If You Want to be a Princess, First You Need an Education

I can’t say I’ve thoroughly combed through the media commentary on Prince William’s announcement that he will marry Kate Middleton, but I did read a little of it this morning after this statement in a New York Times article caught my attention:

“Should Miss Middleton become Queen Catherine, she will be the first queen in British history to have a college degree, or indeed, to have any college education at all.”

Some commentators have lamented the fact that future Princess Kate has done little with that college education except procure a husband, but I think that overlooks a more important point.

For the past few weeks, my undergraduate classes have been reading about gender and sharing their thoughts on gender roles, marriage and family, media influences and girls’ education. In a comparison of contemporary and 19th century arguments about single sex education, one student commented that at least nowadays women’s main reason for attending college isn’t to find a husband. Agreed, but when I asked them whether as college women they feel pressure to find a boyfriend, or at the very least to procure male attention, stories started to pour out about friendly teasing at family gatherings and being left out of social events as friends paired off. The story that floored me, though was one young woman’s account of deciding in seventh grade to save her money for higher education, a commitment she stuck to when she recently faced the choice of getting married and starting a family or staying in college and continuing on to the graduate degree she wants to complete.

Two traditions are at issue here. One is education versus marriage, the notion that education (and the career, as e.g. abbess, teacher, social worker, college president, that education can lead to) exists as a respectable alternative to family life, giving women a path to success that runs parallel to the marriage track. Second is education as a means to marriage. A third, far more lovely and quintessentially modern, possibility, is that education is neither the autobahn to marriage nor the functional frontage road running next to it but, rather, a road to adulthood on which women can maintain an autonomy that serves them, and their relationships, well. Education not only provides careers and husbands; it provides the ability to make sense of it all and to keep afloat no matter what follows (divorce, job loss, dissatisfaction, media hullabaloo, whatever life brings).

A few years ago, in a New Yorker review of biographies of Diana Spencer, John Lanchester commented on her “outlandish lack of education” and how poorly it served her in later life. “In retrospect, it’s clear,” he notes, “Diana would have been better off with a mug of cocoa and an art history book than with jetting around Europe with Dodi Al Fayed.”

Yesterday in class, my students discussed media images of women and the out-of-school education those provide. We talked about how much more the media is a part of our lives than ever before and why girls and women hold themselves to the standards of beauty sold to them by television, magazines, the internet, music, film and ads at every turn. And we talked about how to raise girls possessed of self-respect, dignity, insight and resistance to manipulation. At times, the prospects looked hopeless. The education that teachers and parents can offer our girls and boys seems a frail opponent to the forces of popular culture. But the notion of a college educated British princess makes me hopeful. Parents and teachers everywhere can now say this to all those little girls begging for tiaras: If you want to be a princess, first you have to get a higher education.

Why Remember the Night of Terror This Tuesday?

This past Thursday, a grandmother-friend who works as an office manager in the education department of one of our campus museums sent me the most unexpected and thought-provoking spam email, especially instructive for those who (like me) are NOT political or social historians. Forgive me if you are yourself an historian (in which case you may want to amend or otherwise critique this history) or if you have already received this email (which may be late in coming to me). I never forward spam, but I did forward this “Message for All Women,” itself an inspiring example of spam activism. All day Thursday and Friday my inbox filled with replies to that spam, from yoga teachers and classmates, girlhood pals, graduate students, and school teachers telling me about their grandmothers’ observations of the events retold in this email or about young students’ responses to it in class that day, and pleading for social events organized this election season around HBO’s 2004 movie starring Hilary Swank, Iron Jawed Angels. Referencing that film as well as a highly informative Library of Congress archive online, this spam email implored its recipients to ask ourselves what the women who struggled to win the right to vote would think of the way we use or don’t use our right today. Any thoughts on that question to share? Have you seen this film? If so, please comment here.

Remember also that not only women—but John Dewey and other men too!—wrote, spoke, and marched for women’s suffrage, a cause intimately connected with that of coeducation. But I don’t think Dewey or many of them suffered for suffrage as some courageous women did on the Night of Terror, only to be labeled “insane” by that “progressive” Democrat U.S. president who sold war as a way of making the world safe for democracy.

Useful to educators, the HBO film’s website and the government archive site both include timelines and pictorial histories of women’s struggle for suffrage and of President Woodrow Wilson’s active opposition to that struggle as he led the U.S. into World War I. It’s worthy of note how war seems to affect political concerns about sex equality. Just as the U.S. suffrage movement had slowed to a halt during the Civil War, some women gave up the struggle for suffrage to take up “war work” during World War I. But Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, religious women (Roman Catholic and Quaker respectively, educated at Vassar College and Swarthmore College respectively) who founded the National Women’s Party, adopted the tactics of British women’s activism for suffrage, organized a counter-inaugural parade, and relentlessly picketed the White House everyday. As a consequence they were arrested for “obstructing sidewalk traffic,” and November 15, 1917 has become known as the Night of Terror. Forty prison guards with their warden’s consent went on a rampage wielding their clubs against the arrested suffragists. They smashed Dora Lewis’s head against an iron bedstead and knocked her out cold, causing her cellmate to have a heart attack. Imprisoned six times, Burns insisted that the incarcerated suffragists, who also included Paul and many others besides Burns herself, were political prisoners. Imprisoned at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, the women were fed colorless worm-infested slop for weeks and could only drink water from an open pail; Burns and Paul instigated a hunger strike among the prisoners. Prison officials beat Burns, handcuffed her hands over her head, hung her bleeding overnight, and force-fed the hunger strikers. They tied Paul to a chair, poked tubes down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. Afterwards, these suffragists organized a cross-country speaking tour, the “Prison Special,” to inform the public about their experiences of brutality, their punitive reward for wanting full U.S. citizenship.

This coming Tuesday, August 26, will be the 88th anniversary of U.S. women’s getting the right to vote, through U.S. Congress’s ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Contemplate this fact along with the Night of Terror while watching the Republican and Democratic Party conventions on television this coming month, and share your relevant reflections and observations here.

When will Men finally be treated fairly?

A disgruntled lawyer is suing Columbia University for discrimination against men! Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but it's true, a New York lawyer and self-proclaimed anti-feminist (and probably a good friend of Rush Limbaugh), would like everyone to know that Women's Studies courses are unfair to men.  

While this man is so busy worrying about what ideology is being spread against men, he should just realize that Women's Studies like other course offerings in Universities continue to be offered because they continue to be profitable, the students pay the thousands of dollars in tuition and attend the classes. So, I encourage him to design a program for Men's Studies and let's see how many people are interested... maybe he can start by studying what's on Spike TV.

UPDATE: I certainly don't want to disparage existing Men's Studies Programs. My remarks here  were designed to question the legitimacy of this lawsuit, which I view as one man's attempt to use the press for his own agenda against liberated women. ( He uses the term Feminazi's. His other lawsuits involved suing the Federal Government over a law that protects women from violence. Beyond that he has a lawsuit against nightclubs for lady's night discounts! see: NY Times) I appreciate Len's comment and I agree that gender studies is a progressive development. Of course, neither women's nor men's studies programs should be used as a forum for discrimination. I think one important way of determining whether these types of programs are rigorous is to evaluate the extent to which they are seeking to contribute to a pluralist interpretation of the world that will be passed on to the next generation, and not simply seeking to spread their own interpretation of the world as the only valid one. 

More here: Wall Street Journal law blog 

(Thanks to Michelle Forrest for sending me this link)

Honey, who’s watching the kids? Take two!

Barbara Stengel’s “theory-practice puppy” is commanding attention this summer in Oklahoma too, precisely over Andrea English’s question—but in its non-satirical ordinary sense associated with necessary adult efforts at child-minding, as distinct from institutional surveillance. Andrea is right that the latter is a serious social issue worthy of much critical discussion, and I don’t want to detract from the importance of her concern about institutional surveillance. But I have little to add to it, and at the same time I know that this question’s non-satirical sense has a different kind of urgency for students who are parents. For their sake I do want to suggest that this question’s ordinary sense presents a social issue as well, about which “post-feminist” complacency on a Social Issues blog like this would be decidedly premature.

As professional educators, we have dedicated our lives to the improvement of children’s schooling and of colleges and universities. Yet how many of us have taken those broad aims seriously enough to pause and ask our students—not in the interest of surveillance, but in the interest of empathetic understanding of what they and their children are going through: Who’s watching their “kids” while they’re in class? How hard was it to find someone or someplace to help them fulfill that responsibility? How long did they have to spend on a waiting list in order to get such help? How much is such child-minding costing them, and how can they possibly afford it as graduate students? What are their children doing and learning while they’re in class? Where, when, and how can they find the time to get their own academic work done? What do they have to do when their daughters or sons or their parental partners or hired child-minders get sick? What effects might their parenthood have on their anticipated speed of degree completion? And, last but certainly not least in any educational studies program worth the name, what educational wisdom might they be learning through their abundant parental labors? (Such questions can be posed intrusively to individuals, of course, but I am not suggesting that; as discussion questions, they need not and should not be posed intrusively.) Doubtless some of you have felt little need to ask such questions because you have worked through such challenges yourselves and know how difficult they can get, but I have not confronted them myself, because (much to my regret) I have never been a mother. As a doctoral student, I conducted philosophical and literary case studies of mothering as educating, partly with a view toward my own future motherhood. But watching my female peers in such circumstances, I could never see my way past such hard questions to envision myself even capable of working through them adequately while a doctoral student, while an assistant or associate professor. Therefore, I confess a personal disposition to admire the chutzpah and ingenuity of graduate-student mothers.

After witnessing my step-daughter’s childbearing and childrearing through nearly a decade of scientific doctoral work at a major research university, a mighty and sometimes desperate but ever resourceful struggle even with my son-in-law’s 100% collaboration and remarkable parental talents raising my grand-daughter, now aged six, I resolved to open Pandora’s Box by asking what our student-parents in educational studies are going through here in Oklahoma. Graduate students specializing in educational women’s and gender studies have gathered together over all the above loaded questions this summer around a table at our local free public library’s children’s section. Their children, of both sexes, range from the age of five months to the age of military deployment in Iraq, and some students are not yet parents, but hope someday to bear and raise children of their own without sacrificing their intellectual and professional development in order to do so. They are themselves diverse in age, race, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, and economic circumstances, and (because they do need to feed and shelter their children) most are employed full-time as educators of various sorts while attending graduate school and raising their children.

In response to my questions, I got an earful that I cannot divulge without IRB approval for such communication; that is why I enjoin you to find a way to ask these same sorts questions of your students, so that you can compare what you find out with what scholar-mothers are writing on Inside Higher Ed’s MAMA PhD blog by, about, and for “Mothers attempting to balance parenthood and academics." Lest you wonder at the practical or theoretical significance of such informal and internet inquiries with your students, one graduate student-mother of two, Robin Stroud, has referred me to an interesting University of Victoria dissertation (1997--old but probably not yet outdated) in Communication and Social Foundations, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Theory of Women’s Doctoral Persistence, by Roberta-Ann Kerlin, a qualitative study of electronic mail transcripts and face-to-face interviews, whose fifth chapter reports of her research subjects that “To be seen and accepted as serious scholars in the academic milieu, where motherhood has a negative status, required them to make a cognitive shift in which one’s primary identity as a woman was displaced with a newly emerging identity as a scholar. This identity shift gave rise to internal conflict and was manifested in the strained and sometimes estranged relations the women experienced with their families. . . . This reshaping of their identities in a way that devalued this fundamental aspect of who they were contributed significantly to the ambivalence the women felt toward academe as an institution.” Yes, I know! There is essentialism here, but so what? The alienating conflicts reported are deeply felt nonetheless, with consequences for women’s doctoral persistence.

Even without IRB approval, I think I can safely tell you that graduate-student mothers in the University of Oklahoma’s College of Education are no strangers to Barb’s theory-practice puppy. At the Society for Educating Women’s inaugural conference in the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in May 2008, one student leader within the Oklahoma group, Kara Morgan, a toddler's mother, had presented a carefully conceptualized survey of theoretical literature on mothers’ learning; a new mother, Maria Laubach, had presented her study of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s theory of pedagogical mothering in German; and yet another mother of three, Julie Davis, had presented her study of Black lesbian-feminist Audre Lorde’s theorizing about maternal teaching, specifically with regard to her thought on educative vs. miseducative anger. A couple of them had read Jane Roland Martin’s Coming of Age in Academe (2000) and recognized this informal summer gathering at the public library as what Martin, following the Swedes, had named a “fika,” a gathering for both mutual support and problem-solving. Meanwhile one schoolteacher-mother of two teenagers, Kristen Holzer, had presented her formulation of lesbian-feminist mother-poet Adrienne Rich’s thought on coeducation, and therefore urged the group to study together Rich’s classic 1975 essay in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979)—“Toward a Woman-Centered University”—because it lays out an agenda for what this group calls “family-friendly” campus development.

Now in legal process of non-profit incorporation as the Oklahoma Mothers and Educators Collaborative (with guidance from a graduate student who presented her feminist-ethical critique of legal education at the Hull-House conference, Virginia Henson), this group has articulated its mission, begun designing a website, embarked upon research on other universities’ family-friendly features (which have turned out mostly to target faculty, not students) and upon possible partnerships with various Student Life administrators including one non-mother student in the group, Johnnie-Margaret McConnell, and the university’s Women’s Outreach Center. They are planning what they hope will be a schedule of children’s meals, homework help, and artistic, aesthetic, and athletic activities during their evening class times, over which student interns and retired persons may preside; this means they are wrestling with hard questions about safety, insurance, and the like in order to realize their vision of what they want for their children. But they believe that an educational studies program’s student parents can make the college of education a vital locus of cultural creativity, initiative, and leadership for educational programming that can benefit graduate students’ children across the university as well as women’s persistence to graduate-degree completion and education students’ professional learning. Realistically and collaboratively, they are starting small, doing only what they can, one step at a time.

How do busy student-parents find time for such activity? They find time for it because it offers them a supportive community of friends who are going through similar parental and academic struggles as well as opportunities to transform practical obstacles to their graduate studies into subject matter for their scholarly study. This activity is part of their apprenticeship for the educational studies professoriate, through which they are learning how to theorize, initiate, organize, and lead transformative professional service for social justice—for policy changes and new programs of educational value. Indeed one member of the group, Pam Harjo, a mother whose graduate assistantship concerns service to a department committee for graduate recruitment, is showing the group how their work may serve that interest no less than their own needs as student-parents. Meanwhile, the problems to which this group’s members are giving their attention pose many questions worthy of philosophical, historical, and sociological research on childrearing, higher education, and women’s & gender studies. Moreover, they could learn much from those of you who have learned how to survive the juggling act that they are now attempting—and from your students who are also parents. Contact: mothers.educators@gmail.com.

ONCE AGAIN AT HULL-HOUSE~Educating Women

Now located on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and under the direction of Lisa Yun Lee, the original, now historic site of Jane Addams’s Hull-House remains a lively center of activity around social issues, as you will see if you check out the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. On May 22-23, 2008 the old Hull-House dining room and renovated conference facility were filled to capacity with about eighty participants in the inaugural gathering of a new international, intergenerational community of learning and inquiry on women, gender, and education—of which, without doubt, Jane Addams herself would have approved heartily. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the International Society of Educational Biography, the Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University, the University of Oklahoma, and Fairfield University hosted the event and provided scholarship aid for some participants. The brainchild of Lucy Townsend (2008 conference chair), Susan Douglas Franzosa (2009 conference chair), and myself, this new community goes by the name Educating Women. That name’s double entendre refers deliberately to women as both subjects and objects of educating.

True to that name, this inaugural conference brought together professors, students, teachers, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens from North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe around the theme, Educating Women: The Status of Research on the Education of Girls and Women. Consonant with that theme, those in attendance both surveyed and proposed such research, demonstrating the myriad rich possibilities of the scholarship in educational women’s and gender studies that has emerged only within the past two or three decades. Addressing education in infancy and throughout the human lifespan in highly various educational institutions both rural and urban, presenters’ topics included coeducation, single-sex schooling, teacher education, and women’s studies, as well as women’s instructive folklore, women’s educative social movements and friendships. Participants presented studies of girls’ and women’s education in Pakistan, Botswana, Kenya, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the American South. They discussed research on Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American, and Italian-American girls’ and women’s education; on education in visual arts, music, athletics, sexuality, gardening, sustainable agriculture, home economics, and the legal profession; on education about pain, for peace and other sorts of activism, and for living wisely and well; on women’s anger and artistry in teaching; on the teaching, learning, and curricular resources of mothers; on the particular educational challenges of pregnant teens and of both women with disabilities and mothers of children with disabilities. Some sessions argued for the value of studying women’s literary representations of teaching and learning; many others argued for the value of recovering knowledge about the past work or thought of significant educating women—such as Frances Wright, Elizabeth Sherwood, Betty Kirby, Flora White, Sarah Raymond, Ellen Swallow Richards, Catharine Macaulay, Christine de Pizan, Emma Goldman, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Roberta Abney, and founders of women’s studies programs—not to mention the sessions on Jane Addams. Selected papers presented at Hull-House will appear in forthcoming special issues of Educational Studies and Vitae Scholasticae. Meanwhile the community is preparing also to publish its own refereed journal, Educating Women, online, with password-protected spaces for discussing its articles.

Four keynote speakers called attention to issues of recurring concern throughout the conference. Ruth Sweetser, president of the American Association of University Women, opened the Hull-House conference with a lecture concerning the history of that organization’s research on girls’ and women’s education—including its most recent report, Where the Girls Are, which debunks the myth of a “boys’ crisis” in U.S. education and concludes that understanding race/ethnicity and family income levels are critical to understanding girls’ and boys’ achievement. Kolawole Babatunde, representing Nigeria ActionAid International, opened the first afternoon’s session with a lecture on “Major Factors Affecting Girls’ Education in Northern Nigeria: A Grassroots-Based Approach,” which illuminated strong points of resonance with issues affecting North American girls’ education, including critical concern about a narrow focus only on academic learning and achievement, and thus signaled possible directions for future collaboration in behalf of Nigerian girls’ education. The first day closed with a lecture by Lisa Yun Lee and a film, on Hull-House itself, along with a tour of the museum. Jane Roland Martin, whose John Dewey Lecture became one of her many books, Cultural Miseducation, opened the second day with a lecture, “Making Research on Women Count,” critiquing the “hidden” curriculum of misogyny witnessed during the recent U.S. Presidential primary campaign season as a signal of much educational work yet to be done and drawing imaginative inspiration from the concept of the land grant university to envision new approaches that Educating Women might take in the twenty-first century. Gaby Weiner, now of Edinburgh University, Stirling University, and Manchester University in the U.K., formerly of the University of Umeå in Sweden, opened the final afternoon’s sessions with a lecture, “Too Much Talk and Too Little Action: Trends in Research on Gender and Education in Europe and the Anglophone World,” comparing so-called “second wave” and “third wave” feminisms there with a content analysis of journals that suggested important possible future directions for Educating Women.

This conference and the publications following from it do not tell the whole story about the community of learning and inquiry that Educating Women aims to become. A project initially conceived in informal conversation over dinner in Charlottesville, VA during the American Educational Studies Association conference in 2005, and developed by its three founders at subsequent conferences and through carefully planned meetings and retreats in 2006 and 2007, Educating Women responds to a perceived generation gap in scholarship on women and education and also to a situation felt to be presently so limiting as to be stifling the field’s growth. In general, the educational women’s and gender studies field’s senior scholars seem to lack opportunities for collaborative work, while interested junior scholars often lack access to mentors and to sufficiently diversified, advanced studies to feel confident pursuing research on women, gender, and education. Moreover teachers, parents, and community educators often have no access to the research that is published in academic venues, even when it might be useful to them. Besides organizing conferences and publishing an online journal, therefore, this project will—as funds raised permit—utilize distance-education technologies, organize special interest groups within other existing organizations, construct an online archive of the field’s development, connect people with mentors, facilitate mutual communications and collaborations among scholars and teachers, and provide online a researchers' and teachers’/parents’ resource center that may work something like a virtual extension service. This trans-institutional, trans-associational project’s aim is to make unprecedented opportunities for novice, mid-career, and senior scholars to undertake advanced learning and inquiry in this new field and, also, just as importantly, to make their work available to a global audience of educators who can and will inform and inspire the work of scholars, use it, and improve upon it to make a difference in the learning and living of women, girls, and all other gender-troubled people. The founders are currently organizing Educating Women’s Board of Advisers, and welcome new participants in this culturally diverse community who care about girls’ and women’s education and about gender and sexuality education, who are also eager to learn and to teach. Contact: societyforeducatingwomen@gmail.com.