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

54 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?are only now coming into their own. On April 16, 1993, more than eighthundred teachers, college professors, school administrators, and stateofficials gathered at the Hilton Hotel in Parsippany, New Jersey, for athree-day "national" conference on curriculum transformation. The officialprogram gives the overview: "A celebration of twenty years of curriculumtransformation, this conference will bring together teachers,scholars, activists, and cultural leaders to share insights, knowledge, andstrategies to assess our accomplishments and to imagine together a curriculumfor the 21st century."The conference was sponsored by a variety of state and federal agenciessuch as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PennsylvaniaHumanities Council, and the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities.The keynoter, New Jersey chancellor of education Edward Goldberg,pointed out with great pride that New Jersey had invested "millions" inthe curriculum transformation project. "The rest of America cannot be farbehind."Most of the eight hundred transformationists at the Parsippany Hiltonhad their expenses paid by their employers—mainly state governments,public schools, and public colleges and universities. Yet very few peopleknow what transformationists do, why they do it, or why it mightmatter.Ms. magazine used to run a feature called "The Click Experience," inwhich a woman would write in to tell about the moment when a lightwent on in her head and she had her first blazing realization of howwomen had been cheated and silenced. The "click" is a quantum leap infeminist awareness—"the sudden coming to critical consciousness aboutone's oppression." Gender feminist academics have their own particularversion of the click experience: it happens at the moment one "sees" thatthe entire college curriculum has, with very few exceptions, been wroughtand written by men, about men, and for men. History is "his story," mentelling about men. Social science research, usually conducted by men andabout men, holds up men as the norm; women are the Other. The greatthoughts we study, the great art we revere, the literature we learn to loveare largely male achievements. Men wrote the books, and they concoctedthe theories: knowledge is a male creation. In a single "click," a womanrealizes that the culture and science men have created are not only wrongbut self-serving and dangerous for women. The experience often has adepressing and alienating effect on a woman; the culture she had reveredis suddenly not hers, and she may feel like a child of indifferent parentswho discovers at a late age that she has been adopted.Sooner or later, most women, gender feminist or not, have something