Feminist Scholarship in Core Higher Education Journals

The Review o f Higher Education Fall 1993, Volume 17, No. 1, pp. 21-41 Copyright © 1993 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved (ISSN 0162-5748) Feminist Scholarship in Core Higher Education Journals Barbara K. Townsend As a multidisciplinary field of study, higher education derives its con­ ceptual frameworks and methodologies from the social sciences and hu­ manities. Over the past two decades, contemporary feminism has sig­ nificantly influenced these disciplinary areas, stimulating a reexamination of their scholarship and curriculum from a feminist perspective as well as the development of new research paradigms (Calas and Smircich 1992; DuBois et al. 1985, Famham 1987, Langland and Gove 1981). Differentiating between biologically based sex and socially and cul­ turally constructed gender, feminists regard political, social, and eco­ nomic oppression based on gender as a reality that shapes women’s and men’s experiences (Epstein 1988). Feminist theory focuses on the power relationships between men and women, viewing past and existing rela­ tionships and arrangements as patriarchal or male-dominated. By focus­ ing on women’s experiences within this context and by researching ques­ tions whose answers might improve women’s conditions, feminist scholars aim to empower women and change the nature of relationships between women and men (Sprague and Zimmerman 1989). Those scholars who focus upon the experiences of women within the academy hope to gain Barbara K. Townsend is Professor and Chair of the Department of Leadership in the College of Education at Memphis State University. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in Boston, Massachusetts, in November 1991. Thanks are due to Estela Bensimon, Jack Newell, Susan Twombly, and anonymous reviewers for their com­ ments on this paper and to Cecelia Corey, who assisted me in finding articles dis­ cussed in this study. 22 The Review of Higher Education Fall 1993 and share insights that will ultimately lead to “making the academy a fruitful place for women to live and work” (Treichler 1985, 7). For ex­ ample, Mary Belenky et al. (1986) studied female college students’ “ways of knowing” and indicated how the teaching-learning process needs to change to accommodate these ways; Estela Bensimon (1991) analyzed gender differences in administrative leadership styles of college presi­ dents and demonstrated how current leadership theories fail to do justice to women’s leadership styles; and Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harring­ ton (1988) examined factors limiting women faculty and recommended ways for individual faculty and institutions to change this situation. By putting women’s experiences at the center of its study of the acad­ emy, by pointing out institutional activities that perpetuate discrimina­ tion by gender, and by developing theories and models reflective of both genders’ experiences, feminist scholarship has the potential to generate a transformation of the academy. However, if such scholarship is to in­ fluence the operation of the academy, it needs to be disseminated to college and university faculty and administrators, including those who study higher education. These individuals may be faculty who teach about higher education and conduct research on it, or they may be practition­ ers who, while holding faculty or administrative positions in colleges and universities or education-related agencies, wish to understand higher ed­ ucation from a theoretical perspective. Since “perhaps journals both cre­ ate and mirror their fields” (Silverman 1987), inclusion of feminist schol­ arship in higher education’s core journals would seem to be both a necessary condition and an indication of feminist scholarship’s ability to influence the study and the operation of higher education institutions. In short, feminist theory has an explicit political agenda with implica­ tions for the daily functioning of the academy. For this perspective to influence the perspective of those who administer the academy, it needs to become known to them. Publication in higher education’s core jour­ nals helps ensure this awareness and knowledge. The extent to which feminist scholarship has transformed various disciplines has been well documented (e.g., DuBois et al. 1985; Kelly and Korsmeyer 1991; Langland and Gove 1991), but the extent to which feminist scholarship has been published in core higher education jour­ nals has rarely...