With Will to Choose

What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices...Which works have become part of the "canon" of literature, read, thought about, discussed, and which have disappeared dependent on the process of selection and the power to select along the way. Such power, in England and America, has always belonged to white men. That class has written the record called literary history, which is clearly shaped by the attitudes, conscious or unconscious, of white men toward nonwhites and nonmales. As a result of the process whereby male power makes male culture and, therefore, male taste, the literary work of women has either been excluded from literary history or, when included, has been distorted by the values of the class that has transmitted it. From the Introduction   by Louise Bernikow to The World Split Open (L. Bernikow, ed.)   N.Y., Vintage Books, 1974

While questions are still being raised regarding the criteria used for enrollment in my Currier House course on Biology and Women's Issues, I should like to explain why I believe that it may be legitimate in some cases to select as participants in a course women, or blacks, or some other group which historically has not been represented in the elaboration of the traditional, accepted view that constitutes our perception of "reality" in a particular field.

Before doing that, I want to establish two points:

1. No one was kept from enrolling in my course at this particular time. In a long, thorough, and at times painful discussion, it was agreed that all the students then in the room (nine women and three men) could not fruitfully participate in a single seminar, structured in a discussion format, because of the great range of preparation, experience and expectations. We therefore had to decide which of two possible courses we were going to have: one that was elementary, descriptive and historical, or a more advanced and theoretical course. It was apparent that the three men in the room lacked the basic background in feminist literature required for participation in the latter. I made it clear that I was prepared to teach either, though I would have been dishonest not to admit that in a small seminar format, I would prefer to participate in the more advanced course. (I also teach in a large and more descriptive lecture course, Biology and Social Issues; I and five others lead the discussion sections, of which one explores the feminist perspective). The fact that the three men recognized that their level of interest and commitment was quite different from that of the women and decided not to enroll shows that all of us shared a common understanding of the alternatives and of the final decision. (I might note that I offered the men Independent Studies, to enable them to pursue their interests in feminist or women's issues in a systematic way.)

The 13 of us do not seem to have succeeded in communicating what happened in our discussion to others. Some people insist on seeing wide theoretical questions in what, this time, happens to have been a specific and practical issue.

2. In what follows, I shall have to use the words male and female, men and women. I want to make it clear at the outset that I am not talking about known biological differences between the sexes. I am talking about human adults who are the products of upward of 18 years of socialization. What, if any, of their sex-dimorphic social behavior is biologically determined I do not know and I do not think anyone else does either. Nor do I know any practical way to find out.

Our interpretation of reality is a construction that depends on the nature of the institutions that have social sanction to construct and validate what we perceive as real. In our own Western tradition, these have been the church, the state, and more recently the sciences. At present, the sciences are the chief generators and certifiers of reality.

The sciences translate nature into language. In this process, they employ the rules not only of grammar but of what conceptualizations are permissible about the world.

So we must ask: What sort of people have given us the version of the world that we accept as real and true? Who in Western society have been the church fathers, the statesmen, the scientists? And of course, part of the answer is contained in the very words of our question: they have been almost entirely the male scions of social privileged families. Therefore it becomes one of the tasks of those groups who have been excluded from the tradition of reality-making to examine the "real world" critically from their own viewpoints, and to generate their own models of those aspects that contradict or blatantly exclude their own experience.

Schools at all levels, including the universities, have traditionally been the sanctioned purveyers of accepted realities: their task is to continue and extend the job that begins at home, of teaching the young person what she or he shall or shall not accept as real. To quote from Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan:

[Don Juan] pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to Don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged...when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.

But the process never ends. Again and again in her or his life the child must learn first to see and then to admire the Emperor's elegant new clothes. (Only the "insane" fail to do so.)

One of the basic things the child is taught is what its parents learn first and often hold most precious about it: its sex. That moment in which Mrs. and Mr. Jones are told that they have just become proud parents of a ... (fill in the blank) affects significantly their attitudes toward the new baby. And they, in turn, determine an important portion of the baby's relationship to society and its outlook on the world. The baby at birth is destined for "full membership" as a woman or a man, a large part of its socialization at home and in school will be directed towards making it an acceptable member of the one group and not of the other.

It is a historical fact that the present construct of reality was assembled at a time (right up till now) when women were excluded automatically and without question from the church, the state, and the universities. This is one reason why women's contributions play little part in the reality that is presented to us. "I would venture to guess," writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, "that Anon, who wrote to many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

The few examples of women's achievement that we learn about in school serve only to reinforce the notion that these are all that exist so that not until the recent wave of scholarship about women have we begun to be aware of the rich heritage of women's activities that has been erased from history. So, Virginia Woolf had no idea how many women had been writing when she imagined for the fate of Shakespeare's "wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith" who, like her brother, loved the theater and wanted to act and write.

To exclude women from the public sphere and confine them to domesticity has been so clearly in the interests of the male makers and legitimators of reality that they have not needed to think, much less to talk, about it. But even if it were true (which it is not) that women's achievements have been domestic, while men's were public, it is a social decision to value the one and devalue the other.

What has all this to do with us at Harvard? Everything. Of late, women have been invited to enter a world that has been constructed by men for men's use, delectation, and betterment. The question is, do women merely want to participate in this world that we had no share in making. Don't we need to gain the space to look around and decide what things look like to us? Since reality is primarily a male construct, the female student is put in a peculiar position. She can either ignore the potential difference between the prevailing view and what she might see if she had a chance to look, and busily learn the accepted view of reality, or she can become interested in that potential for difference, inquire more deeply into her female roots and history, and explore them.

It is a psychological fact, that unfortunately all of us grow up so completely embedded in the prevailing paradigm of reality that we internalize it to the point where it seems the only possible and natural one. (Indeed, isn't that what it means to enter the fellowship of educated men and women--that one has at last learned to stop asking certain kinds of questions?)

Becoming conscious of this internalization is extremely difficult and requires a process that the exiled Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, has called "conscientizacao," sometimes translated "consciousness raising." In practice it is done most successfully by groups of people who have had similar experiences, marginal to the mainstream and who feel that the social accepted view of reality differs significantly from their own, though often in ways they cannot define or describe to their own satisfaction. By sharing their experiences of the ways in which the dominant view is not their own (and has often victimized them), they begin to see the world in new ways and to generate new and different constructs of reality. At the stage of analysis when the group is striving to create new visions, challenge and counter-argument are usually not helpful and are often destructive, particularly if they come from proponents of the traditional and accepted view from which the innovators themselves are only just beginning to emerge. In the long run, of course, the new model has to fend for itself, but while it is being born it needs to be sheltered against the requirement to measure "up" at every stage to the normative standard of the prevailing view.

This is why I believe that feminist theory must be generated by the collaborative efforts of feminists. Now it so happens, for rather obvious historical and social reasons, that feminists, by and large, are women. Those rare men who are indeed feminists would probably be the first to agree that there are large areas of feminist theory to which they have nothing to contribute. In our supremely sex-dichotomized society, that means that for the most part, men can usefully participate only in the product and not in the process. Therefore, any self-respecting program of women's studies or feminist studies--any program that puts forward new visions of reality--will have to leave women space in which to explore. Such a program will have to offer opportunities for intensive, self-searching theory building, some of which will for the present need to be limited to feminists (and/or females), just as advanced courses in biology are limited to biologists, in history, to historians (or to "others who satisfy the instructor that they have equivalent preparation"). At present, when this kind of material is dealt with in a mixed group, both the women and the men often feel that they are being stereotyped and watched. Moreover, the women sometimes begin to feel as though, for the men, they were part of the subject matter of the course. Clearly, there will also have to be more descriptive courses that introduce any interested person to the subject.

The problem at Harvard now is that among an offering of approximately 700 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, about half a dozen deal explicitly with women's experiences and only one or two do so from a feminist perspective. These few courses cannot possibly satisfy all comers. It is to be hoped that once this university realizes that it is a defect not to offer courses in women's studies, it will also understand that the female experience and/or a thorough acquaintance with feminist theory will have to be a prerequisite for some, though by no means all, of them.

In summary, then, I believe: (1) that we need first of all the recognition that the interdisciplinary field of Women's Studies is a vital area of modern scholarship and that this university must offer courses in it; (2) that these courses must be pitched at different levels so that people with no prior knowledge can be introduced to the voluminous and rapidly growing literature, while those who are ready for advanced work can do that (3) that different courses must be taught by people with different outlooks on feminism and on what should be included in Women's Studies, so that the style of learning and teaching can evolve along with the content. The possibilities in this area are exciting, as they are in any new field that is defining itself. This university must foster and encourage such explorations and not try to brand every innovation illegitimate.

This brings me to Harvard's use of Title IX in reverse. The intent of Title IX was to redress iniquities that have arisen as a result of an institution's history of discrimination. All the institutions that have generated our presentday Western reality and values have such a history. Title IX not only exempts programs designed "to overcome the effects of past exclusion," but "requires remedial action to overcome the effects of previous discrimination." I honestly do not understand how Title IX can be warped to apply to the selection of feminists and/or women for the kinds of courses in feminist theory that try to examine the basic assumptions of male-generated values and structures of reality from the perspective of women's experience.

Harvard and like institutions have invented an entire vocabulary of Newspeak to get around Title IX and Affirmative Action, with words like "equal access," "quality," and "standards." (Remember that George Orwell defined Newspeak as the introduction of new words and the simultaneous elimination of old ones, so as to make only the allowed thoughts thinkable.) Indeed, Harvard's tradition is so entirely based on discrimination that the present furor about the Currier House course makes one wonder where all the advocates of equality and justice have been all this time. Certainly they have not been crying with outrage at the daily indignities and discrimination that women, minorities and poor people encounter in this university, dominated by socially privileged white men.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman--whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the sense and hands... We may also infer...that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that in woman.   --Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise us, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable. These are the duties of a woman at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.   --J.J. Rousseau, Emile

[Ruth Hubbard is a professor of Biology at Harvard.]