Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

Chapter 3Transforming theAcademyI am grateful... to the students of my women's studiesovular at Washington University in the spring semester of1982}This little acknowledgment, in the preface of a book by the feministphilosopher Joyce Trebilcot, is one of the more amusing examples of thefeminist effort to purge language of sexist bias. Trebilcot considers "seminar"offensively "masculinist," so she has replaced it by "ovular," whichshe regards as its feminist equivalent. Linguistic reform is one characteristicactivity of feminist academics, and biological coinages are verymuch in favor. Feminist literary critics and feminist theologians (who callthemselves thealogians) may refer to their style of interpreting texts as"gynocriticism" or "clitoral hermeneutics," rejecting more traditional approachesas inadmissibly "phallocentric."Does it matter that academic feminists speak of replacing seminarswith "ovulars," history with "herstory," and theology with "thealogy"?Should it concern us that most teachers of women's studies think ofknowledge as a "patriarchal construction"? It should, because twentyyears ago the nation's academies offered fewer than twenty courses inwomen's studies; today such courses number in the tens of thousands.Such rapid growth, which even now shows little signs of abating, is unprecedentedin the annals of higher education. The feminist coloniza-