Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (review)

For those of us who were students or faculty during the late 1960s and early 1970s, reading Ellen Messer-Davidow's account of the translation of the feminist movement into the academic world of feminist scholarship and the discipline of women's studies will trigger flashbacks to the times when we first encountered ideas that would literally change our lives. Messer-Davidow's book enables us to understand now how the exciting, life-changing ideas expressed in the feminist political movement have been transformed by and within academe into dry, highly abstract academic jargon as feminist discourse transmogrified into feminist scholarship through the disciplining of feminism—turning it into an academic discipline and compelling it to follow the conventions of the academy.

In the book's introduction Messer-Davidow shares her own background so that readers can see how "the personal is political," as feminists used to say. Suffering from spousal abuse and seeking a divorce during the mid-60s, she experienced the difficulties of a system that at the time would not help a woman seeking to leave her husband. During her graduate studies in English at the University of Cincinnati, she was a community activist and became an academic activist both locally and nationally. Her activism taught her knowledge through doing, while her academic studies taught her knowledge through reading—a difference she returns to throughout the book.

Against this personal backdrop, the author, now Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, sketches her goals for the book: to describe the history of academic feminism and to answer how "academic feminism [was] formed by the dynamic structures it had set out to transform" (p. 13). Her central thesis is that female studies became transformed by the academy it set out to change.

To obtain her goals, she divides the book into three parts. Part 1: Confronting the Institutional-Disciplinary Order, Part 2: Institutionalizing and Intellectualizing Feminist Studies, and Part 3: Crystallizing the Future for a total of seven chapters. The rest of the book consists of over 100 pages of footnotes and references, illustrating the thoroughness and extensiveness of her research.

The two chapters in Part 1 looks at how academic disciplines and institutions in the affected feminist students, graduate and undergraduates, during the 1950s and 1960s by limiting knowledge about women and discriminating against them as students and scholars. This time period is important for it shaped many first-generation feminists. Chapter 1, Disciplining Women, uses examples from four disciplines—physics, art history, sociology, and literary studies—to compare and contrast how organized disciplinary discourse could have the following effects: "female disciples . . . estranged from every day experiences, alienated from themselves and others, split into conflicting identities, and deauthorized as disciplinary knowers" (p. 21). Depending upon how the discipline defined what could be known and how it could be known, those within a discipline learned to exclude certain knowledge as inappropriate and certain ways of knowing as unacceptable.

Before feminists could contest disciplinary discourse, they first had to become a part of the discipline and gain credibility within it. Doing so initially meant gaining admission into graduate programs and then becoming tenured faculty members. Chapter 2, Constructing Sex Discrimination, explicates how disciplines and universities "coproduced systemic sex discrimination" (p. 48), a concept first labeled by feminists. Again using examples from physics, sociology, art history, and literary studies, Messer-Davidow describes some of the early literature on sex discrimination within the academy. She then describes how university processes maintained this discrimination and worked against efforts to implement affirmative action practices required by federal law. The chapter concludes with a look at judicial rulings on individual and class- action lawsuits that facilitated the university's authority to continue discrimating. According to Messer-Davidow, both "universities and disciplines (with a little help from federal agencies and courts...