Consciousness raising 101: inside the gender studies classroom.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns - Column

FOR THE SECOND year in a row, I have had the fascinating experience of playing a role in which I never expected to find myself: professor of a gender studies course.

In 2001 David Hendrickson, then chairman of the political science department at Colorado College, contacted me about teaching a short course. Colorado College, a small, selective liberal arts school in Colorado Springs, has a unique system in which a semester is divided into four "blocks." Each student takes one five-days-a-week, three-and-a-half-week course at a time. The system allows the school to make liberal use of visiting professors.

Given a chance to design my own course, "Beyond the Gender Wars," I decided to offer a survey of different approaches to contemporary gender issues, with a focus on challenges to orthodox feminism offered by writers such as Christina Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?), Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power), and Katie Roiphe (The Morning After) . I fully expected the experience to be educational for me as well as my students, and I wasn't disappointed.

It is something of a truism that while young women today reject the "feminist" label, they embrace the feminist principles of equal opportunity and flexible gender roles. Both my classes--the first comprising six women, the second nine men and six women--bore this out. Only one student in the first class, and three in the second (one man and two women), had previously taken any courses studying feminism. Most had paid little or no attention to gender issues; they had so little knowledge of the women's movement that the phrase consciousness raising did not ring a bell with anyone. Most were turned off by feminism's radical image.

Yet these young people were not only over-whelmingly supportive of broad "equality feminist" goals but strikingly predisposed to believe various claims of inequities toward women in modern-day America. Thus, it was universally taken for granted--at least when the topic was first brought up--that the gap between male and female earnings was due to discrimination against women and amounted to proof that sexism was alive and well.

Our readings and discussions, however, had some effect: Late in the course, when we got around to reading Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' "Third Wave feminist" book Manifesta, which espouses "pay equity" as a key item on the feminist agenda, many students questioned without prompting the authors' use of statistics on unequal pay.

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