Feminism in Education: Praxis and Promise

May 26

Preface:

Any meaningful social justice work invites conflict between the expected processes and values of the broader cultures that surround us, and the values that we espouse within intentional educational communities. These conflicts are often exacerbated by the challenges of deeply connotated language, with multiple orientations to familiar words at play in our dialogues. The constellation of feminism includes various and often conflicting movements, including several historical waves of US feminism, theories of intersectionality, gender-inclusive feminism, and international feminisms. We also carry and continually reimagine loaded terms (such as sexism, misogyny, transmisogyny, patriarchy, and paternalism) that complicate a shared understanding of blended concepts. For the purposes of this essay, I will be using “feminism” to refer to a set of practices and values that are oriented toward equalizing the opportunities and experiences of all genders, and eliminating harmful biases and superficial understandings of gender roles that contribute to dangerous and destructive gendered social structures.

Part I: Tropes

The “hysterical woman” trope has multiple origins, etymologically traceable to ancient Greece and frequently mirrored conceptually in other cultures, where the words ‘υστέρα (womb) and ‘υστερικός (suffering in the uterus, hysterical) directly link a physical organ of the female reproductive system to female expressions of emotionality. These terms eventually evolved into Latin versions of the word hysteria that support its contemporary usage. In a relatively more recent history of early feminist movements in the United States, this term is acknowledged for its relationship with social and emotional capabilities and perceptions of the roles and limitations of women in society. Medical historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg suggests in an article on the role of women in the 19th century that “physicians saw woman as the product and prisoner of her reproductive system. It was the ineluctable basis of her social role and behavioral characteristics, the cause of her most common ailments; woman’s uterus and ovaries controlled her body and behavior from puberty through menopause.” [1] Complications of menstruation could include temporary insanity [2] which would have to be closely monitored, implying a thesis, widely accepted in medical communities for hundreds of years and culminating in the Victorian era, that woman is inherently abnormal. This language contributed to a systematized foundation that placed women in subordinate roles in an effort to protect them from their own emotionality.

For all of her revolutionary ideas and work that provided a foundation for later feminist movements, even Simone de Beauvoir (celebrated French feminist and philosopher who came of age in the early 20th century) acknowledges these tropes as having validity, while nonetheless working to situationalize them and separate them from concepts of inherent capacity:

“We can now understand why, from ancient Greece to today, there are so many common features in the indictments against woman; her condition has remained the same throughout superficial changes, and this condition defines what is called the woman’s ‘character’: she ‘wallows in immanence,’ she is argumentative, she is cautious and petty, she does not have the sense either of truth or of accuracy, she lacks morality, she is vulgarly self-serving, selfish, she is a liar and an actress. There is some truth in all these affirmations. But the types of behaviors denounced are not dictated to woman by her hormones or predestined in her brain’s compartments: they are suggested in negative form by her situation.” [3]

In the wake of de Beauvoir’s work (as well as the foundational works of scholars of Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and others who put forth early concepts of intersectional feminism), the United States experienced a political avalanche of concrete attempts to attend to overt situations of individual and structural misogyny. Patterns of treatment of women in the community and the workforce, including access to healthcare, reproductive rights, family leave, equal pay, equal employment opportunity, recourse for claims of sexual violence, and countless other gendered issues, were nominally resolved in hard-won battles during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 70s. The following decades saw what Susan Faludi describes as a backlash in her eponymous 1991 work, wherein women began reacting to situations that were a result of their successes: for many (white) women, feminism was no longer deemed necessary, as problematic conditions had clearly been attended to by the success of past legal battles, even as they simultaneously grappled with the challenges of managing expectations of dual roles in careers within and outside the home.

Concrete changes in policy that nominally supported equality for women overshadowed (for a time) a more insidious manifestation of some of those ancient impressions of the hysterical nature of women that continued to operate in the background and interstices of formal legal language of equality and civil rights. Faludi’s 2006 Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of Backlash rounds out the anniversary preface to the original edition with the following admonition:

“What is missing is the deeper promise of a woman’s revolution, a revolution that was never intended to champion cut-throat competition or winner-take-all ethics, a revolution that was abandoned on the road to economic opportunity. Women’s disillusionment comes from the half-gleaned truth that, while we have achieved economic gains, we have yet to find a way to turn those gains toward the larger and more meaningful goals of social change, responsible citizenship, the advancement of human creativity, the building of a mature and vital public world. We live within the confines of a social structure and according to cultural conventions that remain substantially intact from before the revolution. We have used our gains to gild our shackles, but not break them.” [4]

Another decade past, and our vitriolic response through media to the character, wardrobe, and vocal tenor of female presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the last several election cycles, as well as the emergence of the #metoo phenomenon [5], indicates that, as a culture, we have been far from successful in internalizing the spirit of our Civil Rights Era victories of equality. The vestiges of those early links between the perceived instability of the womb and its impact on the uncontrollable behaviors of women are still evident in the headlines of major newspapers and the conclusions of arbitrary definitions of professionalism in many workplace settings.

Rebecca Solnit outlines this phenomenon beautifully in an exegesis on the national response to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign:

“Clinton was constantly berated for qualities rarely mentioned in male politicians, including ambition--something, it’s safe to assume, she has in common with everyone who ever ran for elected office. It was possible, according to a headline in Psychology Today, that she was “pathologically ambitious.” She was criticized for having a voice. While Bernie Sanders railed and Trump screamed and snickered, Fox commentator Brit Hume complained about Clinton’s ‘sharp, lecturing tone,’ which, he said, was ‘not so attractive’; MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone; Bob Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’; and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said, ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but, of course, if she did that she would not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a woman, since power, in this framework, is a male prerogative, which is to say that the setup was not intended to include women. As Sady Doyle noted, ‘She can’t be sad or angry, but she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this one. Anything she does is wrong.’ One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses.” [6]

Earlier this year, as I watched the Vice Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, I was reminded again of the ways in which women, and especially women of color, are so often expected to tolerate patterns and techniques of oppression in male counterparts: gaslighting, stonewalling, character attacks, blatant lies, frequent interruptions, and a pathological unwillingness to cede the floor when asked, are just a few of the tools Pence used to maintain dominance in conversation. These behaviors were shown to be sanctioned (for men) at our highest levels of government, but anything less than perfect poise from the now-Vice President as she grappled with those attacks would have been immediately criticized in the usual ways.

Numerous studies suggest evidence that female professors are more harshly judged by students than male professors, indicating that students find women performing similarly as men to be more arrogant and harsher evaluators, among other undesirable traits [7]; studies that determine the efficacy of CEOs often find that women are perceived as arrogant, whereas men exhibiting similar behaviors would be perceived as assertive [8]; reports that offer advice for emerging female professionals often encourage them to strongly emphasize their successes in language of the “team” as opposed to themselves as individuals, to be more likely to be perceived as cooperative, whereas male individual successes are more likely to be celebrated [9]; studies and frequently documented personal accounts indicate that we are more likely to accept angry behavior as a matter of course in men, and to find similar behaviors as problematic, or even pathological, in women [10].

What we face in the current era is a culture in which many of us seem to have command of the correct language to use to avoid direct responsibility for actions that might indicate misogyny (and other forms of identity-based discrimination), but in which we fail to recognize the impact of conditioned implicit bias and the way it presences in our everyday language and assumptions. This is made even more complicated by the fact that, in any given situation, it is possible that the individual descriptors could also be accurate. It is possible that a female CEO could exhibit traits of arrogance; it is possible that a female professor could be unduly harsh in grading; it is possible that a female professional could be disinclined to support team projects. It is not the individual situations, but the trends that show us evidence of an underlying bias that forces minoritized genders (and ethnicities) to maintain much higher standards of decorum and composure in difficult situations than their (white) male counterparts.

When the tropes of misogyny are buried so deep in our unconscious that we don’t recognize them for what they are, assessment of the motives behind individualized actions becomes almost impossible, and the burden of proof requires a level of certainty that is rarely accessible. Nonetheless, patterns of injustice persist.

Part II: Institutional Norms

In progressive communities, it is extremely challenging to make claims of structural injustice in a way that will hold up against defined institutional standards, practices, and policies. This challenge, however, does not absolve us of the responsibility to attend to problematic patterns of injustice, and the need to explore new ways of addressing individual situations that honor the nuanced landscape of those patterns.

In efforts to teach and model feminist-informed practices in institutions, we are often forced to grapple with an ennervating paradox, as culturally sanctioned standards for professional decorum often inhibit actions that may help us to identify and address examples of systemic oppression. Conditions of propriety often serve to perpetuate unjust systems, even as we work to dismantle them from other directions. In progressive communities, our experiences and practices of implicit bias and prejudice are often rooted in behaviors that can be justified, defended, or criticized from other, less incriminating angles. Nonetheless, the continued presence of discrimination in the subtext is extremely harmful, and still presents barriers to equality.

We are trained to respond quickly to concerns of a breach of the contract of professionalism, a tool that often limits the options of engagement for exploring the underlying claims of discrimination, while we are often much slower to respond to concerns about background issues that inspire such professional transgressions (if we respond to them at all). Furthermore, we are often forced to question ourselves when we personally experience acts of injustice. While a continued commitment to self-reflection is relevant and important, and will help us avoid applying a single lens to a complex problem, this personal questioning should exist while simultaneously interrogating the lenses of the system. In practice, a system is almost always defended at the expense of an individual, and if, as individuals, we have valid complaints, we are rarely permitted to articulate those complaints authentically. We are trained to think that unless our claims are overt and explicit, they will not be successful, and may invite more scrutiny of our motives, legitimacy, and character than of the complaint itself.

The uncertainty we feel when our methods are called into question at the expense of the content (especially when no effective methods are available to us within the boundaries of decorum) is a particularly insidious form of institutionalized gaslighting. For example, the accepted practice of generalizing issues (so as to avoid public criticism of individuals) is often ineffective, as individuals are thus tacitly allowed to exclude themselves from responsibility. In offering specifics, we have the opportunity to move from the abstract embrace of shared values to a realistic institutional confrontation with the ways we struggle to live up to those values. If we continue to address issues of marginalized communities only in the abstract, those abstractions themselves can serve to perpetuate problematic behaviors.

The tendency to evade accountability through abstraction and generality is often intensified through complex power differentials, especially when those in power are not invested in recognizing the impact of their own prejudices and deeply-held biases. Traditional institutional hierarchies often uphold a directionality for decorum: any upwards challenge must be extremely careful, polite, airtight, and perfectly executed, whereas policies of supervision often serve to reinforce the perspectives of those in power, regardless of legitimacy. When our attention to professional decorum and traditionally-sanctioned power structures distorts realities that we are ill-prepared to manage, we have lost the opportunity to engage some of our deepest challenges with integrity and acuity.

It is inevitable that institutional structures and policies that are informed by the conventions of the broader culture will also represent aspects of existing cultural conflicts, as these structures are sustained by the dominant cultures surrounding us and are cultivated in our consciousness before we are able to form abstract thoughts. Our challenge, if we are to authentically address the complexities of institutionalized, structural injustice, is to engage questions that will help us build the foundational values that we cherish into our very systems, acknowledging that, in many areas, this is uncharted territory.

What happens when our shared work in dismantling structural injustice comes into conflict with institutional and community standards of decorum and professionalism? Are there events that justify pushing against the institution in the service of helping us to move closer to the values we proclaim, and if so, how do we determine which events are worthy of this attention? How do we recognize which standards of decorum are no longer serving us? How do we honor a commitment to constructive engagement of conflict and a recognition of the basic humanity in each of us without also conflating the word “constructive” with the word “complacent”? I believe these are dilemmas that each of us face daily, and that require us to accept that all actions (including the choice not to act) have consequences. If we are going to attempt to address structural injustice head-on, we may occasionally find ourselves needing to break some of the rules that hold the system intact.

As we recognize that we have a responsibility to our students to build a globally-inclusive curriculum that attends to these liberatory ideas, it is important to also begin to hold our institutions to similar standards. A feminism-informed set of institutional practices will undoubtedly require a reimagining of the role and placement of hierarchies (including attention to what it means to fight embedded patriarchy and paternalism), a commitment to community accountability that may require more specificity of transgression and more accommodation of emotional experiences than we are accustomed to, and a courageous examination of the underlying cultural norms, assumptions, and language patterns that are embedded in our institutions but which may no longer be serving us.

Part III: The Implications and Limits of Language

Any curriculum that centers justice will require us to take on some of the most controversial, challenging, and ideologically-laden concepts in our language structures and declare a commitment, within our learning communities, to cultivating a nuanced understanding in ourselves and holding each other accountable for the same. Nothing about this work is easy, and its implications reach beyond our classrooms, into our interpersonal communication patterns, our policies, our systems and schedules, and our comprehensive institutional praxis. Our culturally-sanctioned and institutionally-sanctioned patterns of language may be serving to support systems of structural bias and injustice, even as we use that language to try to counter the injustice.

The ways that we use language, manipulate language, and sanction some forms of language while rejecting others can be seen as a tool of social control (whether implicit or explicit) that is frequently used to protect the status quo, often without formal recognition or awareness of this reality. Professionally-accepted language and patterns of response are among the most deeply embedded practices in institutional cultures. These language patterns often serve to unconsciously misdirect and invalidate the experience of people who are historically marginalized within these cultures.

Gikuyu writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind (his final work written in English), offers a retrospective analysis on the ways in which languages of the European colonizers have impacted both the construction of identities and the potential for engaging culturally relevant ideas in the people who were forced to adopt unfamiliar language structures across various African communities:

“[Colonialism’s] most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.” [11]

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to a compendium on the writings of Critical Race Theory also highlights the power of language to influence and control the conclusions of both law and scholarship. Critical Race Theory represents a movement that emerged in academic law programs following the critical legal studies movement of the 1970s, in which legal scholars began to question the linguistic foundations and claims of detachment in law studies, insofar as the language and practices were found to implicitly support structural bias against marginalized groups. Previous to this work, law was perceived to be an entirely objective, neutral practice; the work of these scholars helped to define a path forward in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Era, and provided a new language to support a more inclusive legal practice, influencing, among other things, case law and interpretations of Title VII and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Crenshaw explains,

“[Critical Race Theorists] contended that liberal and conservative legal scholarship operated in the narrow ideological channel within which law was understood as qualitatively different from politics. The faith of liberal lawyers in the gradual reform of American law through the victory of the superior rationality of progressive ideas depended on a belief in the central ideological myth of the law/politics distinction, mainly, that legal institutions employ a rational, apolitical, and neutral discourse with which to mediate the exercise of social power. This, in essence, is the role of law as understood by liberal political theory. Yet politics was embedded in the very doctrinal categories with which law organized and represented social reality.” [12]

bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, identifies similar concerns when discussing the construction of curriculum:

“My pedagogical practices have emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies. This complex and unique blending of multiple perspectives has been an engaging and powerful standpoint from which to work. Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to imagine and enact pedagogical practices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism), while simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse groups of students.” [13]

Scholars such as those above recognize that language is not, and never has been, politically neutral. There are ways that the expected, sanctioned language patterns themselves, patterns that we have been trained to use in institutional practices, patterns that we acknowledge as acceptable or unacceptable because we have been culturally conditioned to do so, may actually be contributing to the process of tipping the balance of power away from those seeking a justice-oriented pedagogy.

Part IV: Toward a Praxis of Subversion

In progressive institutions nominally oriented towards justice, various paradigms of thought and practice collide, such as when restorative justice frameworks and theories of intersectionality bump up against embedded legal hierarchies and culturally-sanctioned professional standards. The resultant challenges unveil questions about the promise, power, and responsibility of modeling subversion in an educational context.

If we are to accept Paolo Freire’s claims of the responsibility that the oppressed bear in bringing to light the issues that bind them, we are then tasked with recognizing the role that our students play in bringing forth justice in our community and our world, and in modeling behaviors ourselves that support their work as revolutionaries. Freire suggests in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that

“...this lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly in solidarity with them. As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity.” [14]

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner further remind us in Teaching as a Subversive Activity that

“We are, after all, talking about achieving a high degree of freedom from the intellectual and social constraints of one’s tribe ... We become accustomed very early to a ‘natural’ way of talking, and being talked to, about ‘truth.’ Quite arbitrarily, one’s perception of what is ‘true’ or real is shaped by the symbols and symbol-manipulating institutions of his tribe. Most men, in time, learn to respond with fervor and obedience to a set of verbal abstractions which they feel provides them with an ideological identity. One word for this, of course, is ‘prejudice.’ None of us is free from it, but it is the sign of a competent ‘crap detector’ that he is not completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in which he happened to grow up.” [15]

Students are highly attentive to these distinctions. While no intentional community that exists within the world can entirely ignore the expectations of the broader culture (most notably, with respect to the law and due process in a physical location), anti-oppression lenses require us to work toward progress at a level that may exceed the accepted standards of the communities that surround and influence us. In the categories of identity construction, we must acknowledge a shared humanity that, while inherent in concept, can only be achieved through thoughtful and ongoing engagement in the nuances of difficult issues. Our challenge is to model higher standards and a more inclusive and informed approach to these conflicts, even while recognizing that similar conflicts continue to challenge federal and global legal systems.

Part V: The Promise of a Feminist Lens

An overarching feminist lens can offer a unique entry point for educational reform that meaningfully elucidates broader issues of justice and equity, and has the potential to provide a foundation for questioning archetypal experiences and expressions of misogyny in social and institutional contexts. This lens can also serve as a metaphor for beginning to understand an interrelated set of concepts of systemic injustice that becomes broadly accessible through its application -- while there are nuances and variances in the experience of gender across cultures, every culture has a complex relationship to gender roles and gender expression, with immediate and meaningful connections. Other facets of injustice (such as race, socioeconomic status, neurodivergence, health and wellness, etc.) lack the same level of universality, as they often represent conditions that are understood within contexts of a specific time, place, or culture, and are often defined initially at moments of encounter between cultures. The universal lens of feminism has the power to be uniquely instructive, with gender serving as a multifaceted but nonetheless permanent phenomenon of the human condition.

The praxis of feminism encourages us to hold ourselves accountable for envisioning systems that may eventually transcend the limitations of our contributing cultures and help propel us towards greater integrity and a more just and sustainable future. This praxis encompasses shared principles that are woven throughout specific feminisms. Within these feminisms, there are many points of divergence and occasionally ideological conflict, and this overarching lens is not to be confused with the dominant lens of white feminism, which often masquerades as feminism-in-its-entirety. Nonetheless, when the shared generalities are explored and applied in tandem with specific lenses of intersectionality, critical race theory, and distinct global feminist interpretations, we are uniquely positioned to explore these multifaceted challenges from a place of authentic, personal engagement. To borrow from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “we should all be feminists.”

Notes

1: Carol Smith Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America”, Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Leavitt, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 112.

2: Sharon Golub, Periods: From Menarche to Menopause, (California: Sage Publications, 1992), 13.

3: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York: Vintage, 1949/2011), 638.

4: Susan Faludi, Backlash:The Undeclared War Against American Women, Fifteenth Anniversary Edition, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991/2006), xvi.

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement

6: Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 24-25.

7: Colleen Flaherty, “Same Course, Different Ratings,” Inside Higher Ed, 2018.

8: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, “Speaking While Female,” The New York Times, 2015.

9: Eileen Elias, “Lessons learned from women in leadership positions,” IOS Press Open Library, 2018.

10: Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 24-25.

11: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, (Rochester: James Currey, 1986), 16.

12: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Introduction,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, (New York: The New Press, 1995), xviii.

13: bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

14: Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 1970), 29.

15: Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, (New York: Dell, 1969), 4-5.

Melinda Russial