we'll look at it, responses to this play), we're trying to keep to 20thC stuff.

Sadly, there's a limit to how much we can cover week-on-week, but I will look at including the Dines & Jeffreys.

Thanks again.

great stuff Penth.

Can I suggest sticking some of Betty Friedan 'The Feminine Mystique' into the Freud and 'what women want' week?

because 1. she is very important historically and isn't in there anywhere

1. it shows effectively how Freud was used politically to keep women in a certain place (ie the home).
2. the whole book is about the question of what women want and how they were told they want something but actually they didn't necessarily; it analyses brilliantly the way in which they were told what to want through different media.

Sorry, that was a X-post with you both.

We're keeping it 20thC (largely) for internal course-design/coverage reasons... Too boring and complicated to explain here...

Again, I fully take your point about the dangers of timelines. There is an element of inevitability to this, in that the course is not just about ideas, but also about the moments at which these ideas emerge, or are most iconically articulated; but I absolutely would not suggest that this renders them obsolete, and I would challenge the students to refuse this interpretation too.

That makes sense about keeping it 20th century - as I say, bee in my bonnet. It sounds great, will you post about how it goes? I'd love to pick up tips.

Is women's status better in that Papa new guinea culture SaF? Women are seen as polluting in the west as well too, of course (Christianity!) It just strikes me that if women live together they'd be more powerful; no men to clean up after for one thing. And the men in turn are forced to do their own chores.
Very about the kidnapping of boys (but they get to keep their girls, I suppose. In our culture we lose our girls at a very early age to patriarchal influences)

Sounds bloody good, Penthesileia. Are you planning to add literary texts to it, or leave it as a pure 'theory' course? How I dream of teaching a course like that - let's hope it spreads!

toh, so please excuse lack of punctuation...

penthe would be good to see a week on feminism and mythology... marina warner's beast to the blonde is excellent or elinor gadon the once and future goddess. might be worth looking at literary interpretations of this: angela carter, margaret atwood for example.

swallowedafly tis strange about the shared school uniform rebellions.

i was at secondary in the early 90s. i wonder if the time has anything to do with it, or if it's more to do with social awareness and body awareness. will ponder as i bf!

thanks saF. Men are fucked up.
Is there any hope?

yes, those men were MADE, but it's the chicken and the egg isn't it. Who were the first abusers?

But yes, in a post-patriarchal world, I know men will be able to behave themselves.

That's awful swallowed. Poor little boys.

Echoes of Sparta there, saf. Shocking.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Very much appreciated. I will try to work them in. Just so much to talk about and so little time...

Sybil - yes to Friedan!

dittany - Thanks for that reference.

Doris re: myth - We will be covering this somewhat with Cixous and The Laugh of the Medusa. But I will see about the Carter/Warner, etc.

VG - mostly theory, I think - though I tend to wonder what's theoretical about feminist theory... Seems more like a theorem, I'd say...

Again, thanks all.

LRD - re: how it works out... Just hope it doesn't begin like my colleague's Feminism classes (admittedly some time ago). She had wreckers on her course...

Thanks to Proles too.

Dittany, Butler is saying that there is no essence of woman, not that woman does not exist as an unstable social construction. similar to Luce Irigaray in France; it's postmodern, which doesn't mean it's a deadly enemy to feminism.

You yourself note that Dworkin has not been much celebrated in the groves of academe. On witchcraft and on fairytales, she just hasn't done the basic groundwork; it's all cobbled up from secondary materials. She ludicrously exaggerates the number of deaths in the witchtrials to numbers int he millions when the true figure is around 30,000, and she also assumes that all witch persecutions are aimed at women, despite the massive predominance of male witches among the accused in some countries. Like most radical feminists she hugely overstates the impact of the Malleus Maleficarum. On fairytales, she ignores the role of the original female tellers of these tales and seems not to know the brilliant early versions of many tales, such as the earliest Red Riding Hood, where Red says she has to go outside for a piss, thus escaping the wolf.

NB: I too like Gail Dinen's work.

I'm not defending her 'erasure'. I'm saying that she's not a helpful foremother because as you agree, her work on historical topics was vitiated by what we might now agree to call lack of training or experience. If I point out a mistake in a predecessor's work, I'm not trampling on it. Am I supposed to say she was right when she wasn't? And actually she made those topics very difficult for women to approach for some time.