As women teachers we can either deny the importance of [the] context in which women students think, write, read, study, project their own futures; or try to work with it. We can either teach passively, accepting these conditions, or actively, helping our students identify and resist them.

One important thing we can do is discuss the context. And this need not happen only in a women's studies course; it can happen anywhere. We can refuse to accept passive, obedient learning and insist upon critical thinking. We can become harder on our women students, giving them the kinds of ‘cultural prodding' that men receive, but on different terms and in a different style.

Most young women need to have their intellectual lives, their work, legitimized against the claims of family, relationships, the old message that a woman is always available for service to others. We need to keep our standards very high, not to accept a woman's preconceived sense of her limitations; we need to be hard to please, while supportive of risk-taking, because self-respect often comes only when exacting standards have been met. At a time when adult literacy is generally low, we need to demand more, not less, of women, both for the sake of their futures as thinking beings, and because historically women have always had to be better than men to do half as well. A romantic sloppiness, an inspired lack of rigour, a self-indulgent incoherence, are symptoms of female self-depreciation. We need to help our women students to look very critically at such symptoms, and to understand where they are rooted.

Nor does this mean we should be training women students to ‘think like men.' Men in general think very badly: in disjuncture from their personal lives, claiming objectivity where the most irrational passions seethe, losing, as Virginia Woolf observed, their senses in the pursuit of professionalism. It is not easy to think like a woman in a man's world, in the world of the professions; yet the capacity to do that is a strength which can try to help our students develop. To think like a woman in a man's world means thinking critically, refusing to accept the givens, making connections between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected...

Adrienne Rich
"Taking Women Students Seriously" in
Gendered Subjects: the Dynamics of Feminist Teaching

Course Directors:
Caitlin Fisher/ Any François
Session: F/W 1999-2000

Tutorial Leaders:
Any François/Liz Millward

Time: Lecture Tuesdays 11:30 - 1:30
Tutorial 1:30 - 2:30
Tutorial 2:30 - 3:30

This is an introductory course in Women's Studies. Women's Studies is an area of inquiry designed to explore and generate knowledge by examining the diverse experiences of women. It uses and challenges the methods, theories and knowledge of traditional disciplines in its quest to understand the world we live in. Women's Studies also asks us to examine what difference it would make to our world view if we put women at the centre of inquiry. Does it change anything about what we think, what we have learned, or how we see ourselves?

In this course we will examine several questions and topics in the field of women's studies. We will ask what the word 'women' means; who is it that we are putting at the centre of inquiry? What do women have in common as women and what are the differences among women? How do race, sexuality, class, ethnicity and nationality create commonalties and differences among women? We will also explore how systems of domination and discrimination work. In what ways have women been subordinated? How have systems of power [such as those based on race, sexuality, class and national identity] relate to gender as a system of power? Finally we will explore how women have constantly struggled, resisted and sought to transform their worlds through individual and collective political struggles, as well as through literature and cultural production.