'Burnout' in Women's Studies

The following discussion concerns "burnout" among people teaching
Women's Studies (though some point out that the phenomenon occurs
in other fields as well).  The conversation took place on WMST-L in
November 2001.  For additional WMST-L files available on the Web,
see the WMST-L File Collection.

PAGE 1 OF 2

I've been on this listserve for about as long as I've been teaching women's
studies, and I don't remember seeing this topic.  I am a Social Psychologist,
but most semesters I teach at least one women's studies course.  I've had
times when my entire load (4 courses) consisted of women's studies.  I am
finding that after 10 years, I am becoming burnt out.  It has been 10 years of
the same anti-woman comments and I am feeling frustrated that nothing seems to
be changing.  I am becoming impatient with my students, who are still making
the same anti-women comments after 3 months of Into to Women's studies,
comments relating to issues we have discussed throughout the semester (for ex,
women shouldn't have sex if they don't want to get pregnant, something we have
discussed many times).  I used to love teaching these courses, and now I dread
them.  Has anyone else experienced this?

Christine Smith
casmith  @  mnstate.edu

Hi everyone,

I have not (yet) experienced the kind of burnout that Christine
describes, although I have a couple of good friends who have.  One of
them decided that she was past the point in her life when teaching
Intro WS was fulfilling to her.  The other took a little hiatus (I
think about 3 semesters) from teaching Intro.

As I read Christine's post, I do empathize with her frustrations.
There are three things I thought of immediately, all of which I know
everyone on this list knows, but which also might be helpful to have
someone *say* anyway:

1. we hear many of the same messages from our students over the years
because they are different students; this can make it seem like our
teaching  is not making an impact either with students or within the
culture at large;

2. we also hear many of the same messages because, even though we see
different students each semester, our students get many of the same
messages about feminism/women from mainstream cultural sources; this,
too, can make it seem as if we are (as one of my grad students says)
"merely pissing in the ocean";

3. we do not often get to see all of the learning that takes place
connected to our courses.  What I mean by this is first that we
cannot expect ourselves or our students to be able to address
critically and completely 18 years worth of socialization in one
17-week semester (or 10-week quarter).  This kind of expectation is
merely setting ourselves up for disappointment.  Second, we should
not assume that learning stops when our class is over.  Quite often,
I have students come back to see me several semesters (and sometimes
several years) after having taken my classes.  They come to tell me
that, although they did not appreciate being asked to learn about
___fill in the blank with some feminist concern___  at the time,
something has come up in their own experiences or in the experiences
of a loved one that is relevant to that concern, and now they can see
why it was important to learn about it.  Because of these
conversations, I tend to think of teaching kind of like an
iceberg--what I can see of my students' learning is only about 1/10th
of what is actually going on.

Like I said, all this is obvious and I'm sure you all know it
already, but it often helps me to say this out loud--or to hear
someone else say it.

When I start feeling like my teaching is redundant, I try to find
texts, activities and assignments that I've never tried before.
Changing my class is often helpful.  Assignments that involve service
learning or activism are especially fulfilling, both to the students
(most of them, anyway) and to me.

Best wishes, Christine, and hang in there.  Winter break is coming.
Jeannie

Every semester, it seems, Christine--and I haven't been teaching as long
as you, though I do teach all Women's/Gender Studies courses.

I would love to see a discussion here about strategies for coping with
Women's Studies burnout, if it fits in the parameters of WMST-L.

Janet Gray
gray  @  tcnj.edu

Hello everyone -
I think that this is a fabulous idea Janet.
I have spoken to several instructors about this i nthe past - and it does
not get any easier (and doesn't seem to change much) - and if I may add -
teaching assistants have this problem as well.
If this is not the place to discuss - we can certainly take it off the list,
but  I do think it needs to be talked about.
This might be an interesting discussion session at the NWSA in Las Vegas....
Tracy Kennedy

Having taught one or another version of intro to women's studies for all 25
years of my teaching career, I don't think the problem is only that we
repeat the same things each course and hear the same negative feedback.
When I taught in the 70's and 80's many students were primed to have their
consciousness raised and did hear what then was new. Feminist critique and
perspective is not new any more and has been lambasted in the mass media.
So students think it's outmoded and unnecessary since they think they live
egalitarian lives. By the time I retired from teaching in 1996, after a
year of what I thought would be nirvana -- teaching only women's studies
and sociology of gender -- and from my own book at that (Paradoxes) -- I
was completely burned out and fed up.

However, I did find that I reached students much more when I let them
discover inequities and oppressions in their own lives, rather than tell
them about it. I had several exercises that worked -- analyzing the
gendered division of labor in their own household was a good one, reporting
on the gendered division of labor in a workplace (the favorite was a
supermarket, one of the most gender-segregated workplaces extant), and
describing an incident of sexual harassment that happened to them or to
someone they know. These projects were carefully framed by a series of
questions (I'll be glad to share them privately by attachment). Each
student gave an oral report to the class, so that the experiences were
shared with each other and commented on by each other. It was their own
lives they were looking at and they were usually quite critical about the
extent of gender inequity and sexism.

***************************************************************
Judith Lorber, Ph.D.            Ph/Fax -- 212-689-2155
319 East 24 Street              judith.lorber  @  verizon.net
Apt 27E
New York, NY 10010

"Unless the past and future were made part of the present by memory
and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go."
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
****************************************************************

I wonder if the issues raised are really "burn-out" ones, or the result
of a kind of backlash some of us may be facing--depending on where we
teach and what cultural/religious backgrounds our students have.

I designed a course 16 years ago (A History of Women in Music) which I first
taught in 1986. It's been cross-listed with our WS program so that majors
or minors in WS can take it if they have some music background. It's an
upper-year elective for music students. Most of the students in the course
are music majors from very different cultural backgrounds, most of which
are extremely conservative in terms of women's freedoms. (One student
withdrew from the course two years ago because she objected to a discussion
we had about the Promise Keepers movement.)

What I have noticed in these 15 years of teaching the course is a very large
movement away from the excited, "liberal" attitude of the late 1980s and
early 1990s to a more apathetic, "all-is-right-with-the-world" stance in the
late 1990s. In a course such as this, with so few students having taken
WS courses, I find I do have to deal with issues that are uncomfortable for
many--although my focus is women in music, of course. My students (mainly
female) really do believe that women are treated equally in our society
(despite the statistical evidence I offer). They balk at even the most basic
definition of feminisim. They have never (consciously) encountered
discrimination; thus, it does not exist.

When I began teaching this course in 1986, I truly thought that the liberal
attitudes I witnessed then would continue. (My own work on women in music
began in the 1970s.) So I'm back to the "backlash" idea.

Is this a possible reason for the discouragement some of us feel about our
work? And how do we address it?

Ursula Rempel
School of Music
University of Manitoba

urempel  @  cc.umanitoba.ca

Ursula,
I wonder if you would specify the kind of statistical evidence you are
providing to your students to demonstrate the women (in the U.S.?) haven't
achieved equality in the area of music. Perhaps the problem lies there.
Thank you.
DP

---------------------------------
daphne.patai  @  spanport.umass.edu

I believe Ursula raises an interesting question about backlash.  I have
worked as a graduate TA for the past four years and have had the opportunity
to structure all of the courses I have taught around feminist studies.  All
too often, I have found the same response with my students that Ursula speaks
of-- and "all is right with the world."  Feminists raise provocative
questions for many of the students I have taught, but most often in terms
that such questions are tokens of the past.

I have also found that responding to students with statistics does not spark
their attention.  When Daphne raised the question about statistics, I was
reminded how the students I have taught rarely identify with those
statistics.  For many students I have worked with, behind any statistic which
feminists turn to there is a political agenda which obscurs any chance for an
objective bridge between their politics and those of feminist scholars.

I have been wondering lately about a "backlash," one which includes and yet
extends beyond our classrooms.  While it may also extend beyond our various
academic settings, I have been quite confused by the work and pedagocial
practices of many non-feminist colleagues.  That "all is right with the
world" is not merely an issue with students, but many scholars who believe
that our gender issues are now neutral.  They, for example, no longer find it
necessary to raise feminist-oriented questions in Ethics courses or courses
concerning Globalization despite the fact that many of us know that these
have been central concerns for feminists for decades.  It is a murky sort of
backlash which appears to marginalize the varying questions feminist scholars
have raised with a "new" sort of justification-- namely a justication of
"passe."

Amanda Walker

re comments about responding to the "all's right with the world"
perception:

i've found i DO get their attention when i say directly: "All may be--or
appear to be--'right' with YOUR world, but how about OTHER PEOPLE'S?"
then, a brief summary (with contrasts put on the board to refer back to)
of "concurrent american realities" DOES spark some thought and
discussion (sometimes even prompting some extra self-motivated
research!)--and also provides a "natural" segue into how "those" other
people's realities influence "theirs" and VICE VERSA--both in terms of
present opportunities and future prospects...

sometimes what also happens is--lo and behold--some begin to identify
socioeconomic commonalities with "others" (previously perceived as
"them") as well!...

hope this helps...

debbie <louis  @  umbc.edu>

Hello everyone,
 
As a relatively new member to this listserv, I am reading these posts
about burnout and backlash with great interest.  I am currently in the
dissertation stage of a PhD in English Lit, and while my scholarship
and pedagogy has long been grounded in feminist theory, I am just now
teaching my first Intro to Women's Studies course.  I walked into the
first day of class armed with the experience of other women's studies
teachers who spoke of both the "I'm not a feminist but..." and the
"all's right with the world" syndromes, and while I have certainly
encountered that, a number of students were driven to the course
because of the backlash that's already out there--for example, Bay
Buchanan came to speak at our campus last year on the "Failure of
Feminism," and her talk prompted three of my students to think, "naw,
that can't be right," and sign right up for women's studies.  (I've
been considering sending Bay a thank-you card.)  Given that our campus
is known for its political and social conservatism, I'd say this bodes
well for the future.
 
Where I *have* seen the "everything is better now" attitude is when I
try to complicate gender with race/ethnicity.  Generally, my students
have been willing to accept and think critically about the status of
(white middle-class) women, and most of them are open to thinking
about sexual difference.  But the response to the writing by women of
color--most of which locates the author specifically in terms of
race--has been "I thought this was a class about women, and not about
race."  It was a slow and at times painful process to get to the point
where we could interrogate a stateement like that, and I still find
myself reminding students to consider race as a factor when reading
and writing about women.  I'm wondering if my experience resonates
with others' on this list.
 
Michelle

Michelle Wiener
mhw1971  @  msn.com

Perhaps another take on women's studies burn out, which I'm sure exists.
Although from the teaching end, the resistance seems to never diminish,
I think that even if it is not apparent you are reaching many students,
the results from such education is long term rather than immediate. As
students, they now have an analytical structure to evaluate life
experiences. Perhaps one of the reasons they don't think they have been
discriminated against is a lack of vocabulary and conceptual frame work
to interpret their experiences.

Two anecdotes from my experience as an "older" undergraduate student and
even older graduate student TA.

About 7 years ago when I was an undergrad in a 3rd yr. Women and the
City course, there was a student, who in summation of her presentation
on Jane Adams and Hull House, remarked that "it had never occurred to
her before that women could be important and could change the way things
were to something better." While I, being old enough to have been around
as second wave feminist, blanched at the naivety, for her it was true.
Further, for these students the concept that there was a time, not that
long ago, when women had to choose between a career and marriage,
because employers would not employee married women, was a total unknown.
Perhaps when discrimination was more obvert, it was much easier to
recognize it and now that there is a legal structure which, on the
surface at least, prohibits overt discrimination, it is a harder issue
for young people to interpret.

Second story. As a grad student I took a class in Intro Human Geog for a
friend on the condition it was about feminist geography.  The issues
were pretty basic; home to day care to work etc. transportation, access
to services. This was an extended education class. The students (both
men & women) were attentive, and asked insightful questions. I think
that life experiences were significant. After the class a female
student,
who was the mother of two children, came up to tell me that she had come
to school to write an exam on the evening of the day she had given birth
to her second child, because she hadn't wanted to ask for an extension
and wasn't sure one would have been given to her. She also talked about
how previous to the class she didn't have the conceptual basis to frame
her experience. (She also mentioned that she had studied for the exam
and just wanted to get it over)

While I expect that these remarks are not anything new, my intent is to
reassure some of you that it is not all in vain.

J. Forbes
janetforbes  @  stn.net

In relation to women's studies burnout, Third Wave feminist texts suggest
not that students feel that all has been won, or that they are not
interested in feminism, but that the issues have radically changed. What
could be brought into the classroom as feminism even a few years ago will
not spark the smallest amount of interest now. For example, I have been
teaching in women's studies for eight years and when I started just the
mention of pornography set the room on fire, but now my students say that
they have a handle on pornography while becoming intensely angry about the
more subtle objectification of women in ads and the normalizing of a
particular body image. They want men included in the conversation in a way
that they haven't before, and in fact more men are showing up in class.
They seem to reject a certain type of feminism, and if they hear that type
of feminism in the classroom they turn off. Now it may well be that they
are reacting to the media's demonization of much of Second Wave feminism
and rejecting it themselves without rejecting feminism per se (after all,
they are still enrolling in women's studies courses).  I am unsure. Yet, my
approach is the social work approach of "meeting them where they are." That
is, I want to know what they think the issues are. I try to include in my
courses the books that they think are important, so we end up reading
Reviving Ophelia alongside the stuff that I think is crucial. In this
exercise, my students have taught me a lot, and its the learning that I do
that keeps me from burning out while teaching women's studies. Somehow, I
think that its only fair that I reach to meet them if they are going to
reach to meet me, and even in my most dismal moments when confronted with a
group that I thought would have nothing to teach me, they have always
proved me wrong. I have yet to meet a group of students who actually think
that equity does not matter or that the status of women in the world is
totally fine as it is.

This is not to dismiss the concerns of other people on this list, but just
to add my own experience. We also must be wary of bringing our own
political disappointments into the classroom and, in a way, transferring
them to the students. For example, the dynamic critique of "daddy warbucks"
that feminists made in relation to the Nixon administration is being
silenced in relation to the George W. administration and that can feel
defeating. Some may feel that a sense of "movement" is now gone, and that
"the same" issues are resurfacing. Personnally, I don't feel defeated or
that things have back-slided, but if I did I'd have to examine to what
extent those thoughts informed the way that I was building a classroom
culture. Is my optimism spent? If so, then perhaps that is another thread
of conversation on this list, one that can inform how we create a
conversation about women's studies issues in the class and whether we are
in a way creating the affects of backlash ourselves by capitulating to its
power.

peace,
Linda D. Wayne
University of Minnesota
wayne005  @  tc.umn.edu

<< They balk at even the most basic
 definition of feminisim. They have never (consciously) encountered
 discrimination; thus, it does not exist. >>

So then the question is begged - if they've never consciously encoutered
discrimination, is their perception of discrimination altogether inadequate
or are they naive and immune to the subliminal, or need they be taught that
they are discriminated against?

Susan vanHoek

Susan, I don't really know the answers to your question(s). I suspect
though, that most of my young students have lived very sheltered, protected
lives (as I had at their age), and most come from very conservative
cultural backgrounds where women's traditional roles are clearly defined.
In the real world, I'd say yes--their perception is inadequate; in their
world, it is not. In time, their world will change.

Perhaps you can answer your own questions better than I!

Incidentally, my post was only a brief response to the original poster
to suggest that what some might be facing is backlash--not burnout.

Ursula Rempel

urempel  @  cc.umanitoba.ca

Daphne,

Amanda Walker posted comments today which I thought were very appropriate
and answered part of what you asked, I think.

My women in music course is not Ameri-centred; I deal with the history of
women in music from Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th C. to the present.
Statistical evidence is readily available in my field--both in terms
of historical and contemporary times.

In terms of the present, there is an abundance of information on, for
example, the percentage of women as orchestral musicians in Europe, Canada,
Asia, the US; what instruments they play; how many are first-chair; etc.
Similarly, there are continuously updated studies on women conductors (this
is the most challenging field women musicians face today). Programming
women's music is another central issue, and again, reports abound about the
small percentage of music by women which gets performed by even minor
orchestras. There's some irony here because women were accepted as
composition majors at major universities 50 years ago. Today, women in
the technological aspect of composition (electro-acoustic music) encounter
major setbacks because music and technology is seen as a male field.

Certainly some fields in my discipline have been "equal" for 150 years:
performance and private teaching. My students don't really need convincing
of musical statistics. What I was referring to in my post were the
difficulties they have in realizing lack of equality in the work place,
problems of gendered language, infant mortality rates throughout the world,
the plight of women in third-world countries, the ban on music in
Afghanistan, the annual reports on the status of women at Canadian
universities, the percentages of women who hold CEO positions (or
equivalent) etc. etc. What does all of this have to do with the history
of women in music? Everything. I can't teach this course in a vacuum. Any
history of music embraces cultural, social, political, literary, religious,
artistic, scientific, technological movements.

Sorry--a very long response to a short question! I hope I've answered it.

For anyone interested in some of the musical issues, I suggest this:
    www.acu.edu/iawm/

This is the 4500-page site of the International Alliance for Women in Music.

Ursula Rempel
School of Music
University of Manitoba

urempel  @  cc.umanitoba.ca


on 11/19/01 7:36 AM, Daphne Patai at daphne.patai  @  SPANPORT.UMASS.EDU wrote:

> Ursula,
> I wonder if you would specify the kind of statistical evidence you are
> providing to your students to demonstrate the women (in the U.S.?) haven't
> achieved equality in the area of music. Perhaps the problem lies there.
> Thank you.

Some years ago, I taught a class on women and the law. The students were
all women's studies majors.
I thought that showing them the one-woman show of Virginia Woolf, "A Room
of One's Own," which also had excerpts from "Three Guineas" would really
capture their attention.  Well, it didn't.  They were bored and rather
annoyed.  To them, Woolf's problems were old news and things had really
changed since the 1930s, and she was in England anyway.

I was really thrown by their reactions.  What came through loud and clear
was that they didn't have any experience of discrimination, or if they did,
they didn't identify it as such.

In a flash of inspiration, I asked them about their grandmothers, since
they would have been of Woolf's generation. We made three columns on the
board--grandmother, mother, self, and then started charting different
aspects of women's lives including work outside the home, marriage,
children, age of child-bearing,
choice of careers, etc. That's when the various forms of oppression and
discrimination, and their contributing factors came into sight for them.

What I have learned from teaching, but also from being an
activist/organizer in NOW and other movements,
and as a professor of Latin American history, is that the easiest way to
lose your audience is by presenting something that you think is
self-evident and then wait to watch them see the light and accept it.  If
only it were so easy.

When we realize that in teaching about the various forms of discrimination
in women's lives we are contradicting the overwhelming messages that
society, churches, movies, elementary-, middle-, and high-school  give to
young women, then the resistance is not only understandable but to be
expected.

I have been working with a young woman who suffered an awful injury.  The
student, a senior at my school and a student in one of my history classes,
was arguing with her boyfriend, standing between the open door of his car
and the car itself. Her boyfriend, who on previous occasions had
embarrassed her by yelling at her in front of her friends, lost his temper,
threw the car into reverse; she fell down and was dragged a good ways
before he stopped. She suffered multiple abrasions, bruises and fractures,
including four broken vertebra, a broken coccyx, and a broken hip.  Her
doctor told her that it is a miracle that she is not paralyzed, and she
will be able to move somewhat normally in a few months. In the meantime,
she is out of school for the semester and in a good deal of pain.

Emily (not her real name) couldn't believe that he did it on purpose. Her
brother met the boyfriend in the emergency room where he was sitting and
crying that it was an accident and he didn't mean to hurt her.  Her brother
grabbed him, shoved him against the wall, and told him to clear out; that
if he ever saw him near his sister, he'd dismember him. When I first spoke
with her after the accident, she was very conflicted; she hadn't spoken to
the boyfriend, she felt a little bad about her brother's threat, and yet
she felt scared and shaken about what the boyfriend had done to her. As
time has gone on, we have talked a lot about the incident, and she has
recently been telling me that she now knows with absolute certainty that he
saw her; that he knew that she was standing there and that he was so angry,
he just did it, and didn't stop until he realized how bad it was going to
be. Now she is dealing with her anger about the incident and beginning to
talk to a therapist.

I tell you this story because I inadvertantly wandered into a situation
where being able to talk about the assumptions of our culture--that many
excuses are made for the violent behavior of some men, that the violence of
some men, are aspects of this culture that feminism has risen to oppose.
[BEFORE YOU JUMP ON ME, PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM QUALIFYING WHAT I AM
SAYING--I KNOW NOT _ALL_ MEN BEHAVE THAT WAY TOWARDS WOMEN, NOR DO ALL MEN
MAKE EXCUSES FOR THOSE WHO DO; AND YES, I KNOW THAT SOME WOMEN BEAT THEIR
SPOUSES.] Of primary concern to me is that this sweet, beautiful,
intelligent young woman NOT make the mistake of "forgiving" this slob or
fail to see the warning signs (his yelling at her in front of her friends)
in future relationships.

Of course, you don't think your nice middle-class boyfriend is capable of
hurting you, particularly if you haven't been exposed to feminism.

To me, teaching women's studies classes and Latin American history classes
have a great deal in common.
In the latter, I have to loosen their grip on the absolute trust and
patriotism that they have been brought up to teach them to question, to
examine, not to take at face value everything they're told. The hardest
thing to teach?  That our government is capable of calumny. When I worked
with NOW, it was like teaching Women's Studies 101 every day.  And it was
just as hard every time, just as it is just as hard to broach sexism or our
government's bad behavior with every class of freshman that I teach.

Someone once told me that it is hard for most people to hold two ideas in
their minds at the same time, for example, loving your country and
criticising some of its policies; dating men yet being wary that they may
not always be what they seem; teaching the complexities of life, as well as
encouraging them to think things through for themselves, and even coming to
different conclusions than you do. And finally, accepting that you don't
know the impact of your teaching. The quiet one who never says a word in
class, whose name you never remember, writes a letter to a favorite teacher
years after graduating and says that you class was one of the most
important ones that he took in college. (A colleague told me that about one
of her former students; I could scarcely remember what he looked like--I
wonder what I did that touched him so strongly.) They can have real poker
faces; they may seem to be distant and yet be engaged at a level that you
can't fathom.

Anything done over and over again can result in burn-out. Just do what you
can to sustain yourself, and don't worry too much about the long-term. You
can't control everything, certainly not with a roomful of young minds that
are growing even as you speak to them

Rosie

At 19:09 19/11/01 EST, you wrote:

>So then the question is begged - if they've never consciously encoutered
>discrimination, is their perception of discrimination altogether inadequate
>or are they naive and immune to the subliminal, or need they be taught that
>they are discriminated against?
>
>Susan vanHoek

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Rosa Maria Pegueros, J.D., Ph.D.
Women's Studies Program &       Washburn Hall, 217C
Department of History           E-mail:
University of Rhode Island      <rpe2836u  @  postoffice.uri.edu>
80 Upper College Road, Suite 3  Telephone: (401) 874-4092
Kingston, RI 02881                    Fax: (401) 874-2595
<http://www.uri.edu/personal/rpe2836u/>
<http://nick.uri.edu/artsci/wms/pegueros.htm>

"I have learned from my teachers and from my colleagues. But
I have learned the most from my students." --Rabbi Hanina