Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

knowledge of sexual differences and the relationship between men and women.
Such knowledge is not absolute but relative and it is created within various
epistemological frameworks, which vary according to time and place. It refers
to ideas, institutions, structures, everyday practices, rituals and traditions,
which together create social relationships. Michelle Perrot 2 connects this with
identity practices, which mould the lives of people at the present time. Due
to a lack of their own history and their omission from the past, women must
identify themselves with prescriptions regarding their identity rather than with
who they really are. In this sense, history is identity, as it offers much data and
evidence concerning people’s real lives, capabilities, abilities and powers. To
deny the significance of women’s public actions is to deny their image reflected
in their action. The consequences of this are not just that women have to look
repeatedly for their own social position; they go much deeper. They imply the
establishment of a false impression of time, with events being described as if
they never happened, which establishes a hierarchy of events and actors.
This all means that teaching the female past can only be done within an
inclusive educational framework, which relates not only to women but also to
all groups that society has excluded from history with a view to maintaining
the desired images of them. 3
In the article we focus on various forms and manifestations of violence
against women in history. These cases have been taken from Slovenian history,
but similar descriptions can be found elsewhere. 4 We shall offer some tips and
case studies that can be used in classes addressing women’s bodies or violence.
Women’s Bodies and Bodily Practices
The social identity of women has long been conditional upon the cultural
perception of their bodies. That is why the body has featured prominently in the
feminist debate throughout the Second Wave of Feminism, whilst individual
arguments about the body can also be found in texts written during the First
2
Michelle Perrot, ed., Writing Women’s History (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1984).
3
Andrea Petö and Berteke Walldijk, Teaching with Memories: European Women’s History in International and
Interdisciplinary Classrooms (Galway: Women’s Studies Centre, 2006).
4
To name just a few of them: Five volumes of the book A History of Women, edited by Georges Duby, Michelle
Perrot (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1992). Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International
Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
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