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

90 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?sociological texts, such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Within the PlantationHousehold, Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside, and Eugene Genovese'sRoll Jordan Roll. V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South was on the list—aswell as works by Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, and August Evans Wilson.I was sorry not to find Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor, who aregenerally esteemed as two of the most outstanding southern women writers.All the same, it appears to be a solid course. Unfortunately, courseslike this one are the exception. The Rutgers model is more the norm, notonly for women's studies but for all "feminist classrooms."For the past few years I have reviewed hundreds of syllabi from women'sstudies courses, attended more feminist conferences than I care toremember, studied the new "feminist pedagogy," reviewed dozens oftexts, journals, newsletters, and done a lot of late-into-the-night readingof e-mail letters that thousands of "networked" women's studies teacherssend to one another. I have taught feminist theory. I have debated genderfeminists on college campuses around the country, and on national televisionand radio. My experience with academic feminism and my immersionin the ever-growing gender feminist literature have served to deepenmy conviction that the majority of women's studies classes and otherclasses that teach a "reconceptualized" subject matter are unscholarly,intolerant of dissent, and full of gimmicks. In other words, they are awaste of time. And although they attract female students because of theirsocial ambience, they attract almost no men. They divert the energies ofstudents—especially young women—who sorely need to be learninghow to live in a world that demands of them applicable talents and skills,not feminist fervor or ideological rectitude.Journalist Karen Lehrman visited women's studies programs at Berkeley,the University of Iowa, Smith College, and Dartmouth, audited almostthirty classes, and interviewed many professors and students for astory in Mother Jones: "In many classes discussions alternate between thepersonal and the political, with mere pit stops at the academic. Sometimesthey are filled with unintelligible post-structuralist jargon; sometimes theyconsist of consciousness-raising psychobabble, with the students' feelingsand experiences valued as much as anything the professor or texts haveto offer." 6Ms. Lerhman considers this a betrayal: "A hundred years ago,women were fighting for the right to learn math, science, Latin—to beeducated like men; today, many women are content to get their feelingsheard, their personal problems aired, their instincts and intuition respected."7The feminist classroom does little to prepare students to cope in theworld of work and culture. It is an embarrassing scandal that, in the name