One of the areas where feminist activists deserve credit for genuine improvements in sexual equality in higher education. Through the first several decades of the 20th century, many elite colleges were simply closed to women while others strictly limited the courses and disciplines women could enter. Sex discrimination was the rule rather than the exception. Feminists initiated both legal and moral challenges that today have effectively eliminated such sexual discrimination. Now, however, some feminists want to modify this ban on sex discrimination in academia. The new credo is that sex-based discrimination is wrong unless it is directed by feminists against men.
That is the conclusion that a reasonable observer of the flap over radical feminist Mary Daly’s teaching practices might conclude. Daly is a tenured professor at Boston College, where she’s taught since 1967. The author of several feminist books, including Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology, Daly is one of the few people who make Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, look moderate in comparison. In Gyn/Ecology, for example, Daly devotes several
pages to the hidden sexually oppressive meaning behind the United States’ decision to name its lunar landing program after the Greek god Apollo (Daly complains that “while overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society.”)
But the subject of the current controversy is not Daly’s bizarre beliefs but her teaching practices – she refuses to allow men to enroll in a class she teaches on feminist ethics. Daly says men are intolerable in her classes because “what the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances, I decided, and many others have, that there’s a reality called women’s space. There has to be a separate space for women.”
And, of course, by definition, a separate space for men. In the past, Daly had gone so far as to take a sabbatical for a semester when she suspected a male student might try to enroll in her class. To be fair to her, Daly is a firm believer in the principle of separate but equal. She is willing to instruct men outside the classroom setting in one-on-one sessions but maintains they are just
too disruptive for the classroom environment.
Daly’s separate but equal position received support from her students and prominent media pundits and academics. Kate Heekin, a former student of Daly’s, told CNN she didn’t want men in her feminist ethics classes. “I want to talk about women,” Heekin said. “I don’t want to teach anyone about why I feel oppressed, why we live in a patriarchy – I don’t want to waste my energy on that.” Heekin and 14 other Boston College students wrote a letter to college administrators asking them to keep the women-only policy.
Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara wrote a blistering article attacking male students at Boston College who dared suggest they were being discriminated against by the women-only policy. “Boys, boys, boys, settle down,” McNamara began her article. “Mary didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She knows you hate being excluded, that you get cranky when you feel left out.”
McNamara went on to complain about the men “sulking” over not being allowed to enroll in the class. As McNamara puts it, the men have it all wrong. “She doesn’t refuse to teach men; she assigns them to a separate section … The studies are clear: from grade to graduate school, males dominate the classroom.
They demand more attention and they get it.”
“Given the choice,” McNamara concludes her remarks, “I’ll stand with Mary Daly.”
McNamara joins Daly’s attack on the male Boston College students who started the controversy by threatening to sue the college if denied entry into the class. Daly claims the threatened lawsuit was part of a broader conspiracy to “assert white male supremacy.” Aside from being white males, the students’ main offense has been to enlist the help of the Center for Individual Rights for legal representation. As McNamara puts it, “Of all the lawyers that might represent an aggrieved student, isn’t it curious his cause is championed by the Center
for Individual Rights, which has fought affirmative action policies at universities from Texas to Michigan?”
Harvard Divinity Professor Harvey Cox echoed the vast right-wing conspiracy angle in an opinion piece in the Boston Globe. “I cannot believe,” Cox wrote, “that the real issue here is about a few classes that are open only to women
… After two decades of relentless gender leveling in higher education, everyone now recognizes that some women (and men) learn certain things better in gender-specific situations.”
A major irony in the attacks on the male students seeking to take her classes is that Daly owes her position in part to male students. In 1969 Boston College decided to terminate Daly’s contract due to her virulent anti-Catholicism (after returning from Rome for the Second Vatican Council, for example, Daly urged feminists to “laugh out loud at their [the Catholic Church’s] pompous penile
processions.”) At the time Boston College was a male-only school, but more than 1,500 students turned out to protest the administration’s decision to sack Daly. Eventually, the college reversed its decision. Given a choice, the male students at Boston College decided that academic freedom should apply to professors of both sexes. Daly, unfortunately, choose not to reciprocate this gender-blind approach.
The reader can easily imagine the reaction to this controversy were the roles to be reversed. Imagine an engineering professor at a major American college refusing to allow women to enroll in his classes because, he says, study after study demonstrates women’s inferior mathematical abilities. After explaining how he can’t slow his classes down to accommodate the women, who will surely demand far more attention than the men, the sexist professor might offer to teach women one-on-one where he can meet their special needs without disrupting his classes.
A female student might decide this violated numerous federal laws and perhaps contact a leading civil rights organization to sue the offending college to end its practice. But, some astute columnist at the local paper might ask, isn’t that a
lesbian lawyer representing the plaintiffs? And isn’t she the same lawyer who has been trying to push the homosexual agenda down people’s throats by bringing hate crimes lawsuits? Clearly, the only possible conclusion would be that this is a well-coordinated attack by “feminazis” on everything true and good – after all, nobody in her right might could oppose sexual discrimination in public institutions simply because it is wrong.
Daly’s behavior and McNamara’s impassioned defense of sexual discrimination highlight how far contemporary feminism has wandered off the path of sexual equality. Where once feminists bravely stood up for the principle of genuine equality between men and women, today many feminists in academia and the media have merely reversed the ages-old conservative stereotypes of women, defining them as the norm and men as something less (or as “The Other” to use the faddish postmodern term).
Feminists did an excellent job in showing the hypocrisy of paternalists who kept women from pursuing higher education and effectively mocked those who argued women simply couldn’t handle intellectually weighty classes or might prove too much of a disruption in the classroom. In fact, feminists relied heavily on such ideas of sexual equality to force male-only schools such as The Citadel to open their doors to women rather than set up separate programs for
women which, feminists argued, would be inherently inferior. Today, however,
all too many feminists openly accept and defend the view that sexual stereotypes and discrimination are to be tolerated, if not encouraged, provided they are created by feminists and used against men.
The claim that some topics were simply too intellectually challenging for women or that women would disrupt universities’ learning process were extremely harmful myths, and their near-eradication by the feminist movement was a good thing. But in their place, some feminists have begun to construct new myths about gender that are equally odious. Although it is no longer politically correct (nor should it be) to suggest that women don’t belong in certain classes or universities, numerous Women’s Studies textbooks, journal articles, and other materials repeat claims that men’s participation in classes is wholly negative and disruptive (so much for the oft-mentioned goal
of diversity in the classroom).
Women’s Studies professors Marcia Bedard and Beth Hartung write in an essay that male (but not female) students who “stat[e] the exception to every generalization” that a professor makes are guilty of harassment. When several male students in Magda Lewis’ feminist theory class dared to suggest that violence was a human problem, rather than exclusively a male problem, Lewis included the incident in a Harvard Education Review article as an example of the sort of oppression women experience on a daily basis.
So long as so many feminists continue to agree with ultra-conservatives that men and women are fundamentally different and must be treated fundamentally differently in similar social contexts, a world of true equality will always remain elusive, much to the detriment of humanity regardless of sex.