Education Feminism: Classic and Contemporary Readings

21. Feminism and Curriculum

21 Feminism and Curriculum Getting Our Act Together Madeleine R. Grumet and Lynda Stone University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Introduction Many of us share some uneasiness about the millennial moment. This artifact of calendars and clocks issues from no material cause. It is one more thing we have made up, but it is a popular fiction, reaching around the globe, and its subscription list is sufficient to give it meaning. Those of us in curriculum studies care about what matters to other people, for the construction of curriculum is always a decision about what matters. Our students come to us from families and communities organized around concerns, and they meet us, teachers, curriculum workers who have our own concerns, some similar to those of our students, some very different. Although, as Heidegger (1962) argued, all human experience is rooted to concern—our search for comfort, for pleasure, for connection to other people, for activity that stimulates our muscles and memory—the making of curriculum, draws us into moments that are both intentional and reflexive. It invites us to step back from the scene, and to deliberate about the concerns and interests that are taking up our attention and energy. It allows us to consider how we need to speak about and understand our world so that we might live fuller lives within it. The millennial moment suits a particular reflective pause in curriculum. For American feminists of a certain age who eagerly read the first printing of Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique and who cheer on the women’s soccer teams of today, it offers an opportunity to consider the feminist project in curriculum, to ask how feminism’s ambition to first reveal the ways that gender constrains human experience and then to make other ways of being and living accessible to men and women, has supported a similar intention in curriculum design and development. 357 358 / Madeleine R. Grumet and Lynda Stone Feminism Let us start by examining a principal strand of feminism that has developed in this century , although, significantly, feminism is not a single project or discourse. And, although this paper invites us commit egregious sins of generalization and synoptic theorizing, some distinctions demand acknowledgement. Consider these texts: 1. Journal of 10 year old Louisa May Alcott from the nineteenth century (Moffat and Painter 1975): A sample of our lessons ‘What virtues do you wish more of?’ asks Mr L. I answer: Patience, Love, Silence, Obedience, Generosity, Perseverance, Industry, Respect, Self-denial. ‘What vices less of?’ Idleness, Willfulness, Vanity, Impatience, Impudence, Pride, Selfishness, Activity, Love of cats. 2. Newsweek Issue of July 19 (Starr and Brant 1999): • 90 185 fans attended the sold-out final game of the Women’s World Cup between the US and China, setting a record for a women’s sporting event; • 650 000 tickets were purchased for the 32 matches, bringing in almost $23 million; • 2.9 million households watched the US beat Brazil on July 4, giving it a higher TV rating than game 7 of the NHL’s (i.e., National Hockey League) Stanley Cup Finals; • 19 companies ponied up $6 million for sponsorship rights; and 100 000 girls began playing soccer betwen 1990 and 1997. These two pieces, an excerpt from Louisa May Alcott’s journal written in 1842 and a recent story from Newsweek Magazine, a US weekly news magazine, celebrating the US women’s soccer team’s triumph over China in the World Cup final in 1999, illustrate the dramatic change in the status of women that has been achieved in the intervening years. The capacity of young women to play the game, win it, and win attention and economic resources is testimony to strides in equity, the provision of equal rights and resources, and in social role status, with women achieving attention and resources previously reserved for male athletes. These are the gifts of liberal feminism, perhaps best characterized by the resolution of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 that declared ‘woman is man’s equal.’ Donovan (1985) summarizes the central tenets of liberal feminism: faith in rationality, confidence Feminism and Curriculum / 359 in individual conscience, conviction in the similarity of male and female rationality, belief in education as a force to change society, independence and ultimate isolation of the individual, doctrine of natural rights. Liberal feminism assumes that men’s lives are what women want, and, rejecting the private sphere for...