Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Women's Liberation
- Part II Women's Studies: Introduction
- 10 Women's Studies — towards transdisciplinary learning?
- 11 Are we changing paradigms? The impact of feminism upon the world of scholarship
- 12 Setting up the first Research Centre for Women's Studies in Australia, 1983-86
- 13 The role of a Women's Studies Centre in the university
- 14 Outsiders inside? Women's Studies in Australia at the end of the twentieth century
- Part III Around the World
- References
10 - Women's Studies — towards transdisciplinary learning?
from Part II - Women's Studies: Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Women's Liberation
- Part II Women's Studies: Introduction
- 10 Women's Studies — towards transdisciplinary learning?
- 11 Are we changing paradigms? The impact of feminism upon the world of scholarship
- 12 Setting up the first Research Centre for Women's Studies in Australia, 1983-86
- 13 The role of a Women's Studies Centre in the university
- 14 Outsiders inside? Women's Studies in Australia at the end of the twentieth century
- Part III Around the World
- References
Summary
This article was first published in The Journal of Educational Thought, Calgary, Canada, vol. 17, no. 2, August 1983. The version published here is an extract. I am grateful to the present editor, Ian Winchester, for permission to reproduce it.
In 1983 we are drawing close to the end of the ten years which the United Nations designated the Decade for Women. Halfway through that decade, in 1980, in Australia, the proportion of women in the population involved in some kind of post-secondary education had equalled the proportion of men. Only a year earlier it was possible to claim that ‘Women's studies courses are at present offered at most Australian universities'.
However, all the gains made by Women's Studies courses are affected by their relationships with the institutions in which they are offered. When funding, staffing, resources, requirements and procedures for enrolment and assessment are controlled by academic bureaucracies, the shape and nature of courses are inevitably affected by the attitudes of those bureaucracies. In general they have been, as Ann Curthoys observed in 1975, ‘essentially conservative’. ‘Universities’, she went on,
exist to provide skills for an authoritarian parliamentary-democratic society based on a capitalist economy, and can only develop into something else in accord with fundamental changes in the society as a whole. The university is contained within the society around it, and is in many ways the perpetrator of some of its most conservative values.
In a social formation whose government is prepared to concede equal pay for equal work in a gender-differentiated workforce, the universities follow suit by allowing Women's Studies courses to be established, but ensuring, or trying to ensure, that they are adequately contained within the established structure of the institution.
Courses which have conceded to the academic bureaucracies a broad conformity over enrolment and assessment requirements in return for their very existence can meet a far blunter containment.
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- Dangerous IdeasWomen's Liberation, Women's Studies, Around the World, pp. 175 - 182Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2015