Putting Class Back in the Women’s Studies Curriculum

For a conference on feminist pedagogies at the Graduate Center at CUNY in February 2006 (see Baiada and Jensen-Moulton), we organized a presentation on a course, Women and Class, we had taught at Vassar College. We explained that the broad aim of the course was to foreground class, the category that most often gets forgotten, despite being part of the holy trinity of gender, race, and class that defines the contemporary women’s studies curriculum. After an hour-long presentation in which the students who had taken Women and Class spoke eloquently and passionately about the insights the course gave them into their own positions as classed subjects, a group of graduate students stopped us in the corridor outside the conference room to make a suggestion. They offered what they described as a brilliant piece that we might wish to include in our syllabus: an article that detailed the organizing efforts of immigrant South Asian women who worked as cleaners in Canada. Although we have no doubt that this is a worthy essay, one that might well deserve a spot on any women’s studies syllabus, their suggestion made clear to us that our project had been misunderstood. We had developed the syllabus to expose the ways in which class marks all of us, not only working-class women of color scrubbing out toilets in Toronto. So strong, however, is the residue of Marxism that to raise the question of class leads many academics automatically to consider the deprivations suffered by (and thus the heroic achievements of) the working class: all other classes fade away.

This paper documents our efforts over the last several years to move ourselves as well as our undergraduate women’s studies students beyond the constraints of the Marxist legacy, in which class immediately registers as working class. In the process of teaching Women and Class, we discovered that class was largely invisible to our middle-class students. In that regard, class is perhaps no different than the whiteness that was unseen by white college students twenty years ago, when Ruth Frankenberg’s work on the social construction of whiteness and Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” began to appear on every introductory women’s studies syllabus. Raising students’ consciousness around issues of class engenders many of the same resistances that one finds when discussing male privilege with male students and white privilege with white students. There is an urgency to this work because these resistances are a sign of the advantages that accrue to unmarked subjects. We believe it is imperative for all feminists to continue the feminist process of transformation, which entails apprehending the ways our lives are delimited by class.

The seed for Women and Class germinated several years ago when we were co-teaching a course on feminist literary criticism. Drawing majors from both English and women’s studies, the course traced out the chronological development of feminist literary practice, and thus we progressed from the second-wave feminism of the 1970s to the difference feminism of the 1980s. The week we explored the literary criticism on race and gender passed productively but uneventfully because Vassar students who take our introductory women’s studies course are given a way of thinking and talking about race. Race is foregrounded in that syllabus, which begins with Alice Walker’s critique of Virginia Woolf and includes several chapters of Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class as well as articles on a range of topics pertaining to global feminisms. Moreover, college-wide discussions around diversity initiatives, faculty hiring, and admissions policies percolate at Vassar on an ongoing basis. Race is understood to matter at the college.

When we turned to gender and class, however, we were in no way prepared for the passion of the students’ responses to Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman. To our astonishment, Steedman’s hybrid text, which is part autobiography and part academic scrutiny of the inadequacies of the Marxist and Freudian master narratives of class and gender, spoke in powerful, personal ways to our...