Most semesters (but not all) I hold an “all-female day” and an “all-male day” in my Women in American Society class. My “all-female” day was last Tuesday, and my “all-male” day will be this Thursday.
I got the idea from a group of students who took the class in the spring of ‘01. That was a particularly strong group, and one day midway through the semester a small delegation approached me in my office. In a class that was 80% female, 20% male, they asked me to facilitate two separate days, one for students of each sex. Instead of a lecture, we’d have a structured discussion, sitting in a circle. The all-male and all-female days would happen late in the semester after students had had a chance to absorb and really think about a lot of the material. The single sex environment would, it was hoped, promote greater candor, greater frankness, and greater opportunity for same-sex bonding.
I checked out the legality of having a single-sex classroom for a day,and was assured by my division dean at the time that as long as I offered one day for each sex, I would not be violating college or state rules. And so, since the spring of 2001, I’ve held these all-male and all-female days in most of my sections of women’s history.
I’ll blog about the all-male day experience soon. I can say that the all-female experience is almost always an enormously positive one. Over and over again, I read in student journals and evaluations that that was their “favorite day” of the whole semester. Though I rarely issue sweeping pronouncements about what feminism is or isn’t, I am adamant that one can’t be much of a feminist if one is committed to the liberation of women as a class but one doesn’t generally like individual women. The whole “loving humankind, hating people” deal is thoroughly incompatible with every imaginable category of feminist praxis. And yet so many of my female students do struggle to bond and connect with other women. The “all my good friends are guys” contingent is invariably a substantial one.
A single day of sitting in a circle and sharing stories doesn’t create instant feminist community. But it sure as heck is a good start, and sadly, it’s often more sharing and listening in an all-female group than many of these young women have ever done before. I feel quite strongly that a feminist classroom has elements of the therapeutic as well as the intellectual; personal experience, while not a substitute for reason, is also a valuable source of information and knowledge. Tears are not uncommon on all-female day; tears of sadness, of exhaustion, of empathy.
Unlike at a major university, we have no “discussion sections” built into the course. I get 75 minutes twice a week to cover American women’s history (and contemporary feminism) from the pre-Columbian period to the present day. There is no other course on campus that surveys women’s history or offers an introduction to women’s studies. But as precious as the short amount of time I have is, it’s worth taking two days to reflect together, to retreat from the purely intellectual to the emotional. Laughter, tears, and authentic catharsis have their place in the feminist classroom.
It’s hard to be a Christian alone. It’s hard to be a feminist alone. Living out a commitment — whatever that commitment is based on — is more easily done with a community of the like-minded to encourage and nurture. Given that I teach at a community college that has an almost complete absence of feminist or pro-feminist institutional support for young men and women, I’ve got to try and create that institutional support in the classroom.
We had a great all-female day on May 15. I’ll have some more thoughts on working with young men in a feminist setting next week.
I’ll be looking forward to seeing your post on the men’s discussions. I’ve been toying with the idea in my head of starting some sort of pro-feminist men’s discussion group in my area (modelled after the “Philly Dude’s Collective”, who put out a really interesting Zine just summarizing what their various talks were) but I’m really not sure where to start.
As a one-time ‘all my good friends are guys’ girl, I think part of the reason for that is that you don’t have to compete with guys. You don’t have to try as hard to fit in, because your gender already makes you different. By surrounding yourself with opposite-gender friends, you avoid the bitchiness, the oneupwomanship, even competition for male attention that often occurs in a circle of (young) women. With male friends you may face the attraction issue, but IME that is much easier to deal with.
Now, I treasure my female friends. But I still encounter women who act like schoolgirls - one day all sweet and ‘be my friend’, the next stabbing you with a stiletto because you both looked at the same guy. It can be exhausting!
Heh. I totally hated girls for years. And then I went to a women’s college.
What I ended up loving BEST about my alma mater was that it was a women’s college. The notion of gender roles evaporated, because by being surrounded by women, I began to see them as human. More importantly, I began to realize that we shared so many common experiences based on peoples’ perception of our gender.
My favorite way to sell my college to heterosexual prospies who are “only friends with guys” is to tell them that they should not expect to meet any men. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to truly connect with other women with (for better or for worse) little break in between interactions. They are strangely comforted by this. As if self-protectively isolating themselves from other women did exactly that: it isolated them.
That and how can you beat conversations about yeast infections over lunch? :)
I met so few of the catty, bitchy types. Partially because women do act differently in single-sex settings (sadly) but also because I though women were inherently catty and bitchy, so therefore, everything they did was catty and bitchy. Once I realized women displayed a whole range of human behaviors, I started seeing a lot of non-catty and non-bitchy behavior.
We did have severe oneupmanship though. Not over men, clothes, makeup, or friends: it was completely a professional/academic competition (and mostly fought in our heads). That, however is much more reflective of the college’s academic reputation, than of our single-sex status.
A single-sex institution (and there ARE men’s colleges) is not for everyone. But based on my experience, it is enriching to have self-consciously single-sex spaces once in awhile. Basically, I think single-sex days in a women’s studies class in a coed college is awesome. :)