Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero-c!nadel
From: chris@psych.toronto.edu (Christine Hitchcock)
Subject: Re: The problem in academia
Status: R
Message-ID: <1991Apr15.145023.7239@psych.toronto.edu>
Originator: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Sender: news@aero.org
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1991Mar28.154345.12953@psych.toronto.edu> <jls.671252345@rutabaga> <671413991@lear.cs.duke.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1991 14:50:23 GMT
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Lines: 50


>In article <jls.671252345@rutabaga> (Jim Showalter) writes:
>>P.S. I was puzzled in the extreme by the complaint in the referenced
>>     article that women's studies were becoming more of an objective
>>     science and less of a political agenda. Isn't this precisely what
>>     any discipline that wants to be taken seriously as a science must do? 

Jim, 

  While you may be right about the article in question, I'd like to address
your point about "objective science" vs. "political agenda".  Yes, to be 
"taken seriously as a science", a discipline should be done like a science.
However, the choice of what to study is, to some extent, independent of the 
quality of how well the work is done. 

  What I read in the article (among other things I *don't* agree with) was 
a call for people in women's studies departments to also study things like 
the mechanisms by which girls choose not to take science and math in school,
or the way in which women's earnings remain around 64% of men's, on average,
or the psychological mechanisms which keep women and men in battering 
relationships.

  Granted, the choice to study such topics will likely come from a political
agenda.  However, these are all phenomena which affect women's lives, and a 
better understanding of them will permit us as men and women to change them.
They can be studied objectively.  Hypotheses can be made and tested, rather
than woven out of intuition and left to stand on their plausibility.

  Whatever your arguments may be about the way in which the issues are addressed,
it is clear that on average, women are poorer, less recognized and less
powerful than men in our society.  Men are, on average, under more 
pressure to succeed, lonelier, less "in touch with their feelings", and 
discriminated against in issues regarding child custody.  Most of us agree
that it would be better if both sexes were no longer victims of sexism.
Surely women's studies programs ought to have at least some people who study
areas which have some hope of changing some of these facts, as well as people
who study the form and content of literature.  That, I think,
was the author's point in the Ms. article.  I wish she hadn't made fun of 
the study of literature in the process.  

Chris.



-- 
Chris Hitchcock, Dept. of Psychology     chris@psych.toronto.edu
University of Toronto                  
Toronto, Ontario          UseNet:  I only read it for the  
CANADA  M5S 1A1                         .signatures                         

