Equality or bust
Feminism and patriarchy in the university
April 7, 2007
Carrie Heyde
At the risk of being branded a witch or a feminist bra burner, I’d like to share my journey as a woman in the university.
I think many people assume that being a woman is easy. The breasts and vagina are free, you put on some clothes, do your hair and makeup, and then you choose to fit somewhere into the myriad of traditional women’s roles: mother, seductress, wife, house-maiden. Or you can try to fit into one of the newer roles that have been evolving over the past few hundred years: student, career woman, teacher, musician, artist, etc.
I came to Trinity Western University for two reasons. First, I wanted to learn how to live out my faith while teaching in the public school system, and second, I wanted to learn how to be an informed, thinking woman who could put together the fragmented categories of life, thereby bringing wholeness and balance to myself and those around me.
After 14 semesters of university, here are some of my conclusions. First, there is no such thing as an authoritative body of great literature, or of Western Christian thought, or of history for that matter. Despite this, at university, we are taught about what great white men believe and think about other great men. The accepted body of history does not typically include multiple perspectives or it does not value the contrasting voices of minorities.
History, as it is handed to us, is about men and war, but life is about so much more. I learned a lot in Townsend’s class, “Influential Thinkers in the Western Christian Tradition,” but I also found the all-male repertoire difficult to swallow.
Similarly, other than English courses specifically exploring the marginalized, like “Commonwealth Literature” or “Women in Literature,” many, if not most, of my literature courses have involved a syllabus of male writers with one female author, added on at the end for good measure, which we were free to peruse post-final-exam. We have been conditioned to believe that we are getting an “equal” education, but as Adrienne Rich writes in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, what we are learning is “neither objective reality, nor an accurate picture of the past.”
I do not believe that standing up for my gender makes me anti-male. I adore my husband and many other men in my life. But I believe that rather than being the doting housewife or the bra-burning feminist, there is a third way. I want to encourage women not to sit back and unquestioningly accept what is taught, but to take responsibility for themselves and their learning by, as Rich writes in On Claiming an Education, “refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts.” I also want to encourage women to challenge professors, of both sexes, to stop handing down a “male-centered tradition” without questioning why women are not included in these bodies of philosophy, literature, and history.
At a Christian university, we understand the message of equality in Christ handed down to us in Galatians 3:28, yet women have typically had to move outside of the church in order to gain equal rights. Given that, as Christians, we are supposed to have the market cornered on love and equality, and given that most of my humanities classes have had about a 20:1 ratio of women to men, it seems very ironic that we would continue to propagate old stereotypes and ways of understanding what it means to be human.
Now you go...
Got something to say?