Lot's Wife Edition 5 2015

16
STUDENT AFFAIRS
BY MALI RAE AND
SOPHIE VASSALLO
Why We Need
Bluestockings Week
Content Warning: Sexual Assault
The National Tertiary Education Union
(NTEU) in collaboration with the National
Union of Students (NUS) has run
Blustockings week at a national level for
3 years now, and the theme for this year’s
week is Storylines.
When women were first allowed into universities, the term
‘bluestocking’ was used to discredit them as unfeminine and
informal. Many of the first women in university refused to
wear corsets and other impractical clothing that women were
expected to wear at that time. Women’s presence and their
refusal to continue to be bound by patriarchal standards
was threatening to the male supremacy in universities
and continues to be so today. Women adopted the term
‘bluestockings’ by creating the Bluestockings Society in the
1750s, which was a literary discussion group that signified a
radical step away from accepted activities for women.
Bluestocking week seeks to draw attention to the issues
that affect women in every part of the university community,
ranging from the gender pay gap for teachers and other staff
to the casual sexism faced by women students. Due to the
pervasive influence of neoliberalism, the situation for women
in the university sector is worsening. Neoliberalism is based
on an assumption that individuals can freely act within the
economic market, and this blatantly ignores the structural
oppression that prevents people from interacting with or
acting freely within the market. For women this means that
there is no recognition of the challenges they face in the
university context, and in the labour market upon graduation.
The shift from higher education as a public good and
responsibility of the state to provide, to a marketised
commodity that can and should be purchased, significantly
changes the value of education. The transfer of the cost of
education from the state to the individual consumer was a
key turning point in this transformation of education as a
commodity. Previously the link between the labour market
and education was very different; education was designed
to give individuals the tools to become active participants
in the labour market, however now it is primarily dictated by
the labour market. Which puts the value of education in your
employability, removing the inherent value of knowledge and
learning. This development entails considerable negative
impacts for women at both the tertiary and the employment
level.
In recent years, areas of knowledge that are considered
feminine are devalued, especially so if they do not feed
straight into the labour market. This is the key reason that
women’s or ‘gender’ studies is no longer it’s own study
area and is now subsumed into sociology, which is an
area that can feed into the labour market. Consider that
just twenty years in the 1995 Monash University Handbook
undergraduate Arts units there were 11 units containing the
word ‘women’ in the title and another 8 units containing
the word ‘feminism’, in addition to an entire discipline of
Women’s Studies with 29 units. In contrast, there are only
three Arts units in 2015 with the word ‘women’ in the title and
one with the word ‘feminism’. Women’s studies is no longer
taught, having first been subsumed by the less threatening
Gender studies and then further deradicalised into a major in
Sociology.
In terms of employment, neoliberalism tends to ignore
the structural inequalities that prevent women from
having the same job opportunities as men. This will see
efforts such as affirmative action gradually whittled down
and will do nothing to address the gender pay gap that
continues to permeate throughout the workplace. By looking
at employment within universities we can see that while
women are the majority of undergraduate students, they
are no where near in the majority in the higher ranks of the
university. Women are also the most affected by the rising
rate of casualisation among undergraduate teaching staff.
Whilst it is evident that individual women are succeeding in
the neoliberal university, (you need look no further than our
Vice Chancellor, Margaret Gardner) as a class, women are