Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Gender and Education 681
in math are said to be “hard workers” while the boys who excelled are labeled intelligent. The
young women take on this performance as the hard worker and fail to see their own potential as
bright, intelligent young women. Many young women are even discouraged from taking math
class altogether because to do so would not be the correct performance of femininity. Changing
this performance challenges male domination and superiority.
Walkerdine goes on to discuss the threat that women present to a patriarchal society by
exhibiting their power in a pedagogical setting. Women often live in very contradictory terms with
an intense fear of stepping over the gender divide. The classic response then is the performance
of femininity.
This fear of stepping over the gender divide may be a key determinant in the perpetuation
of social and emotional problems such as eating disorders among women. Many young women
struggle to be as perfect as they can be in the classroom but at the same time recognize the social
and intellectual expectations of society. Women are kept in line via the performance of femininity.
It is much easier and acceptable to see a woman as a frail, sick anorexic than as a strong, assertive,
and competent woman not only for those around her but for herself as well. Since the day she
chose not to answer a question in math class for fear of appearing “too smart” she has been
performing femininity. The struggle between performing academically and the performance of
femininity becomes overpowering as women negotiate the decisions to sacrifice one role for the
other.
Ultimately this performance affects how women see themselves physically and emotionally
as well as academically. The continual messages of how one is to perform begin to affect the
self-esteem of young women, which in turn creates and perpetuates a vicious cycle reflecting
weak, incapable women. Again, the problem becomes that of the young women rather than the
culture, which created her. Peggy Orenstein (1994) describes observations with young women
in a school setting and the social and pedagogical practices that prevent women from taking full
advantage of their educational experiences. Orienstein reasons that we do girls a disservice when
we encourage young girls to feel good about themselves without addressing the culture and its
construction of femininity that originally perpetuated this low self-esteem.
Young women quickly learn that it is not only more acceptable in society to “perform femininity”
but it also protects them against the terrifying idea of confronting the overwhelmingly
misogynist ideal perpetuated by the patriarchal cultural. She has no notion that she has become
so enmeshed in this culture that she not only performs femininity outwardly to the rest of the
culture but inwardly within her own personal concept of herself as well. What started in the
classroom with young boys and girls infiltrates the personal lives of women as they move toward
adulthood and women begin to lose the innate power that exists within them. Attributed to this
notion of performance of femininity, and often masculinity, is the idea that men and women, or
more specifically masculinity and femininity bring with them specific epistemologies or “ways
of knowing.”
WAYS OF KNOWING
Epistemology can be defined as the process or route by which a person comes to know what
he or she knows. What is one’s epistemology? Where and by what means do individuals come
to know what they know. Do we know things as women, as men, as children, from the heart
or is each individual born into a culture that determines his or her epistemology? While some
individuals may have a true clear-cut epistemology, most likely individuals combine a variety of
ways of knowing in order to learn about the world around them and most importantly to learn
about themselves. This epistemology also allows students the opportunity to discover how they
fit into the vast world in which they live.