Consciousness-raising and progress

Now that the "read more?" button question has been addressed, and I am pinned on the couch with a warm and sleepy orange cat, I suppose I can post the thoughts I wrote up this morning:

I have been noticing an interesting pattern in the way my women's history class is responding to the readings this semester.* They are required to post a response to the reading on WebCT prior to coming to class to discuss the material, and these responses tend to be celebrations of the great things that early modern women were able to achieve despite the oppressions of their society, and lamentations over those oppressions. For instance, they will say things like, "I think it was really great that women were able to use their religion to try to move ahead in society," or "I was really disheartened by all the obstacles women faced in trying to study religion in more depth." The posts tend to include a lot about their own reactions and how the readings made them feel; that something was good for women, and something else was bad.

(Before I go further, I should point out that they do also address more substantive issues in their readings, especially as we get further into a unit. So while I get somewhat frustrated with the black/white way in which they respond, I'm not writing about this to complain; in general, I find these postings quite useful, because sometimes they all react to one element of the reading that hadn't seemed very notable to me, so the responses let me know that addressing that element in particular will be more fruitful than I had realized.)

What's really striking to me, though, is how these posted responses are completely, utterly different from the posted responses in my upper-level medieval seminar (which has a similar requirement). In the latter, no one tells me how much they "liked" or "didn't like" a reading or how it made them feel, what encouraged them and what saddened them. They're extremely business-like, and generally, extremely good at analyzing the assigned texts.

There are a couple of factors at work here that have nothing to do with subject matter: the upper-level seminar is populated primarily by junior and senior history majors; the women's history students are primarily first- or second-years (I think) and most aren't (I think) history majors. The upper-level seminar also got a slightly more focused rubric than the women's history class; the seminar posts have to identify at least three historically significant points about the reading. The women's history posts, in contrast, can pretty much be wide open (though I did give them a list of suggestions about what they might want to focus on when they post).

But I can't escape the conclusion that women's history - even if it's about long-dead people in a far-away place - inspires a completely different reaction than upper-level (non-women's) medieval. The latter is just not personal. Though I always get the occasional student who's completely intrigued by the Magna Carta (geekymom, are you reading this?), the provisions of the Magna Carta hold no immediate personal implications for them. Students aren't going to "like" or "dislike" the Magna Carta, or be encouraged or inspired or disheartened or angered by it. 

It's just interesting to me that in some ways, the responses to my women's history assighments have become more a space for a kind of consciousness-raising than analysis of the texts. On the one hand, I kind of hate consciousness-raising; I want to teach women's history as a serious scholarly subject, something that's about using your reason and logic and intellect, rather than about trying to elicit a particular emotional reaction. I don't WANT students to analyze history through their emotions. On the other hand, though, we're talking about 18-21 year-old women who are (mostly, but not all) middle to upper-middle class, mostly from this general region, and while some are quite traveled and sophisticated, they're pretty darn young. Most of them don't know anything about what many women's lives are like TODAY, let alone what they were like in the past. And European society in the medieval and early modern past was an extremely hierarchical place where no one thought twice about using the story of Adam and Eve to justify women's subordination to men in that hierarchy. Writers at the time were perfectly happy to be utterly explicit about women's so-called inferiority. Some emotional reactions to these topics are to be expected; it's probably important to provide a space for them to have those emotional reactions, rather than shut them away; and if those emotions do become an entree into thinking more deeply about what shapes women's experiences and how, then they're useful.

Perhaps my greatest concern, though, is that these responses are cementing in my students their sense that "I'm so glad I live in the modern world where we've solved all these problems." It is a class all of women, who have self-selected to take this class, so they probably don't consciously think that everything has been solved and women now have it completely hunky-dory. But unconsciously, I think that message surrounds them, and it's hard for them to resist it. And reading about how a Calvinist consistory sought to excommunicate a woman and her whole household because the woman wore her hair in curls certainly, on the face of it, encourages them to think, "Wow, we have it SO much better now!" To which I want to say: Okay, in most (not all!) churches today, you are not going to be excommunicated for how you wear your hair. Does this mean that hairstyles don't mean anything today? Do you think you're really free to wear your hair however you like without consequences? What do you think would happen if you got a buzzcut, for instance? How do you think people would react? Do you think that on a job interview, employers would react to you differently if you had hair below your butt that hadn't been cut in 10 years than if you had a nice little neat shining bob? Why was it courageous for Melissa Etheridge to get up at the Grammys and perform on stage without hair?  I mean, yes, if you pressed me, I would say that women have greater freedom of expression (in terms of hair, at least!) now than in the 16th century and I'd much rather live now than then. But I want my students to have to think about it and decide that for themselves, consciously, rather than making assumptions. More importantly, I want them to think about how things may be different today, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're ALWAYS, automatically, better. We wrestle with many of the same issues (for instance, women and religion: heard about the debate about women in the priesthood?) and just do so under different circumstances.

Which is, I guess, where my role in the classroom comes in.

*It's funny, because I had been thinking that this revealed a difference between students at Rural Utopia, which had a very strong activist culture, and students here, where student culture is much more conservative. But then I remembered that when I taught this class at Rural U I assigned weekly response papers that looked very much the same as the WebCT responses I'm getting now. Probably these responses are only surprising because they seem a contrast to the medieval women's history class I taught last semester, simply because I didn't ask students to write responses like this, so I didn't see the evidence written down in black and white.

Comments

[Anastasia]

I think there is a great temptation to conclude that things are entirely hunky dory now. It is very easy to dismiss women who raise the question of gender now. Just being hysterical, right?

Anyway, I agree that things are probably generally better now than in the 16th cent. That said, it doesn't sit right with me to conclude that everything is categorically better now. some things still need fixing. And I don't believe in the idea of progress enough to conclude that everything was terrible in the past.

[Rana]

What Anastasia said. In class, it might be useful to point out that "better" is not the same as "best." It might also be fun someday to have a discussion in which they role-play women of the past, and ask them to pass judgement on the present -- both good and bad. Yeah, you run into the danger of ahistoricism, but at least it would force them out of their view of themselves as the acme of civilization. (Or you could play with that view, and ask them what they think women 100 years from now might have to say about their lives -- but only if you're comfortable leaving history behind and are willing to be quite firm about keeping random opining in check.)

Another thought I had, reading this, was that it might be useful to force students to separate out emotional reactions vs. analysis in their responses. I used to do this for some paper topics on books I knew students might not like. Basically, I told them, for the bulk of the paper, you have to lay out your case in a clear, formal manner, and that's what I'm grading you on. But if you also want to share your _personal_ reactions to the text, you can add a paragraph at the end, and I'll read it, but it won't count toward the grade.

This seemed to work, perhaps because it gave them a space to vent (or enthuse) and because it made it clear that I was looking for something other than "I liked it! It was cool!" in the "official" response.

Good luck, in any case!

[bitchphd]

The flip side of the "all those problems are solved today!" thing is the "women in the past were all oppressed!" thing, which drives me insane. Um, no. Different historical contexts mean that different people understand their roles in different ways. In some contexts, convents were freeing, allowing women to live a life of the mind. In some contexts, women wrote frankly and openly about sex and desire. In some contexts, women found their domestic roles empowering and culturally significant. In some contexts, social class mattered as much or more than gender in determining one's access to power (still true today, of course). My pet peeve is the way that, when you introduce a woman into the curriculum, the student's immediate response is to assess the level of her victimization rather than, say, actually reading what the woman wrote or looking at what she accomplished. I like to play the game of asking them to think about whether doing that isn't, itself, kind of a form of erasure...

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

What the Bitch said!! I just went through the same thing in class today - we were discussing a Renaissance source in which the author delineates clear spheres of influence for men and women, as in "Men do X and women do Y," with no particular value judgments attached as it was written. The students jumped all over it and read that as meaning "Men are clearly superior in every way." They can't help reading difference as oppression. I usually counter that with my favorite Spanish proverb, that "Men make the laws; women make the customs." Sure, one leaves a bigger paper trail, but does that mean the other is any less important?

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

Not to monopolize the comments, but I love this topic... a few semesters ago I used an example of travelers' descriptions of Renaissance women in Venice. The women were described as wearing long heavy gowns, and veil-like hoods, and wearing ridiculously high teetery shoes. This was in 2002, so Afghanistan was the hot topic, and the universal student reaction was "They're veiled! They're hobbled! They're terribly oppressed!" It took me a while to tease out the faint possibility that since Venice was famous for its silks, these women could be displaying their wealth and status by draping themselves in as much rich material as possible... and the high shoes were a practical escape from the mucky streets of the city.

[Laura (geekymom)]

I'm reading, I'm reading. It's funny because when I started delving into this in a big way in graduate school, I found myself saying over and over again, "Wow, things haven't changed much in 400 years." I got some looks in class for that. One thing I did in a composition class that was loads of fun was to have the students take the 16th and 17th century poems and sonnets and write a paper in which they compared them to a contemporary piece of art--defining are very broadly. The results of that paper produced the idea that people 400 years ago were writing about the same kinds of things that people today were and in many cases, treating their subjects (women) in similar ways. For example, one person used a song by a "boy band" and compared it to "To his coy mistress." In class, I took a Madonna song (Hanky Panky) and compared it to a Mary Wroth poem and spent some time discussing sado-masochism and whether or not that was empowering. Lots of interesting discussion there! These were freshman at a southern state school. I was surprised how well it went over. I had a lot of fun reading the papers too. I wonder if it's possible to have them look at the language of some of the things you're reading and compare it to something contemporary. Where is the rhetoric similar? Where is it different? Why is it different? I also like your suggestions about customs of personal appearance and how we may be free to dress and decorate ourselves in any way we wish, but we are still constrained by social norms. Very interesting post and comments. Now I'm going to have to re-read the Magna Carta. :)

[Celandine]

Ack! Fascinating topic but I must go work on a lecture, so no time to respond properly.

But just to say - I have students post weekly on Blackboard in both my survey and upper div classes, and there's a fair amount of "wow, things are so much better now" - although sometimes there's also "wow, I didn't realize that ancient Egyptian women had it so (relatively) good." But there is a general tendence to assess evidence in terms of their own reaction to it, rather than in context; this is true of both classes, not just the survey.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Great comments! Thanks!

I think that in the end, I'm okay with the students using the WebCT postings to say, "This is cool! This is not cool!", since they're not graded per se (they just get credit for doing them, as a way to make sure they've done the reading and thought about SOMETHING to do with it). I haven't run into the problem with any of them pulling this kind of response in the formal papers. And in class discussion we don't fall into the vent/enthusing, either; that just gives us perhaps a place to start. I try to confound their notions of progress whenever I can; we just finished reading a 17th-c. Frenchwoman who was much more conservative/reactionary than the Renaissance author we'd read before her, and I did get a few responses along the lines of, "You'd think Frenchwoman was writing before Renaissance author rather than after!" So we've been tackling that notion of "progress" in class discussion - that it's not some kind of inherent linear process, but that individual's writings come out of the context in which they lived, and why a 17th-c Frenchwoman would view the world differently than a 15th-c Italian woman.

P/H, the difference as oppression thing is huge, and we talk about that a lot - because difference doesn't have to mean oppression, but sometimes it does, and how do you deal with that? I mean, even today it seems that there's a debate about whether equality means that women/men should all do the same things in society or whether it's possible to have different roles without assigning value judgments to them. (Of course I also react slightly differently to your examples - because women making customs is definitely important, but laws have the stamp of authority - is exercising power the same as exercising authority? Why do women get the short of end of the authority stick in that context? And I've read the Venetian women (well, not always, but often) as displaying their *husbands'* wealth and status, not necessarily their own. Not that they're not still good examples for making the students think about this! I think I'm just a bit more dour than you about this stuff. Well, and in general! ;-D)

The funny thing too is that the students focus on women's victimization by celebrating whatever woman we do happen to be reading - so they don't say explicitly, "Women were victims in the 17th c!", but rather, "Woman X was so brave to write advocating women's education!" (They're not quite that gushy, actually, but that's the general drift.) Which is still about the victimization, of course, by celebrating the "exceptional." (At which point I want to say, And you know this woman is exceptional how... you've read how much on this topic? But I'm nice, so I don't put it that way. ;-D)

Anyway, I guess at heart it boils down to contextualizing; we're going to be dealing with the convent issue in the next few classes - I teach primarily Protestant kids who tend to see convents as BAD and OPPRESSIVE, and they've already read some stuff about how the Protestant Reformation encouraged women's education (to some extent...so they could be better Protestants, of course!). They've already expressed some confusion about the fact that shutting down the convents REMOVED educational opportunities for women - we're going to be reading some German women who passionately protested removal from their convents - so I hope to complicate their whole picture of all this and get them to see how women at the time judged their own circumstances.

It is just funny because I don't teach anything else where they have quite such strongly ingrained narratives in their heads (they have a whole lot of preconceptions, of course, but they're not usually so personally attached to them). I don't have a problem with that - not much I can do about it! - and it's what I always encounter with these subjects, it's just that the contrast with my other class topics makes me laugh.

But I take heart, because all my medieval women's history students last semester said at the end of the course that they had learned that medieval women's lives were much more complicated than they had ever imagined. ;-)

[marisa]

I'm teaching a "history of western feminisms" class this semester (senior-level), with a similar "reading journal"-type assignment. I've been both surprised and gratified by the way students are able to grapple with the history. Though this is an upper-division seminar, it's a class for women's studies majors, and only two of my students have taken college-level history classes before. My biggest problem has been nearly the opposite of what you've encountered - that is, students are hyper-critical of 19th C. feminists for not seeking active alliances with working-class women or former slaves, for instance. Which is about what I expect from my women's studies students, but it's a very nice change from the type of response you're getting (a response I had the last time I taught, in a "History of Women in the US" survey.

[Manorama]

Yes, I can identify with this. I usually bear down pretty hard in the first unit on not comparing Indian women's live in late 19th century India to one's own "freedoms" now in the U.S. (in a very privileged position in the U.S.!); I have to stress, many times, how important context is in literary analysis. It is pretty frustrating sometimes because I do spend considerable time on Indian women during this period who were major reformers, and I still get generalizations about Indian women all being victims. (One of the short stories I teach is even by a woman reformer, and I also assign a critical essay about her life and activism--you'd think this would break the victim binary!) It has gotten better as I've gotten more experience teaching these texts, although I don't think this response from students will ever just disappear (unless, as you say, they are upper-level with more experience with approaching these texts).

[b.]

Dammit.

I was all set with the oh, I don't REALLY want to be a professor of literature thing, but there's something about this post and the comments that makes me reconsider. Again.

[What Now?]

Such an interesting conversation! As a lit rather than history person, here's my take on the whole emotional vs. analytical response. I actually spend time in class trying to get them to have an emotional response to texts, because I think that such a response can be a great place from which to start analysis. E.g., if students say, "I hate Character X," then we can talk about how Character X is described in the novel, what kind of dialogue X has, how are X's relationships with other characters depicted, etc., and how the author has deliberately made these choices to evoke a certain response from readers for such-and-such reason.

I just get really frustrated at students who don't seem to enjoy reading--especially weird in English majors! And I think if I can push them into having an emotional response, they're more likely to be life-long readers. Of course, there are also students who have trouble doing anything BUT emotional response, and that's a problem of a different kind.

[Anastasia]

right on with the convents. the option of celibacy for women in early christian communities was freeing in many ways, not least from the responsibilities (and potential DEATH) associated with marriage and motherhood.

I also like what rana said about making them reconsider their own position as the acme of civilization. Very good.

[Leesa]

Sadly enough, I think those reactions may not be limited to first and second year undergrads. Perhaps it's more a function of personality type, or analytical ability?

There is a woman in a graduate seminar that I am taking who has similar opinions. She kept insisting that we "aren't in the 70s anymore, ladies! I mean, we've been there, done that! We went through the feminist/sexual revolution, it's done." She became a little sheepish when she was asked if she thought racism no longer exists because we "went through" the civil rights movement.

I am the TA for a class on women and politics, and I relish the classes when those who think that sexism has been eradicated try to prove their point in class debate. I lecture about gender roles and perceptions in society. This inevitably prompts statements about how women can do the same things men, and that sexism is just an excuse because women want to spend more time on their families. This always leads into comments akin to, "Well, women *have* the opportunity. If they want to sacrifice their family to get ahead in their career, that is their choice." At this point, I ask why they don't think that men are sacrificing their families when they work 70 and 80 hour weeks. Silence. I tell them that this is a perfect example of gender roles.

I also like to relay a story about how I was once at a baby shower for a friend when I overheard an amusing conversation. One of the other guests, a woman about my age, was talking to a woman about my mother's age. The older woman asked the younger, "So, where is your baby?" The younger woman replied, "Oh, she's at home with her Dad." The older woman said, "That's so nice, Daddy's babysitting," to which the younger woman replied, "No, actually, he's *parenting.*" Touche.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Leesa - thanks for the comment! And the stories - I love the "parenting" punch-line. It is amazing how equality often gets read as "women can stress themselves out in all sorts of ways if they want to but men aren't any different."

[Ancarett]

I miss teaching the Magna Carta because I get so passionate about the clauses -- I love to tear down the presumption that this is the start of some universal democratic tradition and, instead, spend a lot of time getting the class to comb through the clauses and see how special interests are entrenched (the debt forgiveness clause, alone, provides fodder for an stretch of fiery debate about the roles of money and self-interested elites). By pitching MC as an example of how special interest groups (the barons et al.) managed to ram through their special interest demands, you can get students considering how overtly political was the medieval past (beyond their common presumptions of the singular power of the monarchy and, perhaps. the church as monolithic institution).

It's a matter of finding the angle which brings the past alive. For many female students, a "women's history" course seems a natural, easy "in" to the past, not even dealing with those who are enrolling for a feminist perspective or with interests piqued from exposure to Women's Studies.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Ancarett, I know what you mean, but it's funny about the MC; the textbook I use, especially, is so good about saying, this is NOT the foundation of democracy (as is the intro to the MC in the version I use), that none of my students seem to have that impression! They're all like, "Oh, yeah, it's all in the barons' interests." Umm...great. Moving on... ;-) (Though we don't actually stop there, of course!)

[Ancarett]

Well, that's good for the text but annoying for the teaching, isn't it? It's also interesting to see how some discussion points boom and bust -- my ancient history students are excited about anything that can be presented through a media or educational history filter as opposed to gender issues. I suspect that's just burnout because a number of them took multiple women's studies or gender history courses last term and many of the others are taking a concurrent course with a strong gender history component. . . .

[Another Damned Medievalist]

NK, I frequently run into similarly odd approaches and conceptions of religion when I teach the Ref. I go through lots of "no, really no such thing as 'Christians and Catholics' in 1400" and just read a paper on 'Man for all Seasons' where the daughter of missionaries student wrote all about standing up for what one believes in without mentioning that More's objections were based on the fact that, well, Henry was kinda sorta going against the teachings of the Church. Part of it was bad writing, but part is that I was unable to get trough to her that, to a historian, no religion gets preferential tratment as the right one.

I don't teach women's history -- no background -- but regularly deal with power, prestige, race, class, and gender. One of the source essays my students can do for the survey midterm is comparing what Laura Cereta's defense of education, Leon Battista Alberti's 'On the Family,' and the Strozzi marriage negotiations tell us (and don't tell us) about gender relations and roles in Renaissance Italy. The poor essays are "women were oppressed, but some women, like Laura Cereta, fought the Man." The essays that follow the instructions almost always reflect the more nuanced views that take into account wealthy widowhood, age difference in marriage, the fact that a potential mother-in-law seemed to be looking for the same kinds of skills that a middle-aged man did in a spouse ... and that we're really only talking about a small group of people here, so that maybe it's not representative. But we have to do it with every time period and every culture, it seems.