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

TRANSFORMING THE ACADEMY 53anti-intellectual, and humorless places, they will find that among theprincipal causes of the decline was the failure of intelligent, powerful, andwell-intentioned officials to distinguish between the reasonable and justcause of equity feminism and its unreasonable, unjust, ideological sister—gender feminism.At the 1992 National Women's Studies Conference in Austin, Texas,that I described in chapter 1, the moderator urged us to "dwell for amoment on success. . . . Think about the fact that we have been so successfulin transforming the curriculum." My sister Louise, who attendedthe conference with me, has two sons in college and a daughter startingjunior high, and this remark alarmed her. Having spent several hourswith the Austin conferees, she had doubts about their competence andreasonableness. "What exactly did she mean?" she asked me. She did wellto ask; for she had stumbled on an area of feminist activism that has gonevirtually unnoticed by the public. What began as a reasonable attempt toredress the neglect of women in the curriculum has quietly become apotent force affecting the American classroom at every level, from theprimary grades to graduate school.A nationwide feminist campaign to change the curriculum of the Americanacademy is receiving support from the highest strata of educationand government. The Ford Foundation recently helped launch a NationalClearinghouse for Curriculum Transformation Resources at Towson StateUniversity in Maryland, to give the growing number of transformationconsultants in our nation's schools quick access to resources. The Towsoncenter provides consultants and project directors with readings on feministpedagogy, samples of women-centered syllabi, lists of womencenteredtextbooks, and suggestions for women-centered audiovisualmaterials. It provides aspiring transformationists with manuals on how tostart their own projects, as well as a list of resources to help them to"counter resistance." 8The transformation projects receive generous fundingfrom major foundations and from federal agencies such as the Women'sEducation Equity Act Program and the Fund for the Improvement ofPostsecondary Education (FIPSE), as well as from the state governmentsof New Jersey, Tennessee, Montana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and California.In a recent book chronicling the triumphs of "the transformation movement,"Caryn McTighe Musil reports on the success of the "hundreds ofcurriculum transformation projects around the country since 1980." 9Infact, the transformationists have been at it for longer than that, but they