My women’s history course had its first class meeting yesterday. Though I don’t know yet how many students will stick with the course, I had a record number of men show up for the class. Since I started teaching the course in 1995, males have averaged 10-15% of the students in each class. 30% of those who showed up yesterday, nearly a third, were young men. There will be some drops, to be sure, but it looks promising that this might be a record-breaking semester.
Mind you, it’s not “all about the menz.” The last thing I want to do is measure the success or failure of a women’s studies class by how many male students complete the course! But though it is to be expected that the majority of the students in the class will always be women (the student body at PCC is 58% female as it is), it’s nice to see anecdotal evidence that more and more lads are becoming comfortable with taking a course like this.
I’d also note another demographic shift. For years and years, my women’s studies courses were much “whiter and blacker” than my other classes. At PCC today, Latinos make up just over 40% of the student body, Asians/Pacific Islanders about 30%, whites about 15% and blacks less than 10%. Though those numbers were reflected in Western Civ course enrollments, my women’s history classes tended to attract lots of white — and lots of African-American — women. Fewer Hispanic and Asian students took the course, presumably because of greater cultural conservatism within those communities and because of higher percentages of students for whom English was a second or third language. (My women’s history course features more readin’ and writin’ than my survey classes.)
But just in the last two years, the demographic for my women’s history class has “normed” with the overall college population. In particular, I’m seeing more and more foreign students (on F-1 visas) from Latin America and East Asia enrolling in the course. I always had plenty of these students in my Western Civ classes, and it’s not as if there’s been a huge change in the college’s overall student population. It seems plausible that there’s a growing receptiveness among students from non-white and non-black backgrounds to courses like women’s history. I’m pleased, of course, and will do my best to continue to adjust the syllabus to meet the needs and interests of this changing demographic.
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