Studying the Sisterhood

The class that meets on Saturday mornings in an otherwise deserted hall on the San Diego State campus is no ordinary gathering. All but three of its 70 members are women, who range in age from 14 to 55. One student sits taking notes while she nurses her baby; others have left their children at the campus child-care center. More than one-third are nonstudents, taking the course for their own interest rather than for credit. They have all enrolled in this class on the Socialization Process of Women because they believe that there are things to be learned about women that they have not learned simply by growing up female.

Women's studies, the systematic analysis of women's role in history and culture, are surprisingly new. The program at San Diego State, which began in 1970 with five teachers and ten courses, was the first in the country. Today women's studies have spread to scores of campuses and include more than 600 courses. One out of every ten students is a male, and a few sympathetic men have even risked ridicule to teach such courses.

The most popular classes deal with the study of women in literature. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, students of Literary Attitudes Toward Women spend 15 weeks reading ten works, about equally divided between those sympathetic to women (The Scarlet Letter, Cymheline) and those that are hostile (Paradise Lost, Mailer's The American Dream).

If women's studies frequently begin with literature, they go much farther. Barnard now offers women's studies courses in its sociology, economics, history, English, French and German departments. Elsewhere students can sign up for such diverse topics as Sex and Politics (Smith), Media's Manipulation of Women (University of Massachusetts), and Women and Social Uplift (Harvard).

Oppression. Many of these courses emphasize a long history of discrimination and denigration. Joanna Russ, an English instructor at Cornell, is trying to change the rules whereby, as she recalls her own education, "we studied E.M. Forster but not Virginia Woolf. We read Thackeray, who was splendid, but not Charlotte Bronte, who was considered eccentric, minor and dull." In history, too, the emphasis has been changed to the study of "invisible women" whose achievements have been largely forgotten: Dorothea Dix, whose exposes revolutionized conditions in mental institutions a century ago; Sojourner Truth, a former slave and influential abolitionist who was received by Abraham Lincoln and later appointed "counselor to the freed people"; Maria Mitchell, who discovered a new comet in 1847; Belva Lockwood, activist lawyer and candidate for President on an equal-rights platform in 1884. In analyzing the bias that has ignored such figures, the women's studies courses frequently focus on economic exploitation and other forms of oppression. At Buffalo, a course on the Politics of Health examines the "medical-industrial complex" as a profitable business. Even a course on automobile repairs presents the car as "directly analogous to the female body, that is, it is a female machine driven and serviced by men."

Like black studies programs, women's studies have been criticized as a fad, or as simply a disguised form of consciousness-raising talk sessions. Cornell Historian L. Pearce Williams, for one, calls them "rather silly," "worthless," and "a lot of nonsense." His argument: "A lot of these courses are not scholarly, they're ideological. They're out to indoctrinate rather than illuminate." Teachers of women's studies reject such criticisms. "Actually," observes Portland State Professor Nancy Porter, "consciousness raising is what education is all about." Professors Annette Baxter and Suzanne Wemple of Barnard agree: "If we acknowledge that the purpose of a liberal arts curriculum is not merely to provide preprofessional preparation for our students but also to give them an appreciation of their cultural heritage, then it is our duty to give them an awareness of their legacy as women."

Prejudice. The feminists, like many black scholars, reject the notion of "value-free" scholarship that rises above prejudice. Preconceptions and unexamined assumptions are widespread in education, they contend, and must be refuted by an adversary process. Cornell's Joanna Russ is often asked: "Why don't you present the other side?" Her reply: "The other side is all around us." Or, as Buffalo's Ann Scott says of John Milton: "Nobody who is such a great writer has a right to be such a damn pig."

San Diego's program attempts, more than most, to bridge the gap between academia and the community. "Bring friends, daughters, mothers or neighbors," Barbara Kessel urges her class on the Socialization Process of Women. Teaching methods have had to be devised by trial and error. "I've erred both on too little consciousness raising and not enough," Instructor Kessel admits. She says she started out by asking her students to go out and observe women in various roles in society, but she recalls that "one girl raised her hand and asked 'What should we be looking for?' I realized that first they needed a course on sexism, which would then lead into the regular subject matter of the course."

Now she starts the course with an exercise in which she solicits secrets from the students. The resulting list becomes the basis for discussion: "I resent always having to stop what I'm doing to take care of my baby," and "I'm scared to death of men." The members soon realize that their frustrations and insecurities are common to many women. The next week they are ready for a session based on such works as Robin Morgan's anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, or Anne Koedt's interview with a lesbian, "Can Women Love Women?"

Depression. Enlightenment can sometimes prove devastating. At the end of a literature course, one girl came up to Buffalo's Ann Scott and declared: "I want you to know that you've ruined my life. Everything I read now fills me with rage." Another problem is the deep depression that these courses frequently arouse. Mary Anne Ferguson, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, observes: "The depression builds up as the essentially negative reflection of women is documented in story after story, and even women authors offer little hope as they show women wasting their lives tied to worthless men or driven to suicide by the very awareness that such a course is trying to develop. One can try to substitute anger for depression, but the problems of channeling the anger constructively remain."

Nor is all the consciousness raising limited to women. John Willems, a senior at Portland State University, where some 800 students are currently enrolled in 18 different women's studies courses, notes that the men in such classes have developed a new style of behavior. "They are much more open on an emotional level," he says, "and they aren't as involved in the ritual struggle for dominance. The movement demands that they become more human, less rational and more in touch with their feelings, that they discover women as people."

The ultimate goal of women's studies, according to San Diego's Barbara Kessel, is "to change the world so that women's studies will not be necessary."

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