Subject: A SISTERHOOD OF SCHOLARS? [long]

From: [email-masked] (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 05:54:48 GMT

I found this over on soc.feminism.  

>From: [email-masked] (John McCarthy)
>Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
>Newsgroups: soc.feminism
>Approved: [email-masked]
>Date: 4 Feb 93 23:30:05 GMT

This is another posting with permission of an article from the
newsletter _Measure_.  All articles are posted to alt.activism.d, and
certain of them are posted to other newsgroups that seem relevant.
University Centers for Rational Alternatives _Measure_ Number 112,
January 1993

                   A SISTERHOOD OF SCHOLARS?
                     Christina Hoff Sommers

(An abbreviated version, entitled "Sister Soldiers," appeared in the
October 5, 1992 issue of _New Republic_.)

        In theory, the National Women's Studies Association is a
central professional academic organization like the American
Philosophical Association or the American Chemical Society. It holds
annual meetings, and chose the Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas, a
pleasant hotel, as the site for its 1992 conference.

        In practice, though, the missionary nature of Women's Studies
makes for some striking differences. Not all of the 500 participants
in this year's NWSA Conference were happy with the chosen milieu. One
woman from a well-known southern college complained to me about the
weddings being held there throughout the weekend. "Why have they put
us in a setting where that sort of thing is going on?"
Dissatisfaction was a conference motif. The Keynote Speaker, Annette
Kolodny, a feminist literary scholar and (until recently) Dean of the
Humanities faculty at the University of Arizona, opened the
proceedings with a brief history of the "narratives of pain" within
the NWSA. She reported that ten years ago the organization "almost
came apart over outcries by our lesbian sisters that we had failed
adequately to listen to their many voices." Five years ago sisters in
the Jewish Caucus had wept at their own "sense of invisibility." Three
years later the Disability Caucus threatened to quit, and the
following year the women of color walked out. A pernicious bigotry,
Kolodny confessed, persisted in the NWSA. "Our litanies of outrage ...
overcame our fragile consensus of shared commitment and the center
would no longer hold."

        At past conferences oppressed women accused other women of
oppressing them. Participants met in groups defined by their
grievances and healing needs: Jewish women, Jewish lesbians, Asian
American Women, African-American Women, Old Women, Disabled Women, Fat
women, Women Whose Sexuality is in Transition. None of the groups
proved stable: the fat group polarized into gay and straight factions,
and the Jewish women discovered they were deeply divided: some
accepted being Jewish, others were seeking to recover from it. This
year concern extended to "marginalized" allergy groups.  Participants
were sent advance notice not to bring perfumes, dry- cleaned clothing,
hair spray or other dangerous irritants to the conference out of
concern for allergic sisters. Hyper-concern is now the norm: At the
first National Lesbian convention in Atlanta flash cameras were
outlawed--they might bring on epileptic fits.

        Eleanor Smeal, the former president of NOW, was scheduled to
be the first speaker on the NWSA "Empowerment Panel," but her plane
had been held up in Memphis. To pass the time, we were introduced to
an array of panelists who were touted as being experienced in conflict
resolution. One woman was introduced as a member of the Mohawk nation
who "facilitates anti-bias training." Another, an erstwhile dancer,
was described as a Black lesbian activist who was "doing an amazing,
miraculous job on campuses building coalitions." A third, who had
training as a holistic health practitioner, headed workshops that
"creatively optimize human capacity."

        The moderator told us "These women have agreed to come to us
as a team and work together to help us figure out how we might begin
to deal much more effectively ... with issues of inclusion,
empowerment, diversity." To keep our spirits high, we were taught
words to a round which we dutifully sang:

        "We have come this far by strength, leaning on each other.
        Trusting in each other's words. We never failed each other yet.
        Singing Oh, Oh, Oh. Can't turn around. We have come this far
        by strength."

        After several minutes of singing, and still no Smeal, panelist
Angela (the former dancer) took the microphone to tell about "ouch
experiences." An "ouch" is when you experience racism, sexism,
classism, homophobia, ableism, ageism or lookism. One of Angela's
biggest ouches came after her lesbian support group splintered into
two factions, black and white. Tension then developed in her black
group between those whose lovers were black and those whose lovers
were white. "Those of us in the group who had white lovers were
immediately targeted .... It turned into a horrible mess .... I ended
up leaving that group for self protection."

        A weary Eleanor Smeal finally arrived and was pressed into
immediate service. She confided that she was feeling discouraged about
the feminist movement. "We need totally new concepts .... In many ways
it's not working .... It is so depressing. We are leaving ... the next
generation [in a] mess." Smeal's liveliest moment came when she
attacked "liberal males on the campus," saying, "they have kept us
apart. They have marginalized our programs. We need fighting madness."

        Despite the call to arms, Smeal's talk was a downer, and the
moderator acted quickly to raise our spirits: "What we want to do now
is to dwell for a minute on success .... Think about the fact that we
have been so successful in transforming the curriculum ...." It was
soon time for another song.

        "We are sisters in a circle. We are sisters in a struggle. Sisters
        one and all. We are colors of the rainbow, Sisters one and all."

        As it happened, I did have a real sister (in the unexciting
biological sense) with me at the conference. Louise and I were frankly
relieved to have group-sing interrupted by a coffee break. Half and
Half was available, but perhaps not for long. The eco-feminist caucus
has been pushing to eliminate all meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products
at NWSA events. As the break ended Phyllis, the panelist from the
Mohawk nation, holding two little puppets, a dog and a teddy bear,
came round to inform us, "Teddy and his friend say its time to go back
inside."  Louise, who is a psychologist, was beginning to find the
conference professionally intriguing.

        Phyllis' Native American credentials, it turned out, were not
all that solid. In addition to Mohawk, she was French and Irish with
traces of Algonquin. Having established her unique racial persona, she
said,

        "Let us take a moment to give ourselves a big hug. Let me
        remind us that the person we're hugging is the most important
        person we have in our life."

Phyllis continued:

        "Let's do it again! Each and every one of you is my relative ....
        We are interconnected. We are interdependent. And we have
        respect. Those are principles. So, what would I need from you
        in a loving relationship, the reminder that I have gotten away
        from my principles here; and to help me get back to my
        principles. Even if I have to say "ouch" and hug my puppets--or
        whatever I have to do."

        To conclude the Empowerment Panel session, a "feminist
facilitator" led us in a "participatory experience." We were told to
turn to our neighbor and tell her what we liked most about the NWSA.
Louise turned to me and asked, "Have we accidentally stumbled into a
convention of borderline personalities?"

        After that debilitating morning session Louise and I visited
the "Exhibition Hall." There, dozens of booths offered women's studies
books and paraphernalia. Witchcraft and goddess worship supplies in
aisle one. Adjoining aisles contained handmade jewelry, leather
crafts, ponchos and other peasant apparel (which, for Louise, solved
the mystery of where many of the participants did their shopping). One
booth offered videos on do-it-yourself menstrual extractions and home
abortions for those who want to avoid "patriarchal medicine."

        Lack of substance was compensated by action: the conference
was strong on workshops, and movies. My sister and I were especially
interested in two films: _Sex and the Sandinistas_ and _We're Talking
Vulva_. Unable to locate the screening rooms, we asked two shocked
Hyatt bellhops for help. They turned out to be fans of the
conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh: "Is this a conference of
'feministas'?"  they asked. They were perceptibly scared .

        The philosopher Paula Rothenberg (from William Paterson
College) spotted me and approached. She knows I am a skeptic. "What do
you think of the conference so far?" she asked. Two of her comrades
approached. I was cornered. "Few scholarly papers, sing-a-longs,
chants, teddy bear hugs. It's not your garden variety academic
conference." I replied.

        She took this badly and went on the offensive.  "I am very
uncomfortable having you here. We are in the middle of working through
our problems.  I saw you taking notes. I feel as if you have come into
the middle of my dysfunctional family, and you are seeing us at our
worst moment."

        But Professor Rothenberg's "dysfunctional family" has had many
bad moments. Ouchings and mass therapy are more the norm in academic
feminism than the exception, and often appear as desperate attempts to
"save the family." Last year, at a meeting of Women's Studies Program
Directors, everyone joined hands to form a "healing circle."  They
also assumed the posture of trees experiencing rootedness and
tranquillity. Consequently, victim testimonials and new age healing
rituals crowd out the reading of academic papers at NWSA conferences.

        I do feel a little sorry for Professor Rothenberg. She is a
veteran Marxist feminist. In the past year or so she has had to
contend with the rapid and unexpected dissolution of the Soviet Union,
the fall of the Sandinistas, the campaign against political
correctness.  Now she finds herself in a "dysfunctional family" whose
faddish "therapies" she must find fatuous.  Still, she has her
consolations. She is Director of something called the "New Jersey
Project: Integrating the Scholarship on Gender." With New Jersey tax
dollars and federal funds, she is, in the best tradition of Marxist
revolutionary activism, hard at work "transforming the curriculum"--to
purge it of all patriarchal, Eurocentric, racist, sexist and
homophobic biases.  Later that day she would be boasting to some
fellow work-shoppers how "deeply committed" the New Jersey Chancellor
of Higher Education, Edward D. Goldberg, is to her goals.

                        *     *     *

        Does it matter that a bunch of high-strung, anti-intellectual,
chronically offended, "dysfunctional family members" get together for
a conference and say and do a lot of odd things?  It does because on
more and more campuses these consciousness raisers are driving out the
scholars. Within the past fifteen years the academy has witnessed the
inception of more than 500 Women's Studies Programs and more than
30,000 courses, along with the formation of some fifty major feminist
institutes.  Most of the women attending the conference are in the
academy in one capacity or another: either teaching women's studies,
directing programs, or in the administration. Others head women's
centers.

        These women run the largest growth area in the academy. Though
their conferences may be untidy, they are politically astute on their
campuses.  They have strong influence in some key areas, most notably
in English Departments (especially freshman writing courses), French
Departments, History Departments, Law Schools, and Divinity Schools.
They are disproportionally represented in the Dean of Students'
office, in the dormitory administration, in the harassment office and
various counseling centers. They are quietly engaged in hundreds of
well-funded governmental and "philanthropical" projects to transform a
curriculum that they regard as unacceptably "androcentric."  Their
moral authority comes from a widespread belief that they represent
"women." In fact their version of feminism falls far short of being
representative.

        Most American women subscribe philosophically to an older
"First Wave" kind of feminism whose main goal is equity.  A First Wave
or "equity feminist" wants for women what she wants for everyone: fair
treatment, no discrimination.  The equity feminist crusade that was
initiated over a hundred and fifty years ago called for constitutional
changes to guarantee equal opportunity especially in politics and
education. The equity agenda may not yet be fully achieved, but by any
reasonable measure equity feminism is a great American success story.

        Women's Studies practitioners still ride the First Wave for
its popularity and its moral authority but most adhere to a more
radical "Second Wave" doctrine: that women, even modern American
women, are in thrall to "a system of male dominance" variously
referred to as "hetero-patriarchy," or the "sex/gender system."
According to one feminist theorist, it is "a system of male-dominance
made possible by men's control of women's productive and reproductive
labor." (Note the Marxist lingo.) Another describes it as "that
complex process whereby bisexual infants are transformed into male and
female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other
destined to obey."

        Every human achievement is said to bear its impress:
philosophy, science, music, language itself. One professor at the City
University of New York expresses the widely felt enthusiasm for the
new perspective when she says, "Now that the sex/gender system has
become visible to us, we see it everywhere." "Gender oppression" is
invading the political stage previously dominated by "economic
exploitation."

        Heady claims are made for the new way of looking at society
and its impact on scholarship.  According to the philosopher Elizabeth
Minnich "What we are doing, is comparable to Copernicus shattering our
geo-centricity, Darwin shattering our species-centricity.  We are
shattering andro-centricity, and the change is as fundamental, as
dangerous, as exciting." The sociologist Jessie Bernard compares the
explosion of research in women's scholarship to the storming of the
Bastille or "the shot heard round the world." "Academia will never be
the same again."  Gerda Lerner, Professor of History at Wisconsin,
cautions that attempts to describe what is now going on in women's
scholarship "would be like trying to describe the Renaissance--ten
years after it began."

        Of course, like so many other worthy intellectual endeavors,
some feminist scholarship is innovative, sound and necessary. Literary
scholars have discovered and rescued many gifted women writers from
undeserved oblivion. Women historians and social scientists have found
that much previous research did not apply to women. The best research
on women does not use the radical feminist prism, but unfortunately a
good deal of what is assigned in women's studies classes is not
disciplined scholarship but "gynocentric" feminist ideology, a
damaging parody of otherwise very legitimate concerns.  The amenable
student learns to unmask the subtle, inimical workings of patriarchy.
Committed instructors declare their classrooms "liberated zones" where
"silenced women" will be free for the first time to speak out in a
safe gynocentric ambience.

        This is a pedagogy which aims above all to cleanse the academy
of masculinism.  In 1985, The American Association of Colleges issued
a seemingly innocuous report on the importance of the college major.
It spoke of

        "...the joy of mastery, the thrill of moving forward in a formal
        body of knowledge and gaining some effective control over it,
        integrating it, perhaps even making some small contribution to
        it."

        The NWSA 1991 Report to the Professions saw in this passage a
blatant example of "phallocentric" discourse:

        "A feminist analysis of this rhetoric reveals ... an analogy
        between knowledge and sexual subjugation ... an idea of
        learning as mastery or control. Clearly embedded ... are
        unconscious androcentric assumptions of dominance and
        subordination between the knower and the known, assumptions
        that all too readily bring to mind the traditional relationship of
        men to women; of the colonizers to the colonized; indeed, of
        the master to the slave. Such phallocentric metaphors ... are
        not the accidental usage of one report, but replicate the
        dominant discourses of Western empiricism which women's
        studies ... critiques."

        Incidentally, this NWSA report, which acknowledges generous
support from The Ford Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education,
was authored by four Women's Studies luminaries, Jonnella Butler
(University of Washington), Margaret Homans (Yale University), Sandra
Coyner (Kansas State University), Marlene Longnecker (Ohio State
University), and the former NWSA Executive Director, Caryn McTighe
Musil.

        Faced with this kind of criticism, it is appropriate to ask
what sort of approach to learning _would_ satisfy the preternaturally
alert authors of the NWSA report?  We get an idea by looking at a
"model" introductory women's studies course developed by twelve
Rutgers University professors. One of the stated goals of the course
is to "challenge and change the social institutions and practices that
create and perpetuate systems of oppression." According to the
prescription, forty percent of the student's grade is to come from: 1)
performing some "outrageous" and "liberating" act outside of class and
then sharing feelings and reactions with the class; 2) keeping a
journal of "narratives of personal experience, expressions of emotion,
dream accounts, poetry, doodles, etc."; and 3) forming small in-class
consciousness raising groups.

        The exhilaration of feeling themselves at the cutting edge of
a new consciousness infuses feminist pedagogues with a doctrinal
fervor unique in the academy.  "The feminist classroom," say four
professors from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Margo
Culley, Arlyn Diamond, Catherine Portuges and Dean Sara Lennox,

        "is the place to use what we know as women to appropriate
        and transform, totally, a domain which has been men's .... Let
        us welcome the intrusion/infusion of emotionality--love, rage,
        anxiety, eroticism--into intellect as a step toward healing the
        fragmentation capitalism [_sic_] and patriarchy have demanded
        from us."

        Exultation over the new "female ways of knowing" is
accompanied by bitterness over sexually aggressive "male ways of
knowing" that have intimidated so many women in the past. Catharine
MacKinnon, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, gives
extreme expression to feminist anger for having so long been taken in
by patriarchal constructions of knowledge: "In the Bible to know a
woman is to have sex with her. You acquire carnal knowledge....
Feminists are beginning to understand that to know has meant to fuck."
In this manner does victimology add spice to the invigorating idea of
a "feminist epistemology."

        The nonconformist, an often incoherent character of feminist
pedagogy, has not impeded its burgeoning growth. Is _anyone_
resisting? Most faculty have been skeptical, but at the same time,
passive and permissive. The administration has been cooperative.  The
one academic estate that resists are the students; but ordinary,
non-doctrinaire students have little political standing on the
American campus.

        An undergraduate may take Freshman Composition, Baroque Art,
or Egyptology and discover on the first day of class that it will be
taught from a "gynocentric" perspective. Students tend to like
opinionated teachers who breathe commitment, but even so most are not
buying the story of a gender war. Women' s studies professors often
describe their classrooms as being in "crisis" because of "rebellious
students;" a situation that has been aggravated because, on so many
campuses, women's studies courses are now mandatory. Instructors tell
of the inevitable "mid-semester blow-up" in which students protest
angrily about the one-sidedness of courses. Feminist pedagogues call
it the "blame the messenger" reaction, or the "denial" stage.
Ordinarily, instructors facing persistent student protests would be
moved to reconsider their own methods and arguments. But in the
feminist classroom opposition, counter argument or complaints about
methods serve primarily to convince the instructor that she is
encountering backlash, and thus should become more aggressively
persistent.

        At the Austin conference the "White Male Student Hostility"
workshop was packed. It was led by two female assistant professors
from The State University of New York at Plattsburgh. What to do about
young men who refuse to use gender neutral pronouns? Most agreed they
should be told they would be graded down. One of the Plattsburghers
told us about a male student who had "baited" her when she defended a
fifteen year old's right to have an abortion without parental consent.
The student asked: What about a 15 year old that wanted to marry a 30
year-old? She referred to this as a "trap." (In philosophy, it is
known as a counter example.) Did we have any advice to offer?

        For this particular young man the agreed strategy was to say
to him, "I am trying to figure out why you are asking this kind of
question."  Someone noted that female students in the class can
usually be relied upon to keep male students in check. One woman got a
big laugh when she told of a feminist student who silenced an
"obnoxious male" by screaming: "Shut up you fucker." The group was
more perplexed about what to do with recalcitrant females. Now that
women's studies courses are required courses on more and more
campuses, they expect more troublesome resistance. One workshopper
triumphantly concluded, "If the students were comfortable, we would
not be doing our job."

        To succeed as they have, feminist academics needed strong
support from friendly administrators. They got this in two ways:
First, by entering themselves into administrative positions in
disproportionate numbers. Second, by doing all they could to get
cooperative people into positions of power. Increasingly, aspiring
presidents, deans, professors and program directors in all academic
fields have to pledge allegiance to feminist educational agendas if
they want to get hired.  The American Association of Colleges
disseminates a widely used questionnaire entitled "It's All In What
You Ask: Questions for Search Committees to Use." Among the questions
asked:

        "How have you demonstrated your commitment to women's
        issues in your current position? (lead question)
        What is your relation to the women's center?
        How do you deal with backlash and denial?"

        This kind of screening was used at the University of Maryland
in their recent search for a president. According to an enthusiastic
report by a Ms. Betsy Schmitz, who now assists the new president, all
candidates for the position were prepared for the questions and many,
including, President Curwin, had the right answers. The screening
procedure proved effective. President Curwin has come through with
$500,000 of University funds for a politically correct curriculum
transformation project. In allocating that sum, the President
obligingly bypassed the faculty senate. Now, Ms Schmitz, a specialist
in curriculum transformation projects, reports that many Maryland
faculty are outraged and that the president is taking the heat for "a
lot of backlash."

        The proposition that "the knowledge base" must be radically
"transformed" on feminist lines is now asserted by prestigious
mainstream educational organizations such as the American Association
of University Women and the American Council on Education. According
to the ACE, the feminist challenges to "conventional ways of knowing
and thinking" sets a new agenda: "What has yet to happen on all of our
campuses is the transformation of knowledge, and therefore of the
curriculum... ."

        At the root of all transformation projects is the thesis that
not just people but also ideas and disciplines are gendered. But, as
the academic promoters of the politics of sexual identity are
beginning to learn, gender is not sacrosanct as a principle of social
division. Why should identity politics be stabilized at two? A woman
can be simultaneously a victim, and, depending on her race and
physical status also a white, able-bodied oppressor of Latinas, black
males, and the disabled. The middle class educated women who
discovered the sex-gender system are now being forced to regard
themselves as oppressors in a complex ecology of domination and
subjugation. But perhaps "ecology" is too orderly a concept for a
manipulative victimology.

        One would normally expect that more objective and less
partisan academics would quickly demolish the outsize claims being
made for feminist theory and its transformation projects. That they
hold back is a tribute to the reputation feminists have for their
ruthless _ad feminam_ ways of dealing with unfriendly comment. Adverse
criticism is never examined with any seriousness. Instead the critic
is denounced as reactionary or worse. Few disinterested scholars have
been willing to take on the unrewarding job of critically examining
feminist arguments. When the respected Shakespeare scholar Richard
Levin took issue with some of the more fanciful feminist
interpretations of Shakespeare's tragedies, he was denounced and
ridiculed in the _Publications of the Modern Language Association_.
One particularly nasty letter boasted 24 signatories: signing in
groups is a standard feature of feminist critical response.

                *     *     *

        Academic feminists are easily as accomplished at squelching
and "silencing" uncooperative women as others out there in the
"hetero- patriarchy."  After somehow learning that I had been
commissioned to write an article on feminism by a popular monthly, a
radical feminist from the University of Illinois wrote the editors
urging them to suppress its publication. Later, in _The Chronicle of
Higher Education_, she justified her action comparing herself to
someone combatting holocaust revisionism. "I wouldn't want a nut case
who thinks there wasn't a holocaust to write about the holocaust."

        Group censure of Camille Paglia is now routine and the
"_reductio ad Hitlerum_" has also been used against her: in one
attempt to get it removed from a reading list, Paglia's scintillating
and erudite _Sexual Personae_ was compared to _Mein Kampf_. To invite
Paglia to your campus is to invite a lot of in-house trouble.  When
someone in the Brown University English Department asked Paglia to
give a talk, outraged faculty feminists wrote a memorandum asking for
an explanation and requesting that the English Department meet to
discuss its procedures for inviting speakers to the campus. That
Paglia would be blackballed by her detractors had been predicted by
Yale professor Harold Bloom:

        "[T]hey are totalitarians, they are sanctimonious, they are self-
        righteous.  They are, in fact, truly illiterate people. They are
        _careerists_."

        Bloom noted that "someone as brilliant, as learned, as
talented, as ferociously burning an intellect as Paglia" belongs in
the Ivy League or at someplace like Berkeley or Chicago. But the
"bureaucrats of resentment who are appointed in the networks because
they are politically correct" will continue to do their utmost to make
sure that this does not happen. "They will blackball her everywhere."

        Few academics are prepared to trigger the ire of zealous
colleagues in constant agitated communication.  There is, therefore,
an appalling dearth of critical scrutiny of feminist theory and little
resistance to the spread of its anti-intellectual influence.  But the
faculty's incapacity to impede the radical feminist colonization of
the liberal academy cannot be ascribed to mere timidity. The deeper
reason is that a confused academic community has persistently failed
to distinguish between the traditional "First Wave" equity feminism,
which is responsible for the main achievements of feminism in this
century, and the Second Wave gynocentric feminism which, since the
early Seventies, has taken center stage in the universities.

        A befuddled liberalism has provided fertile soil for the
growth of an intolerant, powerful gynocentric academic feminism. Even
now the studied posture of affront and victimization keeps a liberal
academy permanently off balance, giving a scholastically weak group of
academics power far beyond their numbers and abilities. As a result,
the highly successful feminist effort to transform the American
academy is going virtually unchallenged.

        Gender feminists sometimes boast among themselves about the
way they use naive liberal sentiment to gain their ends.  Paula
Goldsmid, a former Dean at Oberlin College, muses "You might wonder
... how we managed to generate a Women's Studies program that has a
catalog supplement listing more than twenty courses, that offers an
Individual Major in Women's Studies, that has been able to involve
several committees in really working to transform the academy in
various ways."  She then notes with cozy candor, "There is great
reluctance to say or do anything publicly that goes against the
liberal and 'progressive' Oberlin stance. Oberlin's liberal values can
be turned to our advantage. [Her emphasis.]

        Paula Rothenberg seconds that explanation.  How did she and
her sister feminists get William Paterson College (New Jersey) to
require all students to take women's studies?

        "Our surprising success was due ... to the presence on the
        curriculum committee of ... some old style liberals who found it
        difficult to disagree with the idea of such a requirement, at least
        in public."

        Two years ago I wrote to the British novelist and philosopher,
Iris Murdoch, asking for her views on some recent trends in Women's
Studies. In her judgment:

        "Men 'created culture' because they were free to do so, and
        women were treated as inferior and made to believe they were.
        Now free women must join in the human world of work and
        creation on an equal footing and be everywhere in art, science,
        business, politics etc. ... However, to lay claim, in this battle, to
        _female_ ethics, _female_ criticism, _female_ knowledge ... is
        to set up a new female ghetto. (Chauvinist males should be
        delighted by the move...) 'Women's Studies' can mean that
        women are led to read mediocre or peripheral books by women
        rather than the great books of humanity in general....  It is a
        dead end, in danger of simply separating women from the
        mainstream thinking of the human race. Such cults can also
        _waste the time_ of young people who may be reading all the
        latest books on feminism instead of studying the difficult and
        important things that belong to the culture of humanity." [Her
        emphases.]

        At the Austin conference, however, the universal ideal of a
culture of humanity was not the theme. On the contrary, the
self-imposed segregation of women was everywhere in evidence.

        The best feminist scholars proceeded to do their work within
their established disciplines and meet the expected traditional
standards of those disciplines. But they come under fire from the
gynocentrics.  Eminent researchers like the classicist Mary Lefkowitz
of Wellesley, the literary critic, Cynthia Griffin Wolff of M.I.T.,
the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory, the sociologist Rita
Simon of American University, or Jean Bethke Elshtain of Vanderbilt
write and teach about women, but they are reproved for failing to
stress male hegemony and women's subjugation. While these
outstandingly competent women were gaining "mastery and control" over
their fields of study, the gynocentric feminists who find fault with
them were busy networking, workshopping, forming councils and
committees and joining governmental commissions. Many are now deans;
some are university presidents. Many were at the Austin conference.

        As the conference wore on, the summer solstice was acclaimed
while Father's Day came and went without comment. Attendance at the
scheduled events languished, increasingly giving way to informal
groups griping about the insensitivities of the NWSA. Many of the
scheduled events and workshops were being video-taped and the tapes
were available to us for a small price.  The tapes convey the spirit
of a movement that inspires its adherents to hunt ceaselessly for real
or imaginary bias and insensitivity in both men and women, and to find
it in the most unexpected ways. The zealous extirpation of
phallocentrism and sexist bias is a growing preoccupation of colleges
large and small.

        Faculty members at Middle Tennessee State University are now
asked by the "Campus Committee for Curricular Transformation" to
analyze all of their assigned readings, their lectures, and their
audio- visual material for gender bias. One question asks instructors
to tally the number of male and female pronouns in their assigned
readings.  The document is typical for the bland confidence of its
authors that the faculty will not find it offensive.

        At many colleges and universities students now evaluate their
professors on their sensitivity to gender issues. At American
University in Washington D.C. students are asked whether "The course
examined the contributions of both women and men". Salaries are
directly linked to how well professors fare on these forms. One
political science professor told me he often used the term
"congressman," and got penalized on that question by two angry women
students.

        Virginia Polytechnic issued to its faculty a sixty page guide
called _Removing Bias: Guidelines for Student-Faculty Communication_
that presents "tactics for attitudinal change." (It was
taxpayer-funded by the U.S. Department of Education.)  Among much else
of an edifying nature, the guide offers suggestions on how to avoid
offensive humor.  Professors are advised to read _Free to Be You and
Me_ by Marlo Thomas for help on how to be funny while "eliminating
gender stereotyping."

        The conference received a warm letter from Governor Ann
Richards welcoming us to the Great State of Texas.  The governor
called the assembled feminists "the vanguard of the latest incarnation
of the women's movement" praising their leadership as essential. The
NWSA audience broke out into thunderous applause as the letter was
read aloud. It is possible, however, that Governor Richards was
unaware of the witchcraft booths, the menstrual extraction videos, the
teddy bear puppets, the paranoid exposes of "phallocentric
discourse"--let alone the bullying of students and the implacable
hostility to all exact thinking as "male."

        Less innocently benighted are such government agencies or
foundations as the U.S. Department of Education, The Ford Foundation
and The Mellon Foundation--that keep groups like the NWSA "empowered."
Officers of The Ford Foundation estimate that it alone has funded
women's studies projects to the tune of some twenty-four million
dollars.  Those who irresponsibly abet the spirit of Austin have much
to answer for. Perhaps, for penance, they should be made to view all
the tapes of the conference and then asked to hug themselves till they
"ouch."

__________________________________________
Christina Hoff Sommers is a Professor of Philosophy at Clark
University. She is writing a book on the future of feminism for Simon
and Schuster.

--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.