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?

I call myself a feminist (though know a few people who would say I am not in rl as I have taken the carer role; one of us had to, it suited me better).

Have just submitted the research protocol for the final stage of my part time MA.

dittany - Hild of Whitby was head of a male/female convent. THat's the nearest I can think (and obviously isn''t woman-only, but woman-controlled with some women-only spaces within it). Just mentioning her for interest, though, as she's so unusual.

Oh yes - as I say, it's the nearest I can think rather than an perfect, just she is an interesting character. But I'd also agree entirely that women managed despite, rather than because of, Christian structures.

The reason I get interested in women like Hild, say, is that I think there are two separable levels of patriarchical oppression - one during the historical period these women lived in, and a second by people coming afterwards who whitewash that history, pretend women had less power and less impact than tehy did, and use that myth to argue that the current, modern status quo is excusable in relation to this fictionalized past.

I think it's important for teachers to look at that second level of sexism, as well as the first.

Does anybody know? the first universities were dedicated to teaching religion, is this right? only many years later were people given what was termed a classical education and only recently women were even allowed in the door. I remember reading that women were not taught mathematics, had no need of it apperently until after 1900. Or was it something to do with the fact that men believed women were incapable of understanding it.

Same with religion, thats why women were not educated, so that they didn't question the status quo.

Seems to me that women have always been very able to understand both mathematics and theology, so the only way to ensure our subservience was to deny us the right to study either.

Dittany: As the other thread suggests, I can't say that I've witnessed any 'hotbeds' of radical feminism. With regards to undergrad level, certainly I don't know of any courses that specifically focus on the thinkers and activists you often cite (in my own area, it wouldn't really work - there might well be in other fields). There will always be the tension at undergrad that the students need to know all that it out there - at postgrad level of course, they dictate their own research path.

But though it might not be specifically taught in a classroom, I do think it's bubbling under for students to find. Elaine Showalter is used (gynocriticism is still taught), and we've got Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin in the uni library (I know we've got a shelf on feminist analysis of pornography because I read most of it for an article). I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to any student who asked me, or mention their names when we consider patriarchal analysis. Yes, I do teach Butler and yes, I use queer theory in my work but in my experience queer theory is always introduced as distinct from feminism (largely through their disagreements).

In practice, too, I think what students see is immesely important, and certainly in my field what they see is women. Women thinking, teaching, writing about other women (and these women are getting to the top - slowly but the male/female ratio of Profs is balancing). The focus is firmly on women's thoughts - I reckon women's texts firmly outweigh men's in my area, have done for a while and will continue to do so. I do think it's hopeful.

LRD, think I agree with you - and Dittany, I do know Daly's work well, and it's interesting that she herself seems to have begun as an evangelist. Thing is that popes and bishops had huge power in one sense, but not much local impact on the day-to-day. So convents like Syon Abbey offered huge power - economic and intellectual - to women, which obviously did not make them feminist. Also obviously, layfolk also came under the jurisdiction of male ecclesiastics in this period, so - paradoxically - conventual life might have offered a more reliable escape from male oversight.

"Women as group didn't have power. Some individual exceptions did. Not a lot has changed in some ways."

Dittany, is it going to change unless those women who are exceptions also acknowledge the point of what you just said. It would also take women in academia to stand up and say "women haven't had equality, still don't have it but we are going to have it, not just some of us but all of us" instead they teach liberal ideas.

The perverse way in which some women who claim to have freedoms ignore the fact that many other women don't. Do they not see or do they not care?

queen - yes, the first universities taught from a religious perspective. Even in the nineteenth century you had to be Anglican to go to university (or at least you had to go to church). That's why the university of London was founded. The thing is, some women have always been at least as well educated as their male peers, but societies have always found ways to pretend these women either didn't count somehow, or were unnatural or wrong. I reckon knowing that is important, because (as dittany says), it shows you how little has changed, when the misogynists would like to pretend there has been a huge change and aren't the little women lucky nowadays?

It's exactly the same as the 'in the past women didn't work and stayed home caring for the babies' myth, and deployed for the same reasons.

seig, are you a medievalist then?

With what I'm teaching now, and in my field, no, I can't say that I do. Without outing myself, the theory that I teach has to have relevance to our primary texts. So if I taught pornography, for example, then Dworkin would be perfect, because that's her main field of operations (that's a crap example but hopefully it does the job). There are critics out there that are pro-woman whose field of ops is literary studies, and so I use them.

And, frankly, there are problems with teaching what can loosely be termed 'second-wave' to students. I was going to use The Female Eunuch, and then Greer refers to gay people as 'freaks'. With Butler, I can explain the disagreements, the ideological clashes, etc. I can't defend teaching 'gay people are freaks' to an undergrad class.

Although this thread has got me thinking that Daly's stuff on 'hag' and 'witch' as patriarchal labels for women could well be worked in, because we cover things like that anyway. Mental note made.

Why did Greer call gay people freaks?

It's on my bookshelf at home, and I'm not there, but when I get there I'll double check my refs and confirm.

Victor, do you not get to question what you're teaching then? Couldn't you teach Greer and also get people discussing what's wrong with her views as well as what's right?

(sorry, dunno if this is coming close to the outing problem; if so just let me know you can't reply of course.)

LRD: Simply because I don't teach politics, sociology, etc - if I did, I suspect that discussing the ins and outs of theoretical/political/non-lit texts would be higher priority. As it is, discussion of literature is the prime focus and there simply isn't the time to discuss the views of the critic as well as the literature, and how it relates to the literature.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these texts to a student, and certainly any postgrad who wanted to focus on contemporary women's writing would be expected to have a reasonable knowledge of post 1950s feminist thought, but for undergrads I think that similar positions to Greer's can be brought in using literary critics.

Ah, fair enough, I see. I'm just learning this stuff - I teach, but have only just started, and I was wondering how to use feminist theory for my students myself, so thanks for explaining.

i think that ive always been a feminist but didnt know it.
ive always fought but just didnt know what and why i was fighting.
i always thought it was "society"but i now know its deeper than that.
i dont read feminist books because i dont understand them and im always ten miles behind everyone else but i shall carry on plodding along.
the stuff that i do read often take me time to understand but when i do get to understand it i often agree with it.
the stuff i dont agree on makes me think and i find the whole lot quite challenging but i like this.
ive had hardly any education at all!

I don't agree, swallowed.

There are areas and roles of Christianity, at least historically, that are women-only and not as an accident. The reasons why they're women only may be completely misogynistic (eg., the 'special role' of Eve ), but it's not accidental and I don't think it's 'exclusion' either. It's sometimes been the case that women are the ones responsible for most day-to-day spiritual intercession. Most historical Christian attitudes towards women are double-edged, that's why they're so powerful, imo.