Guest Post by Sophia: Why feminism is necessary in today’s schools
Teaching feminism in schools is one of the most important feminist issues of our time. In order to empower young women, we need to teach them about women’s accomplishments through history, and we need to explore teaching methods that inspire girls to speak out and make a difference.
Today’s guest post in the Teaching Feminism series is from Sophia. You can find her blog at http://womenundefined.blogspot.com and you can follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sophiabiabia.
More than 300 years of major progress. Thousands of battles won, and yet the war still rages. Feminism isn’t dead; its use is not irrelevant. We the people are still fighting for the same “inalienable rights” that white, upper class men have enjoyed for years. One of our most fervent needs is to replace old notions about what it means to be a woman. To dispel stereotypes, combat gender discrimination, and attempt to overturn patriarchal social and gender constructs. One of the best ways to accomplish these goals is to integrate a new point of view into the consciousness of students, to re-imagine the standard American curriculum. To embrace the following ideas: that Feminism is relevant and necessary in American schools, that the lack of diversity in American literature contributes to the inability of women to define our own history, tradition, and form, and that integrating feminist theory into schools can contribute to achieving modern feminist goals.
As I mentioned above, great strides have been made to include women in the canon of classic literature taught in schools. Works from women such as Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen and even Mary Wolstonecraft have gained great popularity. This is due in part to their strong message of female empowerment and in part to their perhaps unconscious adherence to the traditional male manner of writing. As is described in an essay by Paul Lauter, the development of modern literature began taking shape in the 1920’s, developed by white men of significant social status, wealth and education.
The professors, educators, critics, and arbiters of taste of the 1920’s, were, for the most part, college-educated white men of Ango-Saxon or northern European origins. They came from the that tiny, elite portion of the population of the US which, around the turn of the century, could go to college.. . The old elite and their allies moved on a variety of fronts, especially during the and just after World Ward I, to set the terms on which these demands would be accommodated. They repressed, in actions like the Prohibition Amendment and the Palmer raids, the political and social, as well as the cultural, institutions of immigrants and of radicals.(Lauter)
At the same time that Lauter hypothesized how literature came to be, feminists also began to question the manner in which works were selected and then included. Their purpose was plain: to combat oppression against women in writing, reading and the very mode of literary criticism. Later, the feminists of the 60’s and 70’s fought against literature’s established norms, arguing for the greater inclusion of women authors. Their findings and motivation were based upon the evidence that the development of modern literature negatively influenced female artists, their work, and the manner in which it was criticized; in every sense, the canon of literature, and model for criticizing literature, was oppressing women by conveying the main themes feminists at this time were so desperately fighting against.
Certainly if we acquiesce in the patriarchal Bloomian model, we can be sure that the female poet does not experience the “anxiety of influence” in the same way that her male counterpart would.. Not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority, they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential, which by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflicting with her own sense of her self-that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy , her creativity. (Gilbert, Gubar)
Today the need for these efforts still rings true; the inclusion of a diverse array of authors of all race, class and sex is still blatantly missing from established curricula. As a result, the manner in which arguments, criticism and how we are taught to read this canon of literature, remains inherently sexist. (A further illustration: I have developed this very argument by following a model developed by Aristotle, a man who believed a woman to be “deformed’ and an “accidental” form of man.) Enough is enough: students should and can be taught from a more diverse literary canon and learn from more than the affluent white male.
How this definition of “woman,” in terms of literature, is important lies in how her work is read, taught and applied. One may question the realistic educational need and thereby use of a distinct definition of “woman.” My answer is that with the “woman” perspective, old texts (hitherto criticized by a male derived model of analysis and thus taught in this same way) are re-examined by student and teacher to get a truly diverse analysis and perspective of the literary subject in question.
The stakes remain incredibly high. If we succeed in establishing a completely diverse canon of literature, one result will be the development of a more concrete definition of “woman.” Not as an ‘other,’ thereby lesser, form of man, but woman- a being socially, economically, physically, emotionally, and intellectually as capable and equal as any man. A definition that includes her own history, tradition and world views completely independant of men, however respected within literary communities and whose ideas and works of art are instituted alongside men within the educational curriculum. “Such sociosexual differentiation means that.. women writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture which has it’s own distinctive literary traditions, even… a distinctive history”(Gilbert, Gubar). When women writers define “woman,” they provide an independent model upon which women and minority writers of the future can allude to, be inspired by and learn from. The work of women must, as Mary Eagleton puts it, “speak as woman,” rather than simply speak as man from a female body.
The importance of this definition of “woman” within the curriculum of schools cannot be underestimated. For learning purposes, students have a tradition, a sense of who “woman” is to base their work upon. Socially, this more definitive sense of “woman” provides another subconscious role model which young women and girls can look up to. This would be apart from the stereotypical image of the “perfect woman,” which is according to, and aimed towards, men. With a more concrete background of what “woman” is, perhaps some of the many negative effects of current patriarchial stereotypes and gender constructs will be blunted.
Modern feminist theory includes three major themes which pertain directly to education.
1. Reshape the canon of literature to include writers that are women, women of color, and minorities.
2. Define art and literature by women as woman; creating a history for modern writers to be inspired, and which disassociates completely with the male literary construct.
3. Use the woman’s perspective to analyze old and new literature.