Christina Stolba has written an excellent 33-page summary of the overwhelming deficiencies of the most popular textbooks used for Women’s Studies courses in the United States. According to Stolba’s report,
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.
One of the textbooks Stolba looks at is Sheila Ruth’s Issues in Feminism, which I skewered here many years ago.
Stolba goes through the litany of problems from absurd factual errors to stereotyping to the anti-intellectualism (in too many of these textbooks, critical thinking is blasted as an artificial construct of the patriarchy). But the most absurd abuse of the textbooks is their condescending attitudes toward young men and women.
Stolba notes, for example, that the authors of the textbook Gender & Culture in America conducted surveys of their students and found that, “nearly all of the women, but none of the men interviewed, plan to curtail or cease their paid employment after their children are born.” They cite one female student proud of her GPA and career prospects but who tells the authors that she believes “children suffer if their mothers work outside the home.”
Of course to a movement that places so much emphasis on reproductive choicest, there can be no room for allowing young women to make their own choices in other areas. The authors of Gender & Culture in America simply conclude that women like this student are victims who “are apparently unaware that in these decisions they are following traditional gender stereotypes.”
Except when having an abortion, no woman in radical feminism ever makes choices except when their actions agree with the radical feminist view of the world. Anything else is chalked up to false consciousness, patriarchal oppression, and/or implicit societal-wide threats against women. And yet, even though radical feminists constantly circumscribe the range of acceptable choices for young women, they still scratch their collective heads in amazement at the general rejection of their philosophy.
Could it possibly be that, unlike their sisters in academia, young women in fact take the pro-choice message about deciding for themselves to heart. For academic feminists, “pro-choice” is just a convenient ideological term that serves a political purpose. For many younger men and women, however, choosing for themselves is a way of life, and such people have as little use for the boring constraints of radical feminism as they do for traditional anti-feminism. And good for them.
Source:
Just in Time for Women?s History Month, Review of Women?s Studies Textbooks Reveals Questionable Scholarship, Ideological Bias, and Sins of Omission. Independent Women’s Forum, March 20, 2002.