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

TRANSFORMING THE ACADEMY 69Discussing the fifth phase reminds Mcintosh of a remark made by thefeminist historian Gerda Lerner: "Don't worry... we were 6000 yearscarefully building a patriarchal structure of knowledge, and we've hadonly 12 years to try to correct it, and 12 years is nothing." 55Marilyn R. Schuster and Susan R. Van Dyne of Smith College "consultnationally" on feminist curriculum transformation. They have developeda six-stage theory of pedagogical levels that looks very much like Mcintosh'sfive-phase theory. Theirs describes a feminist alternative to themasculinist curriculum that is to be pluralistic instead of hierarchical,attentive to difference rather than elitist, concrete rather than abstract.But they, too, are not keen to tell us where the transformations will lead:What would a curriculum that offers an inclusive vision of humanexperience and that attends as carefully to difference and genuinepluralism as to sameness and generalization actually look like? Althoughwe possess the tools of analysis that allow us to conceive ofsuch an education, we can't, as yet, point to any institution that hasentered the millennium and adopted such a curriculum. 56But the problem is not that the "millennium" of a transformed academyhas not yet arrived. Schuster and Van Dyne do not realize that they haveno idea of the curriculum that is to replace the "androcentric" one nowin place. Instead of submitting a comprehensive feminist curriculum forserious consideration and scrutiny, we are given a lot of loose and metaphoricaltalk about female epistemologies characterizing how womenview the world from a female perspective.Catharine Stimpson, one of the matron saints of transformationism, isa former president of the Modern Language Association and, until recently,was dean of the Graduate School and vice-provost at RutgersUniversity. We do get a fairly detailed description from her of a late-stagecurriculum that she outlined in Change magazine in 1988. 57Stimpsonbegins in conventional transformationist fashion by denouncing the traditionalphase one curriculum for teaching students to recognize big(male) names from "Abraham and Isaac to Zola" as little more than agame that, "at its most innocent," appeals only to crossword puzzle or"Jeopardy" fans. Dean Stimpson has a more "coherent curriculum" inmind, and because she has been unusually specific, I shall quote her atsome length:What might a coherent curriculum be like? Let me pass out somewhiffs of a syllabus, which focuses on the humanities. . . . "My syl-