Gender - Balancing the Curriculum Who Gets What and Why

Extract

When I went to college in the forties, I could not have imagined questioning the teacher, the syllabus, or the texts we were given to read. I was at Hunter College, in those days still a women's college with a high percentage of women faculty, even a few women administrators. None of these persons, however, seemed concerned about the fact that the entire curriculum taught women that their education would carry them into domesticity and/or jobs in school teaching, social work, the library, or, if they were exceptional, on a women's college campus. The message of the curriculum was, in short: men achieve and work; women love and marry. The twin message of love and marriage, I should add, was present in sociology and literature: elsewhere, women were almost entirely absent, except for the traditional nudes painted by scores of male artists one viewed in art history.