The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

Eight. A Feminist Class

Eight a feminist cl ass I have taught a course called Women and Organizations for the past eight years, seven times at one institution and once each at two others. Students, most of them women, take this course because they wish to be successful in a man’s world and not to be disadvantaged because they are women. I teach the course for a different reason, because I like women and am interested in women’s worlds. There is a basic set of topics in my course: women’s development, boundaries, and styles of communication ; women’s experiences in organizations; women’s work; and femaleseparatism.Butequallyimportantareimplicitprocessesthatoccurduringtheterm ,re®ectingthestudents’needsfortheirowngrowth, their resistances and fears, and my own. Because this seminar has provided many of my main ideas for understanding women’s social patterns, I wish to give a sense of the key learnings by describing the ®ow of ideas and experience over a quarter’s time. I wish also to convey a sense of the dynamics of a feminist course, where a teacher is often in a struggle with students over the development of awareness. In the following three chapters, I invite the reader to take the course vicariously by becoming involved with the materials and the classroom experience. 1 7 1 the stream of ideas and experience: women’s boundaries, women’s groups, women’s speech The ¤rst substantive week of the course is titled on the syllabus “Women’s Development, Women’s Boundaries, and Girls in Groups.” My purpose is to start with a familiar topic—the growth and development of the individual—to suggest that women, from early on, learn differentexperiencesof self anddifferentwaysof relatingtoothersthan men do. More broadly, my suggestion is that gender socialization is not only initial, but repetitive throughout life, which is why it is so very effective. If one does not learn properly how to be a girl as a child, for example, one learns this later as a teenager or an adult. We read Nancy Chodorow on the many unconscious ways that female gender identity is established in the ¤rst years of life.1 Especially relevant for my purposes is her discussion of how female children have different personal boundary experiences than male children. The idea that a person has a boundary, which is treated differently if she is female, seems to me important because it leads to grasping how women might develop a different sense of self than men. Later, this idea of a personal boundary will be useful for understanding behaviors of adult women—for example, when women on the job need to say “no” in big ways to seemingly small requests because they do not feel a sense of clear boundary between themselves and others. Chodorow explains that the female ego boundary is more “permeable ” than the male ego boundary because a female mother separates less clearly from a daughter than from a son. The boy, for his part, separates more from a mother than a girl does in order to achieve gender identity,sincebeingmalemeans“notbeingfemale.”Thepoint,Ithink, can be taken further. Throughout their lifetimes, both girls and women experience themselves as more open because they are more frequently invaded by others—both female and male, both strangers and intimates . Female boundaries are more often invaded because women are viewed as accessible and manipulable, whereas men, because they are more respected, are treated as more separate and as more inviolable. The idea that a female sense of self is less separate and less protected 1 7 2 f e m i n i s t t e a c h i n g than a male sense of self may be viewed in positive terms. Carol Gilligan suggests that a woman develops a more relational, connected, less isolated sense of self than a man does, and that this requires relevant types of interpretations. I ¤nd especially interesting her discussion of how women experience danger when their relationships are severed, while men more often experience danger in intimacy and security in isolation. I use Gilligan’s book on psychological theory in the ¤rst week to provide gendered descriptions that are very clear and that lead to organizational extensions—to seeing how female social forms might emerge from characteristics ascribed to women. Because there is no body of literature on women’s social forms, I must often use readings that emerge from the study of one thing—of individuals and of...