Last spring, my student Mon-Shane Chou recorded many of my lectures from my women in American society course, putting them up online as downloadable files. Links to those lectures can be found here. Mon-Shane is now enrolled in my Humanities course on “Beauty, the Body, and the Euro-American Tradition”, and is continuing her most welcome and very helpful practice of taping and posting. I am very grateful.
The first four lectures are online. More to come!
My initial lecture on Plato and Mind/Body Dualism
My lecture on the Eve story and Christian views of appetite and desire
On theories of anorexia, riffing off Joan Brumberg
On Pleasure as a Purpose and a Primary Good
I’m so glad you’re posting these online! I’ve been listening to the last set of lectures you posted on my iPod and enjoying them very much.
Perhaps this is a generational thing and 20 somethings don’t feel as I do. I started listening to your first lecture and all I could think is, “Do I really need a man to explain this stuff to me?”
Sexist? Perhaps, but most every other course I took in college was taught by a man (I was a chemistry major). This topic …. I would prefer a woman teacher. I would too often feel the victim mansplaiining.
A generational thing, as I said. I learned this stuff in women’s study groups. We got together and worked out what we would be studying for that half year and learn through reading and discussion. This is probably how Women’s Studies got started in the first place because there sure weren’t any at that time.
There have always been women’s study groups often called Women’s Library Societies or something like that. The change with my generation is that we studied women and women’s authors. We would usually have a weekend retreat once a year. It was a lovely safe place to learn. I can’t wrap my head around this as a college course, taught by a man with men students. I guess when it became a formal course it had to be. And anti-discrimination laws….
Maybe some of the crap my generation went through made this possible, but having read some of your other posts you have refered to women not speaking or being silenced by the men. It just doesn’t sound safe to me. The incident of the male student and the football helmet is the exact reason I would probably not take your class. Somehow I think a woman professor who has lived with this kind of silencing for a life time would have seen that coming and stopped it before the women in your class had to learn that even a Women’s Studies class was yet another unsafe place.
I assure you, sekhmet, that in the many women’s studies courses I took as an undergrad and in grad school, I saw (as my post on the subject made clear) male students in women’s studies classes engage in more “silencing” behavior (and for longer) than I have ever tolerated. That doesn’t mean my behavior as a teacher has been free from bias, free from the effects of male privilege. I’m better than I was, and will be better still in the years to come, deo volente and the crick don’t rise.
Women’s Studies as an academic discipline is more than forty years old, dating to the mid-1960s, and men have been enrolled as students since that time. I am by no means the first man to teach the subject (though our numbers remain, perhaps rightfully, small.) I know that women’s collectives of the kind you describe remained common on many campuses until recently, existing outside the formal academic setting.
The “women’s collective” I belonged to was not part of a college campus. We met in a resturant in the middle of the city for the convenience of all. Only 3 or 4 out of a group of about 40 were in college.
Women’s (or Ladies) Library Societies started around the late 1800′s to early 1900′s. At that time women couldn’t get into most colleges. They studied all manner of topics and frequently were involved in civic actions that benefitted the community in pragmatic ways (One ladies group forced the city engineer to improve the sanitation standards of the local high school lavtories). Women would be members of these groups for years some for decades.
While there were campus women’s organizations I am not very familiar with them, they were rather exclusive and not part of the general women’s study groups I was with. Around the mid 1960′s many of these groups became politicized and engaged in conciousness raising and politcal actions such as challenging the policies of the catholic and episcopalian churches.
These groups have been fading away as more women were able to go to college and the generation that didn’t go to college has died out. I think there are still a few of these groups around, but not. many. I miss them. Perhaps they will revive as college is priced out of the reach of more people.
I have no evidence to support this but I wouldn’t be surprised if these early Ladies Societies and later Women’s Study groups led to the formal classes in Women’s Studies.
I like to believe that Women’s Studies, now Gender Studies is part of the long tradition of women’s desire to learn about themselves and the world. I wish you luck and hope you can keep these classes a safe place for women.
Hi sehkmet,
As a former Women’s Studies student of Hugo’s, I can assure you that he’s an incredibly fair teacher, and his classes are extremely safe. I never experienced any discomfort with him as a male professor, and I feel that he does an exceptional job of introducing his classes to the wonderful world of feminism and women’s history.
After taking his class, I went on to major in Women’s Studies at UCLA, where I had all female professors (save for the mostly male professors for my English minor). Having all female professors was important, yes, but it also made me feel like Women’s Studies was an isolated field. I missed Hugo’s maleness and his straightness, because they had assured me that men (and straight men, at that) can care about feminism enough to learn it, teach it, and do it.
I feel that if I hadn’t had Hugo as a professor–a white, male, straight, and feminist one–I might be less willing to push the men in my own life to see the inequalities that women are faced with in our culture. Quite similarly, though a white person teaching African-American studies may seem contradictory, it would show African-American students that more people care about their culture and history than just themselves.
Having Hugo really showed me that every movement needs more than just the victims of an oppression. Blacks need Whites. Gays need Straights. Animals need Humans. Muslims need Christians. Women need Men. The more the merrier.
Hilary, as an unsolicited testimonial, that was lovely and much appreciated. Thank you so much.