Teaching '70s Feminism

The following discussion of teaching '70s feminism took place on WMST-L
in July 2001.  Considerable attention was devoted to the notion of "waves"
of feminist activity and thought.  Because of its length, the discussion
has been divided into four parts, and some of the repetitious quoting of
prior messages has been omitted.  See also the later, related
discussion entitled 'Waves' of Feminism. For additional WMST-L files
now available on the Web, see the WMST-L File Collection.

PAGE 1 OF 4

I was told that because  students now in women's studies courses believe
all the myths about 70's feminism, it isbetter to skipp from the
suffragists  to the nineties, and to go back only when the students trust
the faculty person.  While intelellectually I dislike this position, it
makes sense to me, because that would account for, among other factors, a
number of students dropping out after that lecture.  I had considred
demystifying  the seventies and analyzing possible reasons for the
continuation of the lies was a useful excercize, but apparantly it has to
approached very carefully.  Have other people had that experience or
anything like it?  I think that one, and only one reason for the rejection
of seventies feminism is a  daughter mother conflict (symbolic) which would
account for the intensity of resistance to it.  Again what do you think.
Best, Pauline   pauline b. bart  pbart   @  ucla.edu

A rising tide lifts all yachts.
            Professor Lani Guanier
            NWSA Meeting, 2000

pbart  @  ucla.edu  310-841-2657

I am assuming that Dr. Bart is referring to a particular brand of
feminism for which _Sisterhood is Powerful_ was paradigmatic, as
she said in an earlier post as the "70s feminism" - I find such
labeling misleading and troubling, but for the sake of discussion
I use the term under that definition in this post.

On 01.7.5 8:18 PM, "pauline b. bart" <pbart  @  UCLA.EDU> wrote:
> I was told that because students now in women's studies courses
> believe all the myths about 70's feminism, it is better to skip
> from the suffragists to the nineties, and to go back only when
> the students trust the faculty person.

Interesting. If the problem was indeed myths spread by the
backlash, I would imagine that introducing students to raw
materials from the "70's feminism" should dispel them. What are
you afraid of? If students can understand and historicize the
suffrage movement, surely they are capable of understanding and
historicizing the second wave. Or, is that the problem? That
you expect students to accept the "70s feminism" as the timeless
Truth rather than a part of the history (or herstory, or however
you spell it)?

Thankfully, my feminist theory teacher did introduce to me plenty
of materials from the 70s including the likes of _Sisterhood is
Powerful_ and critiques made by other feminists from the same era.
I find it insulting that you continue to insist that any critiques
or resistence by young women are invalid or that they arose from
our ignorance, or that they reflect mother-daughter conflict and
therefore have nothing to do with the criticized text. It is also
disingenuous and anti-intellectual position to take, as it makes
constructive and respectful dialog impossible.

> While intelellectually I dislike this position, it makes sense to
> me, because that would account for, among other factors, a number
> of students dropping out after that lecture. I had considred
> demystifying the seventies and analyzing possible reasons for
> the continuation of the lies was a useful excercize, but apparantly
> it has to approached very carefully.

So you are blaming students for being too intellectually vigorous
to accept an unquestionable authority, too self-respecting to
tolerate ageist dismissal of their views, and concluding overall
that their time is worth too much to waste listening to the 70s
radio. And now you are asking other scholars about manipulating
students into extending their trust by hiding your true agenda,
while depriving students of the consistent historical overview
of the feminist thought. I, too, would have dropped out if my
teachers treated me that way.

> I think that one, and only one reason for the rejection of seventies
> feminism is a daughter mother conflict (symbolic) which would account
> for the intensity of resistance to it.

How is that different from explaining that women's resistence
against sexism is a manifestation of the penis envy? And what
(and whose) purpose does it serve to explain away a conflict
that is costing many young students opportunities to pursue
Women's Studies?


Emi K. <emi  @  eminism.org>

--
http://eminism.org/ * Putting the Emi back in Feminism since 1975.

> I find it insulting that you continue to insist that any critiques
> or resistence by young women are invalid or that they arose from
> our ignorance, or that they reflect mother-daughter conflict and
> therefore have nothing to do with the criticized text.

I didn't see anything in Pauline's post that suggested that *all* possible
(let alone all actual) critiques of 70's feminism by young women are
invalid or arise from ignorance.  I read her as saying that some/many
do.  In my experience, that's true of many student critiques of just about
anything.  To me (responding to Pauline now) it's better to use the
ill-informed critiques as a way to push through to deeper understanding
(and thus possibly some deeper critiques, among other things)--rather than
jumping over the period and coming back to it.  But then, I'm a
philosopher and don't really teach so much from a historical point of
view, so I don't really know.

Rebecca Whisnant

Hi.

I feel like there's something I'm not understanding here. It seems like if
there's something students don't understand or know much about, or have myths
about, then that's exactly what we should be teaching, not what we should be
avoiding teaching -- whatever it is. Just as an analogy: a lot of my students
from more traditional or religious backgrounds aren't comfortable hearing about
lesbians right away, and they have maybe some stereotypes in their heads that
come between them and the subject matter? but that doesn't mean I should drop
the topic from my syllabus, right? or hide it ... It does mean that when I
start out with the topic I'm aware that there's some resistance, so I try to
choose texts that people can enter at a number of points without having to
choose up sides. And I guess I do tend to postpone some of the more "difficult"
topics until later in the semester when they have a little more trust, not just
in me, but in each other and the process of the class. Maybe that's all you're
suggesting. (I'm talking about Intro, by the way -- Feminist Theory, and other
upperlevel courses where students know more what they're involving themselves
with before they turn up, is a different story.) But each group of students is
different, anyhow. One year the "difficult" issue wasn't sexuality, it was
metaphors and science. Another year it was sports.

Also, though, I just like to start the course, not with a history lesson, but
with some difficult  issues that students can get involved in immediately and
whose "relevance" they see. I used to do this just with literature (Bluest Eye,
Tell Me a Riddle, Woman at Point Zero, some poems) and found that people were
pretty able to jump in somewhere ... recently I've been starting with some
things from "Listen Up," too, especially "Your Life as a Girl." (Oh, and I also
use a really good story by Eileen Fitzgerald called "You're So Beautiful," from
her book of the same name.) And then I find that when I do get to Sisterhood is
Powerful, later in the term (after we've done some anthro to to talk about
social construction, some topics like violence against women etc.),  one
response that students have is that it's actually not all that different from
"Listen Up"  in the issues that are addressed, contrary to what they might have
expected. I think there are two main issues for them -- a shrill or angry tone
they associate with 70s feminists, and the idea they have that all the problems
have already been solved ... Of course we talk about differences too. But to me
the whole idea of the thing is to help students use texts and ideas (whether
new or old) to look at what's happening in their lives and the world around
them. It seems best to start where people are, recognizing that not everyone is
in the same place.

The thing I'm having the most trouble with in your post, though, is the idea of
"lecture." I really can't imagine teaching a course like Intro to Women's
Studies in that way, though I know a lot of people do, and I wonder if that
isn't some of the source of this particular resistance, or if at least there
might be a different way to set things up that would work better. I find that
it is much more successful, and also in a way more feminist in the way I
understand that, to ask students to first explore texts on their own, write
informally about a topic, saying what they see, present to each other, discuss
around a table, etc., and that it would in some ways be counterproductive for
them to be hearing from forty-something me that they need to take ownership
over their own lives, right? I'm sorry, I know you're an experienced teacher,
and you know this already, and we're lucky to be able to run small sections of
classes where I work, not everyone can do this. What I mean is that the process
of the class, all term, is just as important as what topics you choose to
foreground ... and that a good way to keep students engaged in the class even
when the material is not congenial to them is to make sure we're giving them
voice to explore it in the way that suits them best. (This doesn't mean
everything has to be personal narrative all the time, by the way ... there
might be an analogy to "hands on" sorts of learning that goes on in first-level
science courses.) I think even if I had a very large class I might start by
asking everybody to write down some thoughts/ questions they had about the
reading, and start from there, rather than assuming I knew what was of
interest/ troublesome to them.

Another thing I have found is that sometimes an issue or text I brought in
purely to give a historical perspective turned out to be helpful and relevant
in Time Present to someone sitting around the table. When I first started
teaching, this happened to me with "the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," which I
had naively introduced as an example of "the things women used to have to deal
with." Well ... let's just say many of my students continue to find that
article insightful and a useful jumping-off point for their own explorations.
But even something like, I don't know, Wollstonecraft or Christine de Pizan, if
somebody writes in their paper "the same thing happened to me on Tuesday as she
talks about in the book," that's not so bad, is it? and then one moves on to
historicize ...

But then, I think I might have a different view of how feminist history
operates than many people do, maybe because if I have to place myself in a wave
generationally I'm at a loss: 2.3? 2.5? I know some of my teachers felt my
generation was ungrateful, considering how bad things used to be and how hard
they had fought ... sometimes recently I have found myself feeling the same way
about younger feminists. To some extent this may be less about feminism than it
is about _teaching_. (I mean, am I the only person who has ever been tempted to
say to a first year class, dammit, I've been correcting your comma splices for
twenty years and you STILL DON'T GET it, what's wrong with you? [Joke.])

But I also know from reading that this dynamic has been constant in 20th
century feminism (see _These Modern Women for the 1920s_, or, I've just been
reading Sylvie Chaperon's les Annees Beauvoir about the 40s and 50s) ... Every
wave has its own undertow, right? and sometimes there are interesting things
going on in what's supposed to be the trough of the wave. Sometimes what looked
like the undertow turned out to _be_ the wave. So I guess I like to teach
feminist history by taking students into some interesting past spot and seeing
what we find there, rather than prioritizing an overarching historical
narrative.

Another big thing to remember is that we don't actually know what students take
away from our courses. It may not be what we put there, and sometimes it takes
the yeast a long time to work. ... I guess I see my task as a teacher mostly as
setting the table, as making resources (ideas, texts, ways of seeing and
reading) available. But students will take what they need and leave the rest,
they always have and they always will. That's not a problem. That's what's good
and different about what we're doing.

IMHO. (Sorry this got so long.)

Meryl Altman
DePauw University

I have found that when teaching the feminist theories that are usually
referred to as radical feminist that they absolutely must be historicized.
Our students simple don't have the same connection with the period between
1968 and 1975 that we do; they weren't alive and they have only the fuzziest
notion of what went on, of what the connections between 60s and 70s feminism
and other radical movements were.  This past year when I taught feminist
theory I used Alice Echols' Daring to Be Bad along with a lot of material
from the period, much of which we accessed from the Duke Scriptoria web
site. Whatever one thinks of Echols' book, to my students it made a huge
difference because instead of simply asking "Does this essay make sense in
the context of 2001?" they were asking "How did this kind of thinking grow
out of the kinds of activism women were involved in at this   point in
history?"  The reading for the first time ever made sense to them and for
the first time I found the students reading it, not uncritically, but much
more sympathetically and indeed, I found the material made much more sense
to me.  I felt as if I did a much better job of teaching it and noticed that
in their final papers, many more students came back to it than had in the
past.

Laurie Finke
finkel  @  kenyon.edu

I'm always taken aback by the "mother-daughter" analysis of second
wave/third wave conflict. My own critiques and responses to "seventies
feminism" were informed fundamentally from my mother's feelings of
marginalization -- as a working-class woman -- from her 1970s
contemporaries in the so-called "second wave." I think that
perhaps this shows the futility of generalizing  about what we percieve to
be students' collective psychology, and also how problematic -- not to
mention intellectually suspect AND patronizing  -- it can be for women's
studies scholars to present themselves as mother figures to feminist
"daughters."


I have found, by the way, that the Combahee River Collective's "Black
Feminist Statement" is an excellent 1970s text that highlights
contemporary feminist concerns with intersectionality, for example.

Jacqueline Ellis
Bates College

>If the problem was indeed myths spread by the
>backlash, I would imagine that introducing students to raw
>materials from the "70's feminism" should dispel them.

It often can. But the problem is bigger than that. I'm disturbed by the
sweeping characterizations of 70's feminism that have become doctrinal,
which rely so heavily on print accounts. There's a selection-by-privilege
process there, since so much of what happened in our communities
(especially by poverty and working class feminists) did not make it into
print and do not fit the stereotypes of all-white, all-middle class,
anti-sexual, insensitive to "other" political concerns. I think this
creates a problem of  misrepresentation.

For example, I was invited (by a fluke) to be on a panel on 70's lesbian
feminism. The implicit agenda was to portray the entire movement as narrow,
anti-sex, all-white and middle class. The first presentation was by a
researcher who, not having been there, relied entirely on print research
and her own often anachronistic impressions. For example, she announced
that 70s LF's were really into arts and crafts, which I gather she
concluded from later developments at the Michigan festival. While the 70s
generally had a crafts boom, this was not especially noticeable in the
feminist community; but what was significant, and what she did not mention
at all, was the explosion of poetry readings, feminist book publishing and
bookstore founding, and the proliferation of women's bands. (No, I mean
besides Olivia.) In the SF Bay Area, for example, we had High Risk (women's
funk band), Orquesta Sabrosita, Bebe K'roche, and other multicultural
groups.

I agree with those who have written that historical context has to be
provided in order for there to be understanding. That would include an
understanding that the feminist and lesbian movements were not somehow
uniquely more racist or classist or whatever, but were a terrain where
these issues were confronted and fought out more explicitly than in the
mainstream society. Things have gone so far that now you even have white
male middle class columnists deprecating feminism as a white middle class
movement.

> What are
>you afraid of? If students can understand and historicize the
>suffrage movement, surely they are capable of understanding and
>historicizing the second wave.

What I am afraid of is the continued erasure of working class women and
women of color who were part of 70's feminism, as if we/they were not
particpants in it. It's so ironic: we objected then to dynamics of class
and race privilege, and now those same dynamics are used to support a
portrayal of the movement as consisting only of the most privileged. Our
voices were in the meetings, in a whole spectrum grass roots activism; most
of us didn't have time to write articles and weren't invited to be on
panels. The feminism we fought for is dismissed as if we never existed, and
insulting cliches have taken its place.

Max Dashu   <maxdashu  @  LMI.com>
<www.suppressedhistories.net>
Global Women's Studies

I was struck by a couple of comments folks have made about this, and I
just wanted to put in my $.02:

First, please remember that, while many of our students may indeed not
have been born by or not have been old enough to remember 1968-1975, this
is equally true of many of the teachers and scholars on this
list(including me).

Second, I do not nor have I ever considered second wave feminists to be my
mothers in any sense of the word.  Many of them were my age at the time
they were writing feminist treatises, so when I read them I have always
imagined them as my peers.  I have to second Emi and say that I find the
whole "mother-daughter" analogy rather insulting as it implies not only
that younger feminists know less and are less sophisticated than their
older counterparts, but also the existence of a complicated relationship
of caring and struggle that is mostly absent except in a very abstract
sense.  I rarely find feminists working together as peers
cross-generationally, and while I often find younger feminists who are
interested in and supportive of second wave politics, I don't often see
older feminists who are very interested in what younger feminists are up
to.  Of course there are exceptions to this, but the students I teach are
very influenced by second wave feminism and their criticisms are generally
not rejections but rather critiques intended to advance the feminist
project.  Unfortunately their own politics are sometimes dismissed by the
same women who have provided the groundwork for the development of these
politics.

Jessica

Jessica Nathanson
Doctoral Candidate, American Studies
Concentration in Women's Studies
State University of New York at Buffalo
janathanson  @  yahoo.com
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jan3

I think teaching well about the 1960s and 1970s is incredibly difficult.
In addition to being ancient history, the 60's are a myth and the 70's are
a joke.  While the value of political struggle may be timeless, the
politics of each generation speak to that moment in history.  It's hard
for students to understand the Reformation.  It's hard for students to
understand Mao.  It's hard for students to understand seventies feminism.
Feminist writers and thinkers in the 1970s were responding to a specific
social and political environment.  I think it's hard to really understand
where many writers are coming from without knowing a good bit about the US
Communist Party, the Black Panthers, the hippie movement, the student
movement, the Vietnam War ... these, IMHO, are far more relevant to
second-wave feminism than first-wave feminism.  Teaching the first wave of
feminism followed by the second may be positively ahistorical.

It doesn't help that we are burdened with stupid stereotypes about
feminists.  I'm sure people teaching about the suffrage movement in 1935
had exactly the same problem.  The suffragettes look noble and reasonable
to us because they won the historical battle.  1970's feminists look
strident and unreasonable b/c the values they fought for are NOT common
sense.  They appear to have bad haircuts only because everyone in the
seventies had bad haircuts.  Students need to know this.

If the goal is to allow students to see the value of the seventies
feminist movement, then it makes sense to start with something they know
better, and move to something that makes little sense on first inspection.
The goal, I believe, should be to make seventies feminist thought
understandable on its OWN terms.  That doesn't mean it's RIGHT, it means
you make it understandable.  I don't think it's wrong for any professor to
ask that students take the material seriously -- to give it serious
consideration.

What happens after that, however, is up to the student.  I hope it is
possible, for all of us, to concede that students may give our material
serious consideration, and still disagree with some or all of it.  And woe
to you as a teacher and as a feminist if call that kind of serious,
reasoned, careful, intelligent, disagreement -- "false-consciousness".
Call it wrong, if you must, but take its wrong-ness seriously.

If I tell you that I don't think penetration is rape, that I don't think
women are a class, that I don't think transsexuals are trying to steal my
womanhood, and that I don't think lesbianism is the practice, feel free to
argue me into a wall, but don't tell me that I have issues with my mother,
that I've been duped by the media, or that I'm ungrateful.  I have issues
with a small, but significant, group of feminist activists, many of whom
are about 10 years older than I am, and none of whom resemble my mother.

When I came home to Cleveland in 1993-96, I understood in a viceral way
that my own ideologies were time-and-place-bound.  I chalk up most of my
late-night arguments with the Cleveland lesbian community not to symbolic
mother-daughter conflict, but to the differences between coming out in
Cleveland in 1979, and coming out in Ann Arbor in 1991.  I fought with
those women because I care about feminism, and they fought with me for the
same reason.  I cannot help but feel that psychoanalyzing that conflict
takes away from the real issues we discussed.

sk.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Kane                suekane  @  u.washington.edu
Reference/WS Librarian            Box 353080
University of Washington        Seattle, WA 98195
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Susan Kane wrote:

Teaching the first wave of feminism followed by the second may be positively
ahistorical...   [snipped here]...While the value of political struggle may
be timeless, the politics of each generation speak to that moment in
history.  It's hard for students to understand the Reformation.  It's hard
for students to understand Mao....  [snipped here]..  I cannot help but feel
that psychoanalyzing that conflict takes away from the real issues we
discussed.


response:

I agree. Apart from the particular present day criticisms that are made of
second wave feminists which may have merits on their own terms, I think it
might be the (more often than not) relative absence of historical
contextualization in those critiques that makes the critiques seem "wrong"
to people who may be retrospectively identifying themselves in some sense
as,
possibly not even entirely willingly as, one of those "second wave
feminists."

The "wave" or generational framework itself seems to uproot "feminism(s)"
from its/ their larger historical contexts and various critiques are more
often than not deployed against other feminists in this vacuum.  I think
possibly the waves framework of understanding itself facilitates a kind of
"psychoanalyzing" rather than a real hard look at the social and cultural
contexts in which feminist ideas were/ are generated.  And it does work both
ways.  I think sometimes feminists don't always recognize that their
namesakes are coming from a different place.

While I have often seen this "waves" framework of understanding used to
organize various presentations of feminist thought and activities, I don't
believe I have ever seen an account of the origins of that conceptual
framework as a framework.  I don't think I mean an ahistorical critique of
the frame like the one I just offered, I mean a contextually rich study
of the origins of the rhetorical deployment of "the waves" frame and its
subsequent course.

Maybe such a study exists and I just haven't seen it.  I'd look into it
myself, but I'm writing about something else right now. Does anyone have any
perceptions on the genesis and course of the frame?

All the best,

JT Faraday
Independent Scholar
qwertyuiop68  @  msn.com

I want to say that this discussion on teaching seventies feminism and the
ways it's branching out is ABSOLUTELY fascinating. If I weren't in the
throes of a major life change (moving from my home of nine years to my
first post-grad job), I would probably take a more active role in the
conversation because the issues being raised are central to much of my
research and teaching. Alas, the packing isn't done and the truck has to be
loaded. I do, however, want to respond to a comment made by JT at the end
of her message. JT writes:

    While I have often seen this "waves" framework of understanding used to
    organize various presentations of feminist thought and activities, I don't
    believe I have ever seen an account of the origins of that conceptual
    framework as a framework. I don't think I mean an ahistorical critique of
    the frame like the one I just offered, I mean a contextually rich study
    of the origins of the rhetorical deployment of "the waves" frame and its
    subsequent course.

    Maybe such a study exists and I just haven't seen it. I'd look into it
    myself, but I'm writing about something else right now. Does anyone
	have any perceptions on the genesis and course of the frame?

Actually, my dissertation, "The Third Wave and the Cultural Predicament of
Feminist Consciousness in the U.S.," explores the cultural-historical
context of the use of the wave metaphor by feminists (and feminist
historians and movement scholars). The conclusion in particular is a
critical reflection on the various deployments of the triptych of First
Wave--Second Wave--Third Wave in the production of feminist
historigraphies. I've been exploring the origins of the usage, which apear
to be tied closely to the framing of social movements by social movements
scholars into "waves" (I forget the name of the sociologist dude credited
with first threorizing this "phenomena"). The conclusion also critically
assesses the ways in which waves are almost always read as ocean waves.
This tendency reinforces the cyclical, progressive and Oedipal narratives
of history and movement that dominate American notions of change,
chronology, and history-as-progress. As much as I love oceanic images, it
also reinforces the "mother-daughter conflict" paradigm in feminism. For
precisely some of the reasons Max Dashu is critical of the narrow
construction of second wave feminists as white, straight, privileged,
anti-sex, etc., this paradigm does little to advance feminist thought,
politics or revolution. Which mothers are the daughters rebelling against?
Which daughters are the ones who get to rebell? What is the rebellion?

Since I kind of dig waves, one idea I've been playing with is a
rearticulation of the paradigm as radio waves rather than ocean waves.
Think of the multiple frequencies you can or cannot tune into on your
radio. Think about how difficult it is to hear frequencies that don't
register well in your receiver, or which you just can't "hear" for whatever
reason. THink about what happens when you move across radio frequency
zones. Think about the different ways in which radio waves are
technologically negotiated to transmit sounds.Think about the different
kinds of receivers we have (transiters, boomboxes, car radios, Ham,
crystal, the internet, etc.).

Anyway. I'm beginining to go on too long and don't want to bore ya'all to
tears with my musings. I just wanted to let JT know that some of us are
really thinking about framing and frameworks. And I, at least, think
examining the "wave" framework is especially important for us U.S.
feminists because its power as a paradigm is both exciting and terrifying.

Ednie Garrison

    We know that many students are interested in history, where they and
others came from, how today's event came to be. Maybe the question to be
discussed is whether the study of history is particular to Women's Studies
classes?
            beatrice
           bkachuck.cuny  @  prodigy.net

The analogy you [Ednie Garrison] use - of waves as "radio waves", is quite
remarkable, and is certainly in tune with an overall approach
that is conducive to the acceptance of diversity, in a multiplicity
of forms, as you have described. But I think that rather than
doing away with the "ocean wave" metaphor altogether, keeping
the two different metaphors can actually enhance
understandings of the "waves" of feminism. There is, after all,
something natural about the waves of feminism, with each one
moving forward and gathering momentum, and then dissipating,
as indeed, the technological "wave" has also.  And you may not
approve of the concept of "cyclical movement" that oceanic
waves suggest but it is an apt one, and reflects the seemingly
timeless aspect of the continuous but ever-changing forward
motion of feminist theorizing and women's movements, in a way
that the metaphor of the radio waves cannot.

You mention mother/daughter conflict, and I don't know why the
oceanic metaphor should "reinforce conflict", except that the
two metaphors, of "radio" and "ocean" reflect different
ways of knowing, and ways of "mothering", perhaps related to
different generations. Reproductive technologies, surrogate
motherhood, cloning, and technical masturbatory devices
instead of natural means are all examples of changes in our
social world that many younger people might take for granted
but that women of earlier generations had to do without, and
which also might reflect different ways of relating to our bodies.

The technological and oceanic metaphors are also related to
wider issues. There are many people who are concerned that
technology and the language of technology are taking over, and
even altering the course of nature and the envirnoment, and
while none of us would likely want to give up our radios and all
the rest of it, there is something to be said for keeping in touch
mentally with nature and the oceanic wave metaphor.

Sue McPherson
sue  @  mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk
http://samcpherson.homestead.com/homepage.html

Hi - not sure what you mean by 'the study of history is particular to
Women's Studies classes' do you mean should be, is, or isn't in other
fields?

Cheers,
Jen a
_______________________
j. l. t a l l e n t i r e
PhD student, History
University of British Columbia
Canada
jltallen  @  interchange.ubc.ca

This has been a fascinating thread, full of implications for pedagogy,
activism, etc.  I'm guessing it's just about played out for the present,
but I want to thank those who have written and add my two-cents:

As a white feminist who does remember 1968-75 but did not 'become an
academic' until very much later, I often feel the categories by which
feminism tends to be organized academically (waves as well as cultural,
radical, liberal, etc.) do not capture my experience.  When things got
rolling in L.A., where I was living, I rarely had transportation to get
me to the centers of activity:  i.e., there was a class gap--and it
manifested in multiple ways.  I worked in my local community on issues
that were not specifically 'feminist'.  Now that I teach, I rely on a
few caveats, key among them:

(1) Family romance models may be useful for critiquing my relationships
to students and colleagues, but I am not my students' mother, should not
aspire to be, and must reflect carefully on what's going on and what to
do about it if things start to look or feel that way.

(2) Nostalgia for the ways we used to think about and do things is an
intellectual trap that has particularly powerful valences for people
(boomers? 'second-wave feminists'?) who were activists in their youth.
Often we do not even recognize it as nostalgia.  When I feel this pull,
I need to stop and reflect.

(3) History-in-the-making is impossibly complex; in telling it, we
always only reconstruct it, even if we lived through it.  I need to take
critical responsibility for the agendas my re-tellings serve.

(4) The 'radical moment' in the history of academic feminism/women's
studies that I aim to recapture in the classroom is the moment when
activism turns to the academy for new knowledge and methodologies in
support of social/political/cultural change.  This means paying careful
attention to present issues and strategies.

Sorry if this is cryptic...happy summer, everybody,
Janet Gray
gray  @  tcnj.edu

Janet, and all,
In a recent message to the list I commented on the "waves"
concept, and did want to write again to say that, like yourself,
neither of the "waves", second or third, captured my experience
either.  But this does not mean that there were not waves of
feminism, just that I was outside it, experiencing only the
rippling effects.

Re (2) Your warning about nostalgia and how it is an intellectual
trap seems* sensible,  but thinking* about the ways we used to
think and feel is not such a trap, and we need to be careful
about getting rid of things simply because they seem outdated.

Re (4) and then (3),
It would make sense for a lot of women outside academia if your
approach in the classroom would not* be that activists necessarily
turn to the academy for "new knowledge" , but that they find ways
to work together to discuss issues of concern to both areas - in
and outside of academia, and perhaps find more effective methods
of doing research, methodologies that take into consideration that
it isn't only academic feminists who "have knowledge".

Sue McPherson
sue  @  mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk