How Women's Studies Textbooks
Mis-educate Students
by Christine Stolba.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Stolba is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and coauthor of Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America (1999) and The Feminist Dilemma: When Success Is Not Enough (2001). Ms. Stolba holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, where her studies focused on American Intellectual History and Women's History.
ABOUT IWF The Independent Women's Forum, founded in 1992, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization. IWF provides a voice for women who believe in individual freedom and personal responsibility, and who embrace common sense over divisive ideology. IWF also supports a campus program consisting of SheThinks.org, a webzine written by and for students, and a speakers bureau.
Independent Women's Forum P.O. Box 3058 Arlington, VA 22203 1-800-224-6000 http://web.archive.org/web/20030224091118/http://www.iwf.org/
Campus Website: http://web.archive.org/web/20030224091118/http://www.shethinks.org/ ©2002
Independent Women's Forum All rights reserved.
Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
II. Errors of Fact. . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Wage Gaps and Glass Ceilings
Occupational Segregation
Women's Health
Domestic Violence
Educational Bias Against Women
Western Civilization and the Canon
III. Errors of Interpretation. . . . . .16
Women Under Siege
Victims of False Consciousness
The Role Model Myth
Sexuality
Marriage
In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf persuasively argued that the reason civilization has produced so few fine female artists, particularly writers, is that women have lacked the central requirements for honing one's craft -freedom from the drudgeries of domestic life and the financial resources to achieve their artistic goals. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the birth of Women's Studies, many feminist academics made a similar argument, claiming that society's-and the academy's-past hostility to women required the embrace of a wholly new academic discipline devoted to the study of women. Today, colleges and universities support a cadre of women academics who not only have achieved the freedom of rooms of their own, but now enjoy the benefits of a proliferating number of academic departments as well. Women's Studies can boast of conferences, journals, and a national organization with over 3,000 members; endowed chairs, graduate programs, and visiting lectureships. The field has even spawned its first wave of histories with titles such as Disciplining Feminism: How Women's Studies Transformed the Academy and Was Transformed by It. But how has Women's Studies transformed the academy? What have Women's Studies scholars done with the "rooms of their own" that they've had for a generation? There is little love lost between advocates of Women's Studies and its critics. Both sides trade barbs about the value of Women's Studies for a liberal education. Often, critics are accused of setting up "straw women" by focusing only on the most extreme examples of Women's Studies pedagogy to criticize the entire enterprise. Rather than look to the extremes, this report seeks to examine the solid mainstream by asses-sing something produced only by programs that have become full-fledged members of the academy: textbooks. By examining five of the most popular textbooks used in introductory courses in Women's Studies, we can come to some conclusions about the usefulness of Women's Studies as an academic discipline and as an intellectual outgrowth of the feminist movement. Feminism seeks to change society through activism and social change, usually by lobbying for new laws and social policies. Women's Studies has a slightly different mission-it seeks to "transform knowledge." Because "traditional systems of knowledge" have often ignored women, the argument goes, Women's Studies must reconstruct knowledge altogether. Metaphors of transformation dot the pages of Women's Studies textbooks. The authors of Gender & Culture in America, a popular textbook for introductory courses in Women's Studies, claim that the purpose of Women's Studies is to "challenge students to consider that addressing gender in-equality in America involves not just activism or new laws and policies, but new modes of thought, a rethinking of our deepest, most accepted premises about the world." Another textbook, Thinking About Women, describes how Women's Studies is engaged in "challenging some of the basic assumptions in existing know-ledge." "Women's Studies scholarship," the author avers, "is transformative." A third, Wo-6 Lying in a Room of One's Own:
I. Introduction.
men's Realities, Women's Choices, states that "radical re-conceptualizations" are required "to overcome the bias that has been built into what has been taken to be 'knowledge.'" The scare quotes around the word knowledge are meant to drive home the point that what we think we know is really a chimera. The authors of the textbook urge readers to engage in what they call an "intellectual revolution." The purpose of Women's Studies is not simply the transformation of knowledge, we are told. Out of that transformation should come a new worldview, one ever vigilant of sins against the status of women. As one textbook notes, "once you begin to recognize these patterns, you may be astounded at how pervasive they are." Indeed, the authors get a bit carried away in describing this experience; readers are warned that "as the unequal status of women becomes more apparent, you might feel overwhelmed by the vast extent of a problem most people have never acknowledged." The process of "transforming knowledge" presupposes that students who enter an introductory course in Women's Studies have some to begin with. That is not always the case. And unfortunately, as we will see, the "knowledge" transmitted by Women's Studies textbooks is often factually and interpretively at odds with reality. Rather than offering young men and women exposure to knowledge, these texts foster a cynical knowingness about women's status in society, one that consistently emphasizes women's supposedly subordinate position. The danger of such a worldview, particularly for a generation of young men and women who enter the classroom already steeped in popular myths about women's place in society, is that it will ripen into a form of anti-intellectualism. Why question if you already know? If practitioners of Women's Studies hope to launch an "intellectual revolution," they would do well to remember that revolutions often end up devouring their own children. 7 How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students.
Since textbooks are an effort to cull a large amount of information into a single, coherent narrative, they are a medium that almost always contains factual errors, regardless of subject matter. Even granted that dispensation, however, Women's Studies textbooks support a large number of factual inaccuracies. Many of these are deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries. This is not surprising when one considers the "transformative" mission of Women's Studies. As the authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices note, "understanding that cultural attitudes and beliefs about women have often been based on false premises and faulty observations, feminists are working to replace ignorance and fantasy with views that have greater validity." Note that they are replacing "ignorance and fantasy" not with facts, but with "views that have greater validity." Valid views, in this case, are those that conform with feminist thought. Other textbooks state this more vividly. The author of Issues in Feminism says: "Feminist theoreticians in every field . are convinced that no purely factual studies exist," since facts have "all developed within a framework of male bias." Following is a partial list of factual inaccuracies in the Women's Studies textbooks surveyed in this report.
WAGE GAPS AND GLASS CEILINGS
All of the Women's Studies textbooks surveyed for this report uncritically repeat two of the most popular myths of the feminist movement: the idea that the wage gap between men and women is the direct result of discrimination in the labor market; and the notion that women in America face an impenetrable glass ceiling, also caused by discrimination, that pre-vents them from advancing in the workplace. Margaret L. Andersen's Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender, begins by warning readers that, although many people "conclude that women now have it made," in fact, "women college graduates who worked full time earned, on average, 70 percent of what men college graduates earned" and "despite three decades of policy change to address gender inequality at work, women and minorities are still substantially blocked from senior management positions in most U.S. companies." Later, she calls it a "social myth" that "women are achieving economic parity with men." Women's Realities, Women's Choices offers a similar assessment: "If we work for pay, we tend to work in gender-segregated sectors of the economy . and to receive less wages than men in comparable jobs." Later, the textbook notes, "women earn less and have fewer opportunities for choice and advancement than men. In 1890, a woman earned 46 cents for every dollar a man earned. A century later, we still earn only 69 cents." This is a deliberately misleading presentation of the wage gap and a predictable reiteration of a favorite feminist myth: that the average gender wage gap is evidence of discrimination. In fact, as a number of economists, including June O'Neill, have demonstrated, the average wage gap tells us very little, for it fails to take 8 Lying in a Room of One's Own:
II. Errors of Fact.
into account important factors such as age, education, consecutive years of experience, and type of job; when these factors are considered, women and men earn about the same. In addition, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 guarantees equal pay for equal work. Equal pay for equal work does not satisfy the authors of Women's Studies textbooks. They are staunch supporters of "comparable worth," or centralized wage-setting based on categories of comparable skill levels. Thinking About Women states that "comparable worth is an important concept for women workers," and claims that "it has been resisted by businesses, probably because they recognize the economic cost that would come from reassessing and increasing the worth of the work that women do." Yet this offers only one side of a very complex debate. Within academia alone, many competent scholars from various points on the political spectrum have criticized comparable worth as poor economics. Academic criticism of comparable worth aside, Women's Studies textbooks fail to answer the most serious question raised by com-parable worth: Who decides what the intrinsic worth of any particular job is? Is a waitress' work more "valuable" than a garbage man's? In a similar vein, Women's Studies textbooks uncritically repeat the standard feminist myth that women face a glass ceiling. In Women's Realities, Women's Choices, for example, the authors claim that "those few women who have begun to reach the top of middle management jobs in corporations have found a 'glass ceiling' that makes it difficult to break through to top corporate positions." Later, the authors claim that women "are viewed as less serious about our work. We tend to be tracked into associate and part-time positions and not to be considered for partnerships and choice assignments. Male-dominated values about women's traditional roles undermine the belief that a woman can be a professional and a good wife and mother." Left unmentioned is evidence that women often eagerly pursue flexible work arrangements. Time and control over their schedules is more valuable to them than climbing the corporate ladder.
OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION
A similar flaw in reasoning hampers Women's Studies textbooks' discussions of occupational segregation. The authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices complain, "many occupations are still identified only for or largely with men.... Not only have men guarded the custom and privilege of the professions as their 'right,' but women have been socialized to agree with them." Worse, for a textbook whose own title alludes to women's choices, there is no recognition of the choices women actually are making in the working world, including part-time and flexible work arrangements. As for the tendency of men and women to go into certain fields, the textbook authors claim "segregation of genders between and within the professions is in part the result of gender discrimination in education." Thinking About Women also views occupational segregation as something imposed on women, to their detriment. "It is in the professions where women have made some of the most dramatic numerical gains," the author writes, "yet they are still concentrated in the lower ranks and less prestigious specialties." The author cites the fact that women physicians are more likely to work in pediatrics or family medicine, and that women lawyers tend to go into real estate and trust law, or into public service law, as examples of this phenomenon. The only concession made is done so with a caveat: "Although many women choose to work in historically women's work or some choose to put their priorities on personal and family matters rather than career mobility, even more women than in the past perceive that there is discrimination against women in the workplace." Issues in Feminism offers a similar interpretation, one in which "discrimination is every-9 How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students. where" and "women workers are channeled into occupations that are seen as 'appropriate' for women." Worse, the textbook presents women as dupes when it comes to issues such as job flexibility. "To meet home demands, [women] may settle for part-time shifts (such as 'Mommy Tracks'), poor hours, or local jobs, all of which can be terribly exploitative." Yet, as years of opinion research reveal, women do not find flexible work arrangements exploitative; on the contrary, many women (and an increasing number of men) rate job flexibility high on their list of priorities for achieving work/family balance. It is feminists who dislike flexible working arrangements and Mommy Tracks- largely because women's preference for them means that they don't climb the corporate ladder at rates similar to men. The textbooks also discuss female-dominated occupations in wholly negative terms. "Women who work in pink collar jobs rarely have any significant opportunity for promotion," states Women's Realities, Women's Choices, and the work they perform "is often highly impersonal and routine, as in a typing pool." No mention is made of the safety and flexibility of many pink collar jobs, nor of the fact that skill sets for these jobs deteriorate slowly, allowing women to move in and out of the workforce in these jobs without their skills becoming obsolete. The authors of Women's Studies textbooks would do well to listen to the reasoning of their own students on the issue of occupational choice. Based on surveys they conducted among their students, the authors of Gender & Culture in America found that "nearly all of the women, but none of the men interviewed, plan to cur-tail or cease their paid employment after their children are born." One student, a biology ma-jor named Susan, could boast of a perfect grade point average and prospects for a successful career as a genetic counselor. Yet, as she told the textbook authors, she personally feels that "children suffer if their mothers work outside the home" and so evinces "a strong career orientation up to but not encompassing reproduction." Other young women interviewed expressed similar feelings about temporarily stepping out of the workforce to fulfill family obligations. One could interpret these young women's attitudes as intelligent and pragmatic planning for their futures; looking ahead, they envision having different priorities at different points in their lives and hope to have families. What do the authors of Women's Studies textbooks see? They see victims, women who "are apparently unaware that in these decisions they are following traditional gender stereotypes." They are also at a loss to explain the clear evidence that "for many young college women, most of the feminist message is irrelevant or unwelcome." Thus, even Gender & Culture in America-one of the more fair-minded and less hyperbolic of the Women's Studies textbooks surveyed here- presents women's career choices as decisions linked to gender stereotypes rather than the individuals' own preferences.
WOMEN'S HEALTH
All of the Women's Studies textbooks surveyed for this report contain chapters or lengthy sections on "Women's Health." Un-fortunately, their diagnosis of the state of women's health, like their assessment of women's progress in the workplace, is seriously flawed. Women's Studies textbooks are riddled with errors about women's access to health care and about the causes and consequences of many women's health issues. One of the favorite myths repeated in Women's Studies textbooks is that women have not been adequately represented in clinical trials for new medical treatments. The authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices, for example, claim that "medication and treatment for medical conditions not specific to women, such as heart disease, have been tested and norms established primarily on men." Thinking About Women asserts, "several reports published in medical journals and reported in the national press documented the exclusion of women from major 10 Lying in a Room of One's Own:. national studies of heart disease, lung cancer, and kidney disease." Later, the textbook begins its chapter on health by claiming that news of new medical breakthroughs shouldn't be heartening to women, since "you might well find out that all the subjects in the study were men and that the same insights or procedures that medical researchers are heralding as advancing medical science have not been at all considered for their implications for women's health." But these textbooks are incorrect. The claim that women have been shortchanged in medical research has been debunked by numerous scholars, most thoroughly by Sally L. Satel in her book, PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine. In fact, drug companies and government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) routinely include women in clinical trials that test the effective-ness of medications. As long ago as 1979, over 90 percent of all NIH-funded clinical trials included women. Other textbooks claim that women's unique health risks do not receive adequate attention from the medical research establishment. Women in American Society tells readers that "many experts point to the shocking lack of research on women's bodies and health as one of the most serious health care problems for women." Thinking About Women urges its readers to "consider the attention given to Viagra, the drug that treats male impotency and for which the scientists who did the basic research underlying its functioning were given the Nobel Prize. Would fewer women be dying from breast cancer if such resources were poured into its study?" This is pure hyperbole, as the facts clearly show. For example, beginning in 1985, when the NIH's National Cancer Center began keeping track of specific cancer funding, it has annually spent more money on breast cancer than any other type of cancer research. Currently, women rep-resent over 60 percent of all subjects in NIH-funded clinical trials. Moreover, if the authors of Women's Studies textbooks want to argue that the money invested in drugs such as Viagra is not well directed, shouldn't they also question the hundreds of millions of dollars spent (by women) every year on things such as plastic surgery and diet pills? Several of the Women's Studies textbooks surveyed also repeat the falsehood that silicone breast implants cause serious health problems in women. Issues in Feminism reprints the statement of Merle Hoffman, who wrote, in the wake of congressional hearings on silicone implants, that it was difficult to understand why "women so eagerly make life-threatening decisions to fit someone else's definition of being sexually acceptable." In fact, as subsequent research proved, and as scholars such as Sally L. Satel demonstrated, the silicone breast implant scare was a textbook case of "junk science" run amok. Only one textbook, Women in American Society, concedes this, noting that "as of 1997, the re-search had shown no large increased risk of traditional autoimmune disease" from implants. Other misinterpretations appear in discussions of women's health. In stark opposition to their concern with biological differences in medical research (where Women's Studies text-books emphasize biological differences between the sexes), in other contexts they downplay these realities. For example, one textbook correctly notes that hormone levels can be affected by factors in the environment, as when women who live together find that their menstrual cycles synchronize. But the textbook draws an incorrectly broad conclusion from this fact to suggest that biology is, in fact, socially constructed: "Increasingly similar living and working environments for women and men may create greater similarities between the sexes." Issues regarding men's health-including serious disparities such as the fact that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, men are less likely to have medical insurance than women- are glossed over quickly or attributed to what Women's Studies textbooks view as the real sickness masculinity. "Mortality differences between men and women are determined by 11 How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students. men's greater risk of death by accident," says Thinking About Women, but this is "itself a function of men's engagement in risky behavior, vio-lent activity, and alcohol consumption." Another health-related myth oft repeated in Women's Studies textbooks is that oppression is the cause of many health problems in minority groups. To be sure, rates of alcoholism, heart disease, hypertension, and other ailments are higher among certain groups in American society, but behavioral choices also play a role. The issue of individual responsibility in health is ignored by these textbooks, which instead proffer claims such as "racial-ethnic and class oppression in U.S. society further complicate pat-terns of health in men and women" and "Native Americans' health is also affected by the degree of oppression they experience." Again, as scholars such as Sally L. Satel have demonstrated, such sweeping claims of oppression in the health care system are insufficient explanations for disparities in health. Finally, some textbooks also demonstrate a notable bias for a nationalized health care system. Women in American Society, for example, states that "the United States is one of the few countries in the world in which basic health care needs are not provided as a basic right, and that failure helps contribute to the relatively high rates of maternal, fetal, and infant mortality." The arguments against nationalizing the health care system are not presented in the textbooks. It is no surprise that Women's Studies text-books distort the facts about women's health; the discipline of medicine-and indeed, of science in general-is viewed with suspicion by Women's Studies advocates. As one textbook stated, "these people-scientists-are like all human beings, products of their culture . . . their investigations and conclusions about female and male characteristics necessarily reflect the perspectives and expectations of the dominant male culture." In other words, science's guilt is presumed because it is an out-growth of "male culture." Issues in Feminism describes the process thus: "Without women's own perspectives to balance the historical fund of ignorance and superstition surrounding our lives, conventional (misogynist) wisdom has been carried into research by so-called authorities on the subject, has hardened into accepted theories, and has ultimately become 'science.'" Later, the author of the textbook introduces an essay, "Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Weapons," by noting that the writer "shows that the present 'masculinity of science' may very well kill us." Other textbooks dismiss entirely the notion of objectivity in science. Thinking About Women states matter-of-factly, "despite the strong claims of neutrality and objectivity by scientists, the fact is that science is closely tied to the centers of power in this society and interwoven with capitalist and patriarchal institutions." Science is not the only suspect field. Other textbooks describe the health care system as one that "has evolved during the past century into an entrenched hierarchy that expresses pervasive sexism, classism, and racism." Thinking About Women claims, "the most immediate context in which power relations can be seen in medicine is the doctor-patient relationship. Because women are more likely to make physician visits and 12 Lying in a Room of One's Own: It is no surprise that Women's Studies textbooks distort the facts about women's health; the discipline of medicine- and indeed, of science in general-is viewed with suspicion by Women's Studies advocates.. the overwhelming majority of doctors are men, this doctor-patient relationship is likely to reflect the gender roles in society." No evidence for these sweeping indictments is presented. Even nurses are portrayed as victims of an oppressive healthcare hierarchy. The authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices write that "nurses are treated as inferiors by physicians," and they "earn a very small fraction of the income that the physicians they serve earn." Of course, nurses are objectively "inferior" to physicians in terms of their medical training and skills, a fact that would also explain their lower salaries, but this is left unmentioned in the text-book's tirade against "the professional exploitation and oppression of nurses."
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Statistics are contested terrain, and nowhere more so than in the realm of domestic violence. Social scientists continue to debate the validity of such statistics, although you will not find mention of this fact in Women's Studies textbooks. Instead, you will find ambiguous statements such as "a fairly large proportion of women who show up in emergency rooms of hospitals for treatment of injuries are victims of a phenomenon known as wife battering" and "in the United States, every 15 seconds a woman is beaten." What students won't read in their Women's Studies textbook are the results of two widely-regarded government studies, one published by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1992 and another by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1997 ("Violence-Related Injuries Treated in Hospital Emergency Departments") that placed the percentage of women treated for domestic violence injuries in emergency rooms at closer to 1 percent. As Christina Hoff Sommers outlined in detail in her book Who Stole Feminism?, the portrait of domestic violence painted by Women's Studies professors and feminist activists is a far cry from reality. In addition, Women's Studies textbooks such as Women in American Society claim that "most research agrees that even when both partners engage in violence, men tend to be the primary perpetrators." In fact, agreement on this issue does not exist. The textbooks ignore research by respected social scientists such as Richard J Gelles and Murray A. Straus, perhaps because it reveals that women are just as likely to initiate violence against men (although women are more likely to suffer injury as a result of violent encounters). A study by Terrie Moffitt, Richard Robins, and Avshalom Caspi published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy in 2001 found that women were just as likely-and in some cases, more likely-to initiate violence. They concluded that the "male-dominance mo-del guiding feminist-oriented intervention pro-grams" is not correct. Rather, both men and women should be treated as potential instigators of violence in the home. Besides repeating incendiary statistics, Women's Studies textbooks also make sweeping claims about male violence that offer the reader no perspective for measuring the accuracy of the claims: Women's Realities, Women's Choices states that "physical violence, rape, wife and child battering, and incest have been found to exist far more commonly than ever acknowledged in the past." Thinking About Women claims that "these once-hidden problems now seem disturbingly common." The book then notes, "studies indicate that the overwhelming amount of domestic violence is directed against women." In fact, as noted above, many solid scholarly studies indicate the opposite-that women initiate violence as often as men. These alternative studies are never assessed outright; rather, the textbooks trivialize or ignore them. Thinking About Women claims that women's violence against men is "a phenomenon that has been exaggerated in the media." Other textbooks make sweeping claims about family violence that do little to inform readers of the complexity of the issue.Tacked onto a discussion of pregnancy in the textbook Women's Realities,Women's Choices is the unsub-13 HowWomen's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students.stantiated claim that "some men feel not only envy but rage [about their wife's pregnancy]; the 'battered wife syndrome' may start with pregnancy." In Thinking About Women, students are told-again without evidence-that "clear-ly, wife battering emerges from institutional arrangements that isolate women in the home and give men authority over them" and that "feminists have pointed to violence as the logi-cal result of both women's powerlessness in the family and a male culture that emphasizes ag-gression, domination, and violence." Women's Studies textbooks even extend their sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about violence to young men on college campuses. In Thinking About Women, readers are told that "fra-ternities . often have an organizational culture that is ripe for sexual violence. As social groups, fraternities are based on an ethic of masculinity. When masculinity is associated with competi-tion violence, and alcohol abuse and is further coupled with gender stereotyping of women, sexual violence is likely to occur." Although women have been the victims of violence in a fraternity setting, the absence of any data that place these sweeping claims about masculinity in perspective (for example, reliable statistics on rates of violence among members of frater-nities) leaves the reader with the impression that gang rapes on fraternity row are a regular occurrence.
EDUCATIONAL BIAS AGAINST WOMEN
Without a doubt, the story of women's educational achievement in the U.S. is one of enormous progress. One hundred years ago, women were barred from entering most universities; today, they receive the majority of bachelor's and master's degrees, and within a decade are projected to receive the majority of PhDs. Yet even this decidedly good news is not emphasized in Women's Studies textbooks. Typically, when statistics about women's educational achievement are presented, they are fol-lowed by a negative caveat. For example, the authors of Women's Realities,Women's Choices note women's "significant gains" in education, but state, "while more of us are obtaining doc-torates and professional degrees, we remain underrepresented at the highest levels." Thinking About Women summarizes women's edu-cational opportunities by arguing that "subtle and not-so-subtle messages still track students according to gender. Girls learn to devalue themselves in some fields in school." Even the curriculum is suspect, as the text-book Women in American Society reminds us. Lurking behind the "overt curriculum" in schools is a "hidden curriculum" that "still sup-ports traditional gender roles and, more specifi-cally, discourages girls who might otherwise stretch themselves beyond traditional bound-aries in intellectual skills and interest." Thinking About Women makes a similar argument, stat-ing- without evidence-that "educational cur-ricula are nested within the traditional culture and therefore reflect the same sexist, racist, cul-tural, and class biases that are found in the dom-inant culture." Why do these textbooks ignore the obvious progress women have made educationally? In large part because they unquestionably embrace politicized research produced by feminist org-anizations such as the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). In Women's Realities,Women's Choices, for example, readers are told that the AAUW's report "How Schools Shortchange Girls" offers definitive proof of "unequal treat-ment girls receive in a wide range of areas, in-cluding curricula, materials used in classrooms, testing, and teacher attention." Another text-book, Women in American Society, also uncriti-cally repeats the claims made in the AAUW study as well as the AAUW's accusations of gen-der bias in standardized testing. The authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices, for example, state, "as compared to 14 Lying in a Room of One's Own:.boys, girls receive less attention and praise from teachers; request less help; and are less domi-nant in class.... Even at the college level, teachers pay more attention to male students than to female students." Later, they begin their chapter on women and education by arguing that "women's educational choices continue to be limited" and even claim that "the same social conventions that hindered the acquisition of learning by women in earlier centuries still limit our educational opportunities." Nowhere does one find mention of the thorough critiques of these studies produced by scholars such as Christina Hoff Sommers-who debunked the AAUW's report in her book Who Stole Femin-ism?- and Judith Kleinfeld, among others.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND THE CANON
Since Women's Studies sees itself as playing a "transformative" role in scholarship, it is, as a discipline, generally hostile to efforts at preserving the canon of Western Civilization. Women's Studies textbooks reflect that bias. Describing the birth of Women's Studies as an academic discipline, the authors of Women's Re-alities, Women's Choices note that "resistance" to Women's Studies is pervasive: "The vocal op-position and national attention given to Stanford University's decision in 1988 to replace its core course in Western Civilization, which empha-sized 'classic texts' by primarily male contribu- tors, with a new course on 'Cultures, Ideas and Values' that requires students to read works by 'women, minorities, and persons of color' is indicative of this process." The authors conclude that proposals to save the canon "are demands that students continue to be exposed largely to the expression of Western, white, male authors, and that the humanities be kept from fostering new social changes." While rejecting the canon, these same authors recommend, among other questionable texts, books such as I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, which scholars have proven to be fraudulent. In a similar vein, Thinking AboutWomen sug-gests that criticism of Women's Studies stems from insecurity about its transformative power: "Resistance to these more inclusive studies has been fierce and indicates the extent to which new knowledge from women's studies and the different racial ethnic studies programs chal-lenges existing ways of thought." No truck is given to the many issues critics have raised about such programs over the past several decades. This goes back to Women's Studies' view of it-self as a discipline that must transform knowl-edge. Thinking About Women argues that "academ-ic knowledge is created within specific institu-tional structures. Because the production of research and scholarship is tied to the setting in which it develops, the noticeable absence or invisibility of women in these settings has con-tributed to the invisibility of women and their distortion in research." 15 HowWomen's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students."B ias-which means prejudice, the absence of objectivity-derives from a term that means oblique, slanted, not standard or true, off-center." So begins a section on "Bias in Academe" in the popular introductory Women's Studies textbook Issues in Feminism. As we will see, Women's Studies textbooks are themselves purveyors of bias-skewing information, telling only part of the story, and failing to include facts that might inconvenience their arguments. Although different from blatant errors of fact, these many errors of interpretation are nonethe-less pernicious.
WOMEN UNDER SIEGE
It is a truth universally acknowledged in Women's Studies textbooks that women have been and continue to be the victims of oppres-sion. Sheila Ruth opens her textbook Issues in Feminism with the claim that the twenty years her book has been in print "have not been good for women or for progressive social activism in general." She argues, "in almost every culture, the tools and conditions necessary for learning and analysis, the means of communication, and the forms of legitimization of knowledge have been jealously and effectively kept from wom-en." Another textbook claims, "as women we experience social restrictions regarding edu-cation, choice of work, mobility, forms of cul-tural expression, and political participation." Thinking About Women sets a slightly more dra-matic scene, imagining how readers might awake to the reality of women's subordinate position in society. "Perhaps at school you see that most of the professors are men . or per-haps at work you notice that women are con-centrated in the lowest-level jobs and are some-times treated as if they were not even there. It may occur to you one night as you are walking through city streets that the bright lights shin-ing in the night skyline represent the thousands of women-many of them African-American, Latina, or Asian American-who clean the cor-porate suites and offices for organizations that are dominated by White men." This attitude of women-under-siege seeps into discussions of history as well. Unable to paper over the fact that a majority of Western civilization's greatest poets happen to be men, for example, one textbook petulantly suggests that "powerful female poets already exist in the Western tradition," but they have not been ap-preciated "by students whose teachers are pre-judiced by sexist values." Thinking About Women states that "traditional systems of knowledge have ignored women altogether or frequently portrayed them in stereotypical or demeaning ways." In this rendering, the entire Western in-tellectual tradition is suspect; the same text-book approvingly quotes feminist sociologist Marcia Westkott: "When women realize that we are simultaneously immersed in and estrange from both our own particular discipline and the Western intellectual tradition generally, a per-sonal tension develops that informs the critical dialogue." Women's Studies textbooks encour-age their readers to embrace this "outsider" sta-tus with regard to the Western intellectual tra-dition. 16 Lying in a Room of One's Own:
III. Errors of Interpretation.
More common are sweeping and unsubstantiated statements about women's subordination. For example, nearly every chapter in the text-book Women's Realities,Women's Choices opens with an obligatory oppression roll call: "All women suffer discrimination by virtue of our gender in jobs and social benefits." "The law still acts to oppress women and treat us unfairly in many ways." Margaret Andersen writes, in Thinking About Women, that a "matrix of domination" that includes sex, class, and race works to oppress everyone but white men. Similarly, the authors of Gender & Culture in America argue that "the overall effect of the twentieth century on wom-en was neither liberation nor gender equality as much as it was change in the nature and mean-ing of their fragmentation." One of the central oppressors was the state itself. As Thinking About Women reminds readers, "although we have had some gains in the last thirty years, women-feminist or nonfeminist-still live in a hostile environment.We live within a struggle." But hasn't that struggle led to gains for women-gains clearly visible in levels of educa-tional and workplace achievement? Not accord-ing to Women's Studies textbooks.They describe the oppressive conditions of bygone eras and then equate them, incorrectly, with modern times.Thus we read, in Women's Realities, Wo-men's Choices, that Aristotle believed that neither women nor children had the capacity for ration-al thinking and that this belief "was reflected in a society system wherein women and children were excluded from public life." True enough. But the next sentence gives pause: "In modern America we often find similar attitudes." Another tactic is to assume that discrimina-tion is the cause of all differences between the sexes with regard to public achievement. In a chapter on "Women, Power, and Politics" in the textbook Thinking About Women, the author asks, "Why are there so few women elected officials?" Her first response? "One explanation is that sheer prejudice has taught people to think that women are not well suited to politics." Her next reason? False consciousness. "A second explanation of the small number of women in politics is that gender-stereotyped socialization does not encourage women to see themselves as poten-tial political candidates." Of the five Women's Studies textbooks surveyed here, none described women's suc-cess without caveats. Even in Women in American Society, one of the more reasonable textbooks, author Virginia Sapiro notes that "the American public is less prejudiced against women than it used to be, and people (especially women) hold fewer gender-based stereotypes than they used to hold." But she follows this by invoking a "modern sexism" that "incorporates denial that women still face any discrimination, antagonism toward women's demands, and a lack of sup-port for policies designed to help women over-come historical prejudices and discrimination." The intense focus on women under siege is a key justification for Women's Studies pedagogy. In this drama,Women's Studies professors are depicted as the first group to launch a thorough scholarly challenge to these supposedly limited social roles for women. In her forward to the first edition of Women's Realities,Women's Choices, a textbook produced by the Hunter College Women's Studies Collective (and the first in-troductory Women's Studies textbook ever published), Donna Shalala, then-president of Hunter College, wrote that the book "symbolizes the coming of age of the Women's Studies movement. Indeed, the substance of this book 17 HowWomen's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students Of the five Women's Studies textbooks surveyed here, none described women's success without caveats..represents years of struggle by courageous scholar-teachers, to be taken seriously by their more traditional colleagues."
VICTIMS OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
How does a movement convinced of its own correctness and intent on transform-ing society deal with dissidents among its own flock? As we learn from Women's Studies text-books, women who don't recognize their own oppression really aren't to blame.As the authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices remind us, "We have not been taught to use our critical fac-ulties, and we have little self-esteem and few ways to develop it apart from society's narrowly approving means." Our only recourse to "sur-vive in a world dominated by men" is the "inter-nalization of society's views" and surrender to the impulse to "shape ourselves according to this demeaning imagery." Indeed, if these textbooks are any guide, a vast force called "internalized oppression" haunts the female of the species. "As individuals within an oppressed group," we are reminded, "we tend to accept the stereotypes of ourselves formulated by the dominant group in society, setting up a pattern of low self-esteem and iso-lation." The textbook Issues in Feminism notes that "strong forces both within institutions, and within women, impel many women to be ab-sorbed into the male worldview rather than to create a new one." And we learn such things at our mother's knees, "mothers who themselves were bent to the yoke as we are meant to be." In a later chapter we find an extended section on "mind control as an instrument of patriar-chy," wherein women's place in society is des-cribed as a form of slavery: "An even more per-fect form of slavery was one in which the slaves were unaware of their condition, unaware that they were controlled, believing instead that they had freely chosen their life and situation.The control of women by patriarchy is effected in just such a way, by mastery of beliefs and attitudes through the management of all the agen-cies of belief formation." The author goes on to indict education, the media, social science, and religion for encouraging this bondage. The media is a favorite villain in Women's Studies textbooks' discussions of false conscious-ness, for it constantly bombards women with negative images. As Thinking About Women tells us, "advertisements convey the message that women should be afraid-afraid of aging, afraid of food, afraid of being alone." Even innocent condiments are not spared.The author of Think-ing About Women calls the Native American woman kneeling on the Land O' Lakes butter package a "gender and race stereotype." Overall, "women tend to be portrayed in roles in which they are trivialized, condemned, or narrowly de-fined, resulting in the symbolic annihilation of women by the media." Referring to content analyses of television programs, for example, the textbooks criticize a broad range of entertain-ment, particularly soap operas, where "strong, successful women are depicted as villains and 'good' women are seen as vulnerable and naïve." The one quandary Women's Studies textbooks doesn't resolve is why so many people watch and enjoy these demeaning programs-and why the overwhelming majority of those people are women. Finally, Women's Studies textbooks urge their readers to combat false consciousness by working toward the formation of group con-sciousness. The author of Women in American Society, for example, writes that "women with-out a group consciousness simply regret their personal fault for their situation and do whatev-er they can as individuals to better themselves. When the system is rigged against them, such solutions are doomed to failure.Women with a group consciousness work to change the situa-tion of women as a group." Of course, the claim that the "system is rigged against" women is a strong assumption, one that should, at the very least, be buttressed with factual evidence. In sum, it is disquieting to see the ease with which Women's Studies textbooks jettison notions of 18 Lying in a Room of One's Own:.individual responsibility in favor of an amor-phous false consciousness.
THE ROLE-MODEL MYTH
A lthough the media supposedly bombards us with negative images of women, histo-ry has also come up short when it comes to role models. Women's Studies textbooks assume that, in order to succeed, young women require female historical role models. Surveying the world of art, the authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices ask, "How can subsequent gen-erations of women avoid being discouraged by the assumption that there have been no impor-tant women artists?" They cite approvingly the work of feminist theorist Helen Vendler, who claims, "no woman can fail to hope for the ap-pearance of a woman poet of Shakespearean or Keatsian power." But this assumes that women can't or shouldn't draw inspiration from male artists, who have, after all, produced some of civilization's most outstanding artistic work. Why shouldn't we encourage young women to emulate Shakespeare as well as Sappho-the latter a perennial favorite in Women's Studies textbooks? Linked to the notion that women need their own personal pantheon of "herstorical" hero-ines is the idea that only women can speak to the experience of women at the level of theory. The author of Thinking About Women claims that "theories of social life centered in White men's experiences are unable to explain the experi-ences of women and people of color," surely news to the generations of white, male sociolo-gists, psychologists, and theorists who have made important contributions to the study of human behavior.
SEXUALITY
Women's Studies textbooks evince a spe-cial confusion on the issue of human sex-uality. Thinking About Women begins its exposition of human sexuality by claiming that we have all been ensnared in a web of "phallocentric think-ing," here defined as "that which assumes women need men for sexual arousal and satisfaction." Linked to this is "compulsory heterosexuality," a phrase coined by feminist theorist Adrienne Rich and frequently deployed in textbooks, to describe the "institutionalized practices that pre-sume that women are innately sexually oriented toward men" and to explain how "heterosexuali-ty is maintained by social control." Contemporary courtship comes under fire in textbooks as well. The authors of Gender & Culture in America, for example, fret about a "culture of romance" on college campuses.The culture of romance is the "world of flirtations, boyfriends, thoughts about marriage, and wom-en's concerns about their physical attractive-ness" that they believe "effectively subverts the career development of many young women" by drawing their energies away from pursuing pro-fessional success and toward ensnaring men. "It is clear that the culture of romance entails male privilege," the authors write, so "why don't more [women] resist?" Although there is nothing wrong with study-ing the many manifestations of human sexuali-ty, Women's Studies textbooks tend to empha-19 HowWomen's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students Linked to the notion that women need their own personal pantheon of "herstorical" heroines is the idea that only women can speak to the exper-ience of women at the level of theory..size the exceptions rather than the rules. The facts are clear: A majority of the human popula-tion is heterosexual, and most people identify with one sex or the other.Yet Thinking About Women encourages readers to imagine a society with more than one gender: "Many cultures consider there to be three genders, or even more," the author notes approvingly. Readers are then treated to a discussion of transgendered folks like the berdaches of Navajo society and the hijras of India-both cases of special classes of men who live as women.The author's con-clusion? "These examples are good illustrations of the cultural basis of gender" and suggest "how the dichotomous thinking that defines men and women as 'either/or' can be transformed." Later, the textbook suggests that we should be "doing gender," which means "rather than see-ing gender as a fixed or learned set of roles, this framework interprets gender as an ongoing and fluctuating series of behaviors that is created through social interaction." In addition, sweeping claims such as "for women, sexuality seems to be more diverse, in contrast to the phallic-centered sexuality of men" and "lesbians, like heterosexual women, prefer romance, physical closeness, and intima-cy- sex is less 'goal-oriented'" offer readers no perspective on the many interesting and schol-arly debates surrounding sexuality.
MARRIAGE
Imagine you are a college freshman, enrolled in an introductory Women's Studies course. You've learned about women's oppression and have become comfortable with words such as "phallocentric" and "patriarchal." But what about issues that hit a little closer to home? What does Women's Studies have to say about things like marriage, children, and other ques-tions on the minds of young women? Not a lot that is positive, evidently. At the be-ginning of their chapter on "Wives," the nine authors of Women's Realities,Women's Choices admit that "our experiences, whether or not we were involved in stable, 'happy' marriages, led us to take a uniformly critical stance on this insti-tution, to regard it as an instrument of social op-pression." A few pages later, they aver: "The institution of marriage and the role of 'wife' are intimately connected with the subordination of women in society in general. It is the constraints on women to engage freely in various social ac-tivities, whether in sexual intercourse, econo-mic exchanges, politics, or war, that make us 'dependent' on men, that oblige us to become 'wives.'" The authors' use of scare quotes around words such as wife and happy in the passages above suggest an overwhelmingly cynical and pessimistic attitude toward marriage. The author of Thinking About Women offers a similarly grim vision. "Although intimate rela-tionships- whether sexual or not-are formed, in part, by the individual attitudes and attributes of those within them, they are significantly shaped by the institutional and historical context in which they develop.Thus, patriarchy, hetero-sexist institutions, the class structure, and racism all have a strong influence on the formation of intimacy." This is a vision of intimacy that re-places "How do I love thee?" with "How do I love thee, let me count the heterosexist, patriarchal ways." Later, the same textbook discusses in detail the "promise and disillusionment" of the "marriage myth." Women's Studies textbooks also enjoy re-peating the helpful statistic that "married wom-en have higher rates of mental disorder than do married men, but single, divorced, and wid-owed women have lower rates of mental disor-der than do similarly situated men," as Women in American Society notes.Yet the fact that more married women suffer from mental illness than do single women doesn't tell us anything about whether or not marriage caused their mental ill-ness. Correlation is not causation. Not everyone who enters the married state loses, of course. According to Women's Studies textbooks, men are greedy benefactors of the institution. The authors of Women's Realities, Women's Choices state, "on balance, it would ap-20 Lying in a Room of One's Own:.pear that husbands gain much more than wives. They not only gain domestic servants, sexual companions, and producers of children but also political assets and instruments for acquiring allies." Issues in Feminism suggests a similar ar-rangement, one where men "benefit consider-ably from marriage, whereas women lose a great deal." This should "come as no surprise," we are told, because "in terms of emotional ex-change, economics, work, independence, free-dom and mobility, autonomy and authentici-ty- traditional marriage offers to women and men a double standard, and women's part of that standard is truly the less advantaged." It is only after the laundry list of charges against marriage is read that Women's Studies textbooks grudgingly admit that it is not a uni-versally reviled institution. Women's Realities, Women's Choices admits, "not all marriages are glum and terminally doomed. Many women en-joy being married." Nonetheless, the authors conclude that "today's economic and social climate, in which many women earn our own in-comes and have choices concerning whether and when to have children, favors experimentation with new forms of commitment and family life."