A Feminist Manifesto for Education

Miriam E. David

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509504275, 9781509504268
• eBook ISBN: 9781509504305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The idea that gender equality in education has been achieved is now a staple of public debate. As a result, educational policies and practices often do not deal explicitly with gender issues, such as sexual abuse, harassment or violence. Exaggeration of neoliberalism's successes in creating individual opportunity in education conceals ongoing problems and ignores the continuing need for a fair and equal education for all, regardless of gender or sexuality. In this manifesto for education, Miriam David rejects the notion that gender equality has been achieved in our age of neoliberalism. She puts the focus back onto issues such as changing patterns of women's and girls' participation in education across the globe, feminist strategies for policy and legal interventions around human rights, and violence against women and children. She discusses waves of feminism linked to school-teaching and pedagogies in higher education as well as an illuminating case study of an international educational programme to challenge gender-related violence. Revealing neoliberal education to be 'misogyny masquerading as metrics', Miriam David argues for changes in the patriarchal rules of the game, including questioning 'gender norms' and stereotypical binaries, and for making personal, social, health and sexuality education mainstream.

Part I
Socio-Cultural and Political Backgrounds and Contexts

1
Feminist Research on Gender and Education

Introduction

Here, I set the scene for developing my feminist educational manifesto, by considering the background to current research on gender and education, and women and girls’ place within the wider society. This issue is rather more complex than it might appear at first sight. There is much evidence from both academic activist studies and evidence-based policy work for different governments and international organizations in developing or critiquing competitive forms of capitalism. In this chapter, I consider the contested but nuanced feminist research on gender and education, largely conducted in universities. However, the funding, as we shall see, has largely been from organizations that have been committed to policy-relevant research within a neoliberal political framework.

Waves of feminists, from first-wave to second-wave and beyond to the fourth wave of the twenty-first century, have successfully campaigned for women’s inclusion in public and political agendas, across the globe. In particular, feminism is no longer a minor political interest, and although the f-word is often reviled, it also frequently appears in popular and social media. The question of its importance on educational agendas is nevertheless contested, particularly around questions of equality, equity, fairness and the future.

The commitment to women’s equality has been a complex and contradictory process, from social democratic or socialist agendas to incorporation into liberal processes. Individualism, or ‘the selfie generation’, has become a hallmark of neoliberalism, resulting in some acceptance of gender equality, while neo-patriarchy, everyday sexism and misogyny continue unabated. This is partly because the social and structural conditions for transformation have not altered, but individual opportunities for enhancement, especially through education, have.

Alison Wolf (2013) celebrates the ways in which middle-class women have been able to succeed as educated women in the labour market, often at the expense of poorer and less fortunate women. Yet others succeed even though they may not have had opportunities for higher education (HE). A particularly important example is how Caitlin Moran has become a feisty feminist journalist and advocate for women despite her lack of university education (Moran 2012).

The proliferation of views about both women or gender and education, broadly conceived, is because of transformations in global capitalism over the last thirty or more years, which have taken on board some of the arguments about gender equality and incorporated them into more marketable versions, evacuating them of more radical meanings. This is what Campbell (2013) and Fraser (2013) argue. What it is to be a woman has led to some contested debates about inclusion or exclusion. In addition, the commercialization or marketization of sex – sometimes referred to as sexualization – has also undermined some of the critiques of traditional categories. Indeed, it is frequently argued now that capitalism is seeping into ever new ways of being, to form more complex traditional social groups and categories. From the point of view of this argument, questions of gender equality can now be debated separately from questions of gender violence, or gender-related violence (GRV), and traditional ‘gender norms’, or ways of being a woman or a man.

These many versions of feminisms and gender equality include critiques not only of gender norms but also of sexualization, and sexting, through new media, and incorporation into forms and practices of education. Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold (2012, 2014) have been particularly imaginative in their critique of new social media and have worked with new methodologies around young girls’ sexualization, including in primary and secondary schools.

In this chapter, therefore, I want to consider some international evidence regarding gender equality in education by way of illustrating quite how far-reaching these changes have become. I also raise critiques of this international evidence, particularly concerning how this is now part of the neoliberal agenda and not at all transformative in a progressive way.

The development of EU-funded Daphne projects – specifically on women or gender equality and education – is one clear example of the complex and contradictory ways in which these issues have developed in the twenty-first century. Issues about gender equality in education do not necessarily address questions of gender violence, and do not address the transformative potential of education – either in compulsory education or as forms of subsequent training – to deal with the more intractable issues of GRV and cultural traditional gender norms. This is precisely what we aimed to develop through the EU-funded Daphne project.

The development of EU-funded training projects for women as ‘victims’ of gender violence is a clear example of the complexity of dealing with these issues in changing socio-political times. We wanted to develop some guidelines and tools for starting to question GRV. Thus we wanted to bring together studies of gender equality and of GRV, with the explicit objective of trying to transform future generations of children’s lives. We were also explicit about using traditional feminist activist theories to achieve these objectives. I will therefore return to discuss our aims and approach, having set the broader international context of complex questions of gender equality in education.

Feminist Values and Demands for Women’s Liberation

I draw on how feminism has become not only a political and social movement for change, but also a part of academic life, developing knowledge and scholarship to facilitate the processes of progressive changes. It has, in other words, become an educational movement, as evidence from my study about waves of feminist activists in universities illustrates (David 2014). First-wave feminism in the UK as elsewhere was about political and economic change, with a key focus on women’s suffrage (Banks 1986). Very few of the British first-wave feminists that Banks studied were involved in university education, inevitably perhaps given their exclusion from full participation as students.

Second-wave feminism has entailed more detailed analysis of the factors that might inhibit wider change, through cultures and social systems. This is in part to do with the growth of feminism alongside the growth of HE. While these two processes have developed together, feminism is largely in tandem with HE, rather than in parallel or as an integral part. Indeed, education remains resistant to incorporating feminist values as a central component.

There have been major transformations both in the economy and in the role which HE plays in relation to economic growth from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, which is now known as academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). These transformations have led to women’s greater involvement in both economic or work activities and in education, including HE. Nevertheless, the developments have been uneven and unevenly spread across social groups and institutions.

It remains the case that women, including those in academia, remain in relatively subordinate positions to men, despite all the changes (Morley 2013). Moreover, male power has become more resistant and resilient to change. In its new form it has variously been called patriarchy and sexism (Lerner 1986; Mackay 2015). Yet feminism as a form of political activism and as a set of theoretical and conceptual tools is firmly embedded within the academy.

In the 1960s, as part of civil, human rights and social movements, women’s liberation was linked to campaigns for greater civic and social equality. The majority of early campaigns were drawn from international student social movements around welfare and human rights. Inevitably these movements took various forms of liberal or social democracy in the countries where they were based. Such movements were usually contested (Mackay 2015).

As a result of much campaigning and debate, 1970 proved, with the benefit of hindsight, to be a critical year for articulating new arguments about sexual equality, leading to what could be seen as a manifesto for women’s liberation. It was the year in which major seminal or ovarian publications came out in the global North: for example, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. They provided critiques of the contemporary situation written by women, as students, in HE in the UK or the US.

They were not the first such texts, as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had been published more than ten years earlier in France; and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 in the US, about married women graduates living with ‘the problem that has no name’, had launched the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the US.

In the UK, the first women’s liberation movement (WLM) conference was held in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford, a working-men’s college loosely linked to the university. This had been organized by [graduate] students, including the redoubtable Sheila Rowbotham who subsequently published Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972), Hidden from History (1973a) and Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973b). The conference aimed to develop a manifesto of demands on the state for sexual equality and social change. Over the next few years of the 1970s, those demands became the principles and values of the women’s movement, based as they became on growing social and historical research, carried out within and beyond the academy.

It was during this era of social welfare that women entered the academy in increasing numbers, as students, academics and researchers, beginning the processes of gathering systematic sociohistorical evidence. This gradually became feminist scholarship and knowledge, slowly but surely becoming known as ‘the feminist canon’ (Davis and Evans 2011).

Indeed, these early movements are now known as ‘second-wave feminism’ to distinguish them from the ‘first-wave feminism’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were largely campaigns for political suffrage and economic independence. Mackay (2015) assumes that second-wave feminism had its origins in these movements, although she does not emphasize involvement in HE, focusing on activism. But her own research on feminists for her doctorate is the basis for Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement.

The initial four ‘demands’ of the British WLM were: equal educational opportunities; equal pay for equal work; contraception and abortion on demand; and twenty-four-hour day nurseries. Legal and financial independence, a right to define one’s own sexuality and elimination of violence against women were quickly added as the fifth, sixth and seventh demands (Coote and Campbell 1982). While none of these ‘demands’ have been fully met, understanding why there has been such resistance to change has become an important aspect of developing feminist scholarship and knowledge, including around understanding the role of social psyches, and the unconscious.

I will return, in the concluding chapter, to consider the elements of such a set of demands or manifesto today, looking at the array of feminist manifestos, from UKFeminista to Everyday Sexism to WOW (Women of the World), and other more education- and/or sexually focused questions. This will include returning to the important points made by the British Labour Party’s Manifesto for Women, and the WE Party. These are all issues that have been raised in the twenty-first century, particularly with the resurgence of feminism, and its new but contested political activism.

The Emergence and Evolution of Feminist Knowledge and Understanding

Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum founded the Women’s Therapy Centre (WTC) in London in 1976, based upon a psychotherapeutic understanding of women’s lives, to provide support for all women in achieving a greater understanding of their inner lives. Orbach’s (1978) best-selling Fat is a Feminist Issue (Fifi) was then published to critical acclaim, remaining a key text about women’s sensibilities, and spawning critical approaches to our understandings of sexual relations.

In 2013, Orbach with Lisa Appignanesi and Rachel Holmes produced an edited collection entitled Fifty Shades of Feminism (2013), illustrating feminism’s broad appeal. The title borrowed from a best-selling salacious novel published in 2012 about BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sado-Masochism) – Fifty Shades of Grey – written by a woman, E. L. James, addressing a young woman’s fantasies about her intimate sexual relations with men. Interestingly, she reverted to the traditional habit of not revealing her forenames, perhaps illustrating the ongoing sexist subordinate position of women, in intimate sexual life too. But the woman narrator was highly educated and sophisticated, graduating from university as the novel opened.

Many feminists have argued that the book contributes to ‘mommy porn’ or more specifically reflects today’s GRV. Appignanesi argued that ‘fifty million women readers can’t be altogether wrong … [but] our times are still embroiled in misogyny … so it is 50 women exploring what feminism means today’ (2013: 38).

This illustrates the paradoxical nature of the publicity afforded feminism in the media, combined with the fact of women’s intimate, sexual an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Socio-Cultural and Political Backgrounds and Contexts
• Part 2: Feminist Waves about Gender Equalities and Gender Violence
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement