Changing Our Minds: Feminist Transformations of Knowledge ed. by Susan Hardy Aiken and Others (review)

82Rocky Mountain Review SUSAN HARDY AIKEN, and others, eds. Changing Our Minds: Feminist Transformations ofKnowledge. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. 171 p. The administration at the University ofArizona should be very proud ofthis book, one result of a four-year curriculum integration project sponsored by an NEH grant. The five editors (Aiken, Karen Anderson, Myra Dinnerstein, Judy Nolte Lensink, and Patricia MacCorquodale) present a discussion of the project, the cooperation it entailed, and the growth and enthusiasm generated; clearly those involved benefited and future students will gain immensely from the expanded awareness and range of discussion regarding gender. But the effort to mainstream material about women and to "change minds" also met with considerable resistance, which the editors examine in detail in the excellent concluding essay, "Changing Our Minds: The Problematics of Curriculum Integration." (An earlier similar essay was published in the Winter 1987 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society titled "Trying Transformations: Curriculum Integration and the Problem of Resistance.") Anyone who has been involved in similar efforts (many sponsored by the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University ofArizona) can empathize with their statement that "the scripts that underwrite masculinist culture are well-learned and intensely resistant to change" (155). At Arizona, over 90 percent of tenured faculty in the 13 departments dealt with were men, and ofthe 45 project participants (those who received stipends, attended the seminars, and agreed to re-examine their course offerings), 42 were men; "most ofthese men were white and middle class," epitomizing what feminists face in dealing with "the major power brokers ofthe academy" (xxiii). The editors note that it is extremely important to have "a strong Women's Studies program in place before attempting curriculum integration" (156). They worry that some administrators see the project as "adequate for the entire curriculum, making unnecessary any more systematic and effective policies to ensure student exposure to materials on women" (157), and note a related danger, that "participation in the program may give uncommitted, even hostile professors" an avenue to dilute precisely what is "most radical and promising in Women's Studies" (158). Of the six essays by project participants which make up the remainder of the book, the one essay by a woman, Leslie A. Flemming's "New Visions, New Methods: The Mainstreaming Experience in Retrospect," speaks movingly of the sense of "self-validation" which transformed her work with students and her own research interests in her field of Oriental Studies. She provides perhaps the best summary of the other five essays when she observes: "An essential part of me has now joined the academic enterprise. My male mainstreaming colleagues, in contrast, have had to find ways to add new, perhaps ill-fitting, pieces to a version of scholarship which has heretofore fully validated their symbols and experience"; for males, this "disintegrating" experience is "perhaps least threateningly dealt with in a theoretical or abstract way" (56). The five essays by male faculty do rely on the theoretical with only a passing mention or two of their own socialization into masculinity. Gary F. Jensen, who is given credit for proposing the book, opens his essay, "Mainstreaming and Book Reviews83 the Sociology ofDeviance: A Personal Assessment," with a childhood anecdote (his inability to avoid a finger-wrestling challenge for fear of being labeled a wimp), and although his thesis is that the reason females commit fewer crimes than men is not simply because they lack opportunity as some researchers have suggested, the tone ofthe essay follows the traditional male mode ofinsisting others are wrong in order to make his own conclusions appear superior, rather than the more feminist model of appreciating and building on the work ofprevious theorists. Patrick O'Donnell, in "Becoming Discourse: Eudora Welty's 'Petrified Man,' " questions "the interior history ofthe textual language itself (21), but his analysis ofthe etymology of words in the Welty story, petrifylpeterlpaterlputery, etc., seems less "feminist" than a combination Freud and the OED, though perhaps the same could be said of some of his "French feminist theorist" sources, too. In "Reflections on Feminism and Political Theory," Lawrence A. Scaff recognizes that traditional male "theoretical discourse itself has become suspect as a "discourse ofdomination...