re: How academic feminism set back women's liberation

[nancybrumback@xxxxxx]

To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: How academic feminism set back women's liberation
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 09:19:46 -0400
Reply-To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sender: owner-marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<<Her position is that women's studies has become a part of
the institutional system, largely engaged in intellectual scholarship too
removed from its activist components. The point of her book, she writes in
her introduction, is to determine "what deflected our academic initiatives
and speculate on how we might redirect them now" (p. 13).
...

<<Although brief, her suggestions
offer a starting point for departments, feminist scholars, and community
activists to begin to rethink their strategies and to consider methods of
change. She believes the price of not changing is too high. The
construction of knowledge is well under way, but the question she asks is
"knowledge for what?" (p. 289).>>

I have not read the book and probably won't. My situation is so different
from the stereotypical women's studies in large colleges and universities,
and I actually have little interest in what goes on there. But I wonder,
has the author ever considered education around the relationship of the
nuclear family to capitalist society as a strategy for change? Because if
she has, then that's what she should be writing about if she really
is interested in changing the conditions of women's lives. Because that's
where education is most needed. Activisms come and go, but if they don't
have a critique of the overall structure of society, they don't get very
far in my opinion.

Also, I want to add that the construction of knowledge has been a very,
very important contribution of academic feminists. Before the '60s, there
was history up the ying yang but not a drop of herstory. Thousands of years
of being denied access to education and being only marginally connected to
the intellectual life of western society has seriously retarded women's
ability to comprehend their condition and define their needs as a group,
according to Gerda Lerner. So the revealing of all the new perspectives of
women's history and anthropology, etc., was a very important step in
helping women understand their past and future as women...one of the
preconditions of revolt (as i described in my last post).

nancy




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