Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Last Monday morning, over 350 persons registered for a day-long session that was geared towards exploring sex bias in education and ways to change those old attitudes and practices in the schools. I checked through the registration list to see what variety of citizen cared actively about this matter and found several members of school boards, both public and parochial, a goodly number of junior high and high school counselors, hundreds of women that were concerned parents, active citizens, and as the expression goes, movers and shakers.

There were some teachers in the group. Uh, they must have been playing hooky from classes as it was a school day. And, oh, yes, also included were a few male citizens. But the group was serious. They were eager to have the problems laid out and hoped that the day would provide some evidence that a new awareness was coming.

[MARLO THOMAS, "FREE TO BE YOU AND ME"] Every boy in this land

Grows to be his own man

In this land, every girl

Grows to be her own woman

Take my hand, come with me

Where the children are free

Come with me, take my hand, and we'll run

To a land where the river runs free

To a land through the green country

To a land to a shining sea

To a land where the horses run free

To a land where the children are free

And you and me are free to be

And you and me are free to be

And you and me are free to be you and me

CONNIE GOLDMAN: One year ago, the Minnesota State Board of Education made a statement of policy and proposed action towards eliminating sex bias in education. Included were such statements as these.

The practice of stereotyping and socializing men and women into masculine-feminine roles has resulted in prejudice, dominance, discrimination, and segregation harmful to the human development of both sexes. While there is awareness among many people of racism and its debilitating effects on our society and the wastage of human potential, there is not the same awareness of the harmful effects and the extent of discrimination and stereotyping due to the prejudices concerning gender. The State Board of Education asked the Department and the public schools to assume leadership in eliminating bias and discrimination so that the many practices based on sexual stereotyping can be ended and the assumptions changed with involvement of new values.

The seminar on sex bias in schools explored four different areas. One, federal laws concerning educational institutions and state laws such as the newly amended state act against discrimination. Two, changes in athletics and extracurricular sports programs, the problems and the progress in providing equal opportunities in school athletic programs. Number three, curriculum, information about sex role stereotyping in textbooks and information about citizens groups such as the Emma Willard Task Force on Education that's actively involved in philosophical change and the actual elimination of sex-biased materials from school.

The fourth area, student counseling. Student counseling was discussed by Patricia Engelhard, a counselor in the Edina Minnesota schools, who gave a large workshop and was highly attended. Her ideas on sex role stereotyping in guidance and career counseling were very interesting.

PATRICIA ENGELHARD: Look at what counselors can do as being one of either expansion, a philosophy of expansion or one of constriction. Now, if that attitude is one of constriction, I think the counselor will continue to view women as home, husband, and children-oriented.

That it's OK to work if it's done in a pinch, in case there's a divorce or in case the man dies or to help out, send hubby through school or maybe send children to a good college or possibly buy a new television set or a boat. If a woman does work, she will probably work in a traditional woman's area, whether that's a secretary or a beautician or a nurse or a teacher.

She will probably not hold an administrative position of any kind unless it is in a woman's field such as nursing. And even then, it might not be. Librarianing is by and large, a woman's field, but your administrators are men.

It says it assumes that she'll marry. It assumes she wants children. It assumes that her own development is secondary to those that she loves. And this is the way that she wants it. It really assumes she is quite selfless.

I don't see anything wrong with a lot of the components in this point of view. In fact, I think they should be choices, viable choices open to women.

At the same time, I think counselors are doing a very dangerous kind of thing if they counsel to the status quo. And this has been the status quo. I think they can also counsel to an expanded view of women in terms not just of career but of lifestyle and all kinds of options that women have.

I want to also include men in this. This is a conference on women. But I believe when women's role changes, men's role will also have to change. And I think women are going to be the pushers. But I think there are some areas where men might decide they want to make some changes too. So concomitantly, women will change.

Hence, I see the counselor as a very key person in opening up the world to human beings, both male and female human beings. I'm going to spend some of my time talking about career development because I think this is an area that counselors get involved in.

The very first aspect of career development-- well, I think a lot of it comes right from home. And it starts right away in schools. But course selection is one of the first very definitive steps in career development.

I think what happens is that in early adolescence, girls start to plan their courses, and hence, their careers, with their sex very much in mind, their sexual identity. And after all, that is only part of identity. I did a little study in my own school before I came here. I found the statistics kind of interesting.

Found out that in our accelerated math program, which starts in grade 7, the boys and girls are selected by their sixth grade teachers on the basis of test scores and on the basis of performance in class, we have almost an equal ratio of boys and girls. In the eighth grade algebra 1, for example, I found 39 girls and 42 boys.

This gives a slight advantage to the boys. And incidentally, there is a slight sex-linked difference in testing on math. The boys score slightly higher as the women and girls score slightly higher verbally.

However, by grade 12, when they take calculus in this program, we find only three girls left and 10 boys. So you have about 25%, 75% split here. What happened along the way? Where did the attitudes come from that the girls acted on? Teachers, counselors, parents, peers, society?

My guess would be, if I were to look into it a little more carefully, that the girls dropped out after geometry. My guess is they went through algebra 1, algebra 2, and geometry, because that's a respectable amount of math to have to go on. But it's not too much, you see.

And sometime, I'm going to get all of those statistics because I did find it illuminating. Physics, which is a boys' course, in a sense. It's not listed as such. But I think there are all kinds of invisible lines. And I think a lot of those lines are in counselors' heads as well as parents' heads and teachers' heads.

Although our physics teacher, in giving me these statistics, said, hey, let's do something about this discrepancy. Let's get more girls in this course. And so I react very positively to that.

There were 68 boys and 22 girls, which is about a 77% boy, 23% girl division in physics. In the enriched physics, interestingly, the girls had a little higher percentage. 35% as opposed to 62%. Maybe if you're that good, you see, then you go ahead.

Home economics. The big breakthrough is foods. But you consider how the breakthrough came. It's foods presented as chefs. It's foods presented as bachelor living or bachelor survival. You see, this is acceptable.

But when it's foods presented as a role-sharing kind of thing in a new world where men and women are sharing both work and home kinds of roles, I think there are lots of high school boys that wouldn't take it if it were presented in that light.

We don't have any boys in sewing. I have a few boys in crafts, which is in the art department. You see, that's a little more acceptable. And they do some things like hooking rugs and weaving.

Family living, child development. I think we have two boys in family living. How can you have a course that's even going to be natural? Half of families are men. But I think here, you see how threatened boys feel.

And I don't blame them for feeling threatened. I really don't. I think it's harder for them to cross over than it is girls. This point came out in the discussion last time. And I think we have to give each other support and strength to try some of this expanded role kind of thing.

In languages, Latin and Spanish are fairly neuter. German comes out 2 to 1 male. French comes out 3 to 1 female. And you think about adjectives that describe these areas. And you come up in German with logical, objective, scientific, intellectual, strong, even the sound is kind of a guttural type of thing.

Whereas in French, it's ethereal, aesthetic, flighty, flowery, rhythmic, provocative, and even the sound of it, you see, is, quote unquote, "feminine," whatever that is. But I think you have them standing in line to prove their masculinity and femininity over and over again, which I think our society somehow requires.

Our American history unit has done some good things. All 11th graders take American history. They have included a woman's unit. They not only have included a women's unit, but they have integrated women into all facets of their course, which I think is very good.

What I asked one of the-- there was a team that taught. And right now, it's the two men on the team are left, and the woman is in law school. But I asked her recently, I said, how did the kids respond to the course, generally?

And she said she had girls come up afterward and thank her. She had a few boys that became champions for the women's movement. Many high school boys feel very, very threatened. And they refuse to take it seriously at that point in their development.

The amount of education is also important. More girls graduate from high school. But more boys graduate with bachelors and progressively masters and doctors. I think our keynote speaker brought that out very clearly upstairs.

A little bit about work. As long as we think in terms of men's work and women's work, I think we are going down the narrow road rather than the wide road. I find myself, being fairly aware of things, still do a lot of these things in that-- well, we have a vocational school option for kids in high school, where they can go to vo tech for two hours of the day.

And then they spend the rest of the time in our high school and get the diploma from our high school. When I am talking with kids in terms of a choice in vo tech school, in my own little head, I have courses that are appropriate for girls, courses that are appropriate for boys, courses that are appropriate for either one. And the only good thing here is that the courses that are appropriate for either one is getting bigger.

But I still, as I go down the list, I find my old finger pointing at this one and that one. I would be better off if I'd close my mouth and give the students the list and shut up. Because what happens is that you point to things like building trades, auto body, plastics technician, refrigeration and air conditioning technician, and so on for boys.

You point to office occupations, child development for girls. The middle ground thing I consider commercial art, graphic arts, horticulture, even auto mechanics, as long as girls are going to learn how to work on their own cars, you see. But again, it's a narrow viewpoint in terms of what could be.

In terms of work at the professional level, I find that 2/3 of professional women are nurses and teachers. For heaven sakes. Are our interests that's similar? I can't believe it.

Interestingly, in England, 16% of the doctors are women. In Soviet Russia, 75% of the doctors are women. In Sweden and in France, many pharmacists and dentists are women.

You think in terms of dental work, fine kind of work as electronics. In Japan, all that fine kind of stuff that really ties right in with small motor coordination. Where are the women?

In terms of background on work, I think it's kind of interesting to look at what's happened. During World War II, of course, women did everything and kind of proved that there wasn't much they couldn't do. After World War II, they went home to live happily ever after.

However, in the beginning of the '60s, these same women began to get itchy feet. And they went back to schools. They went back to jobs. In the late '60s, the women's movement came full force.

And it was at this point that I became aware of all kinds of things. And I read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique in about 1966. And this was the kickoff for me.

None of these things really had ever occurred to me before. Or if they had, I thought there was something wrong with me. And so it gave a lot of support to the point of view and the direction that things are going in right now.

What's happened in the '70s, I think, is a whole new thing. You look at a survey in the paper that appeared very recently on graduating Macalester women. You find that as many almost as men plan to work full time throughout their lives. I think it was 62% of the women versus 66% of the men.

And the percentages on the other options, work at intervals throughout your life, part time work throughout your life, were almost the same for men and women. So what I'm saying is it's happened. And we're still lagging behind. We're here in terms of an expanded role for women.

Ginsburg mentioned three different stances, which I think are interesting. One he called traditional. This is home, husband, children-oriented to pretty much the exclusion of the outside world. The second was what he called transitional. That's where I personally plug in.

When I first went to work, it was for nurturant reasons. It took a lot more than my going to work for me to get anywhere near liberated. And I still have a ways to go. So work isn't the only factor here.

His third category was one he called the innovator. And I think this is where your Macalester woman is today. Planning for, actually actively planning for a lifetime of full time work. What's happened, of course, is not so good.

Newsweek recently says that, yes, there are more women in men's jobs. There are more women than ever working. But their pay is lower than ever. So we're going backwards in some respects.

The kinds of things counselors do, and they do it unconsciously sometimes, sometimes probably consciously, I believe there are key agents in releasing potential of people, men and women. Point was made last hour, hey, let's not forget the men and their expanded role and the good things that this can do too.

And they're talking about having a greater share in child care, for example, and in home, maintaining kinds of things. I think we need to do that and not just for women. I think we can close the gap between what women can do and what they do do.

I think we can help see to it that women don't settle for low pay, low status positions. I think we can reduce parental pressure sometimes. We can be aware of trends. And we can know facts.

We can help women to stretch their dreams, first of all. All aspirations, I think, start with fantasy. And interestingly, comparing a fantasy of a female student and a male student in the high school level recently, lovely, sensitive, talented, artistic girl said, I just want to be carried off by my mountain man. And this was a serious statement.

I didn't laugh at her because she is not the kind of person you would laugh at. I think, again, you have to be careful not to impose your viewpoint. You have to respect where people are and what they want and what they value.

The boy, on the other hand, by comparison, was a very talented musician in the orchestra. And he could envision himself playing with the New York Philharmonic in a violin concerto with the audience standing on their feet and bravo, more and more. And you compare that kind of a dream. And I think it helps to see why men and women go on such divergent paths.

In terms of total lifestyle development, I think that it's important that women realize there are many options. And it isn't just a matter of career or not a career. And I think career was thought of as job.

And of course, it is for men too in many areas. Career isn't a career for everybody that works. But I think a career was job for more women than it was for men.

A little bit about an attitude survey that I did back in 1967-68. I went back to school on a sabbatical leave. And I did develop an attitudinal questionnaire that was given to Minnesota counselors. About 96% of them responded.

And we found very definitely that there was a discrepancy between male and female counselors' attitudes. I had a very nice man in here, a male counselor from-- oh, not Mahtomedi. What's the other one with an M? Monticello, I believe.

And he felt very strongly that not all male counselors were in the constrictive kind of role. And I certainly agreed with him in speaking with him. So you do get some males that are very supportive.

However, when you compare mean scores, you find that female counselors are much more aware of expanded role opportunities for women. They're all, in slightly, the emergent direction, as I defined it, as opposed to traditional. But just slightly less so. Quite a bit less so for men.

Personality characteristics. I would say what happens here is that the identity for women depends so much on their sex role-- how they look, who they're going out with, who they're going to marry. For men on the other hand, I think at the high school level, it's very sports oriented for lots of boys. On the level after high school, I think it's extremely work oriented.

You think about the questions you ask a man and a woman when you meet them. With a woman, are you married? How many children do you have? With a man, what do you do for a living?

And I think all of these identities are much too narrow. I think you need the identity as a person. But women have to look for a sense of personal identity. Somebody mentioned assertiveness training. Not aggressiveness training-- there's a difference-- but assertiveness training.

I think in terms of construction or expansion, we can look at mayor or envelope stuffer, trial lawyer or the researcher behind the scenes that works very hard preparing the trial lawyer, UN delegate or UN guide, if a doctor, a pediatrician or obstetrician only or are there other specialties that you can choose from. Is she going to be a cheerleader or is she going to be on the team?

I think as long as we think in terms of men's roles, women's roles, men's courses, girl's courses, men's jobs, women's jobs, we are limiting options for human beings. And I believe that counselors can be a liberating force for human beings.

I think it's much easier to follow prescribed roles. Life used to be easier. But I think there are some advantages to having alternatives. I think persons end up feeling more satisfied, more fulfilled, more whole, and more integrated. And I think these are good things to strive toward.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Counselor of students Patricia Engelhard from the Edina Public Schools.

[MARLO THOMAS, "WHEN WE GROW UP"]

(SINGING) When we grow up, will I be pretty?

Will you be big and strong?

Will I wear dresses that show off my knees?

Will you wear trousers twice as long?

Well, I don't care if I'm pretty at all

And I don't care if you never get tall

I like what I look like, and you're nice small

We don't have to change at all

Hey

When we grow up, will I be a lady?

Will you be an engineer?

Will I have to wear things like perfume and gloves?

I can still pull the whistle while you steer

Well, I don't care if I'm pretty at all

CONNIE GOLDMAN: The keynote speaker at the Sex Bias in the Schools meeting was Toni McNaron, associate professor of English and coordinator of the Women's Studies program at the University of Minnesota. Although her area of experience is higher education, her remarks spoke directly to those concerned with attitudes and practices in the lower education systems.

TONI MCNARON: I know that for the rest of the day, you're going to have people in workshops with you who are directly involved in various levels of public school education. They are, therefore, much better qualified to discuss with you both the problems and the possible remedies that attend upon sex discrimination at that level.

Rather than try in a very presumptuous way myself to speak to that, I would prefer to talk about what I know, which is sex discrimination in higher education to the women who finally get through the public school system, graduate from high school, and go on to universities, or by implication, to all of those who do not.

I'd like to start by reading a poem called "Susan B." And indeed, it is about Susan B. Anthony. It's by a young poet in this country named Lynn Kelly, probably someone of whom you haven't heard. That in itself is part of the subject of my address.

"Susan B" by Lynn Kelly.

Susan B plays a trumpet

Not a harp

And now, we know it

Born a woman

Born a woman?

Born a woman

Joy

The weaker sex

The curse

The weaker sex

The curse

The weaker

Sex

The

Rage, sisters

Rooftop fire

The heat of our brains

Must not be cooled

By the tap water in a sink

Then before going on to my own comments, I would like to read a comment about Susan B. Anthony, not made in the 19th century, but made in 1971 by a member of the Maryland House of Delegates when that austere legislative body was seeing fit to pass a resolution praising Susan B. Anthony.

"For a woman--"

And there's really no need to read on.

[LAUGHTER]

Susan B. Anthony made outstanding contributions to the history of the nation.

"The farther and higher a woman moves in a man's world, the greater the pressures against success. In a man's world like the university, a woman must make an extra effort merely to survive, let alone succeed. At the same time, she must fight her own internal directives in order to demand higher salaries or promotion or appointments, to submit material for publication, to put herself in the position of being judged at all."

This quotation is a summary of the findings made by Matina Horner in the now classic study on "Intelligent Women and Their Patterns of Fear of Success." Horner's study directly refutes more traditional studies by male psychologists, who have generally concluded that women want to fail. She found, rather, that women working in her research design supported a thesis demonstrating correlation between increased desire to succeed and increased anxiety at being ostracized as aggressive or unwomanly.

Her conclusions make the case much more poignant and difficult than they would be if we could write us all off as wanting to fail. Many academics who are also feminists are convinced, however, that by establishing women's studies programs of the highest caliber, we can at least confront some of the issues that affect all women.

It seems to me redundant to ask if there is sex discrimination within education. There is sex discrimination within our society. And education reflects and indeed depends upon that society. The same men and women who interact at dinners, on jobs, in beds, come to teach at and run universities and colleges.

And surely, we have learned painfully well on issues like racism and the war that education has no direct effect on deep attitudes. What education, or more specifically for women, knowledge, can do is to put women in touch with their own history, psyches, art, and even bodies, since some fine work is currently going forward in genetics, biology, and human sexuality.

I contend with voices from the Renaissance that knowledge is indeed power. And if power runs the risk of corrupting. Surely, ignorance more often and assuredly subjugates.

In forming the Women's Studies program at Minnesota, first, a group of students and then a committee of faculty and students drew up a proposal with very simple, yet radical aims. We intend to help each department see the relative weight given to males and females who either have practiced their discipline or been the subject of its study. Once that problem has been identified, we then expect departments to change existing courses or institute new ones that will treat this neglected aspect of their field.

In many cases, such curricular enlightenment will lead naturally to the hiring of women or men whose graduate and professional training has, in some way, been focused on women. Simultaneously, the courses taught will speak more vitally to all the students in the class, not just half, opening up fresh areas of discussion and debate. For feminist researchers, a Women's Studies program will serve to encourage their investigations by allowing them to test odd hypotheses in courses and by providing that crucial support of fellow researchers and learners.

Obviously, a group that most of all could be helped by women's studies programs to do a different kind of job once they found their way as teachers in the public school or people in the college of education. And we would hope to establish extremely close ties with that college and begin to see students who are training themselves to be teachers of grammar school and middle school and high school or whatever the terminologies in this state to be able to do that more acutely.

The state recently instituted a requirement in human relations. It seems to me that while we are also trying to deal with all the other aspects of that, and of course does that fairly well now, that certainly, an inclusion directly of the issue of women and how they are related to as six-year-olds and 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds must begin to find its way into those courses.

While working with regular departments, however, to achieve more offerings within their own purview, the Women's Studies program will develop concurrently a number of courses of its own with a consciously inter and multidisciplinary emphasis and with a goal of assisting students in integrating disciplinary training with a feminist concentration. This year, our initial offering for freshmen and sophomores is a course in the comparative study of women in five different countries, in social institutions and political structures, and then a study of women in a number of pre-literate societies to try to determine what, if anything, was different before civilization as it's conceived.

In each case, our courses will not only present material to be learned in a fairly conventional way, but will utilize older undergraduate students as small group discussion leaders. It interests me that the flexible format that naturally comes in Women's Studies courses of using students in ways that are generally not the case, in other words, a breaking down of the vertical arrangement between the professor and everyone else, seems to mirror something germane to the larger concepts of Women's Studies, which gives the program a kind of vigor and openness seldom encountered in some of the more vertically oriented departments with which, surely, we all here are familiar.

Most importantly, our courses will attempt to raise questions which will encourage students to test inert ideas against the reality of their own lives and the lives of others. The program's courses will ask questions that push knowledge to the very edge of scholarly speculation. For instance, the course on pre-literate women will try to deal with questions at its conclusion, such as what happens to women in pre-literate societies, 15 or 20 pre-literate societies, when the entire society slides into or collides with civilization?

Do their roles function, self-concepts, powers, change? And if so, why? And how? Coping with these bone-deep questions is bound to awake the best in both the students and the faculty.

Such curricular and research effort will take time and patience, however. And we do not expect easy progress in all quarters, nor should we. Any person who says to me they think Women's Studies is a mischievous affair I take very seriously, because they're right, in the best sense of what "mischievous" used to mean.

After all, the mere publication of certain historical, social, or literary and artistic documents may result in a sharp jolt to many theories and an out-and-out refutation of others. In history, for example, women historians like Anne Firor Scott and psychohistorians like Caroll Smith-Rosenberg have already proven that women have seemed to play a part relatively passive in early American history simply because historians defined traditionally public records as the only admissible documents in establishing history.

Since women were not legally or politically important enough to be included in such records, their names naturally do not show in this analysis. Both these scholars, Scott using Southern women and Smith-Rosenberg using women from the North Atlantic states, have investigated private records-- papers, journals, letters, diaries-- and have shown how fundamentally skewed the accepted view has been. These new sources reveal women to have been every bit as active and directly influential in the life of their community and nation as men.

In the realm of literary criticism, which I know a little better, careful work on Virginia Woolf's style within the context of her times reveals that she must at least share with James Joyce the position of altering the writing of the English language in novels. Traditionally, it's been Joyce who has been credited as the English proponent of that style we call stream of consciousness, while Woolf is perhaps included in a survey of modern British fiction by a brief, aesthetic look at To the Lighthouse.

Yet, her essays on novelists before her time and contemporary with her were not only popular with readers, but were extremely influential on those critics who later tried to trace the development of a new form-- the novel. Now, men and women, and there are members of both sexes, who have staked their intellectual lives on certain broadly accepted visions of any given area of thought or mode of analysis cannot help but feel threatened by research and teaching having so fundamentally altering of potential.

Some of us at Minnesota find the above sketch possibilities exciting in the extreme, since for faculty and students, the whole area of Women's Studies offers a chance to inject new life and vigor into established fields by shifting focus and enlarging perspective. For undergraduate students, the program can actually deliver on the sorts of promises found in most bulletins from liberal arts colleges. It can give a student an opportunity, indeed, can offer her or him little alternative to acknowledge the essential connections between intellect and the rest of one's self, between schoolwork and all the other works of one's days.

TS Eliot once identified a tendency toward what he called a dissociation of sensibility in the poetry that came after the Renaissance. It seems to me one of the cardinal failures, if not crimes, of American education is that there has been a systematic effort to force young people to make artificial distinctions and splits until their bruised sensibilities, which cry out, after all, for careful coaxing and refinement, are so disassociated that our brightest students have simply retreated in alarmingly large numbers from any serious commitment to ideas or language.

I've been at my job as coordinator of Women's Studies for about two months. And in that time, I've had contacts directly with over 800 different individuals. In virtually every instance, the students, faculties, and members of the community have been eager to pursue rigorous study to contribute time and energy to helping younger students learn, to see this program grow and flourish.

There's an air of expectancy, even as we face real financial exigencies which will inevitably hold us back. We believe the logic of having this program together with the excellence of what we do within it will overcome whatever resistance we meet. As with all phases of the women's movement, and certainly, Women's Studies is the academic intellectual arm of that movement, we face what Catharine Stimpson so forcefully calls the "darkening quarrel about theory and practice."

Women don't agree on how to be women and how to be in the movement. That's perfectly acceptable. But if we can admit ideological, political, academic differences without rejecting each other, the Women's Studies program and intellectual women will gain a sense of strength and integration that might let more of us succeed without quite so much struggle.

In the literature of the women's movement in America both now and in the 19th century, much revolves around two problems. What happens if women let themselves feel anger? And what has been done to women's sense of self-worth by exposing them to a paucity of models in the professions of this world?

I believe Women's Studies has a unique answer to both dilemmas and therefore, is of real value in the schools. I'd like to draw an analogy to Blacks in higher education, though it seems to me presumptuous to make simplistic parallels between the struggle of white women and Black people. Many Americans, both educators and members of the liberal public, thought that once Blacks were admitted to institutions of higher learning, they would settle into the comfortable molds to be found there.

What we all overlooked, and I'm very glad we did, was the shattering power of information that can be found in books, lectures, talk. It seems no accident that Blacks became angrier once they had matriculated and been given library privileges than they had been as more bona fide outsiders. So with women, though more subtly.

Women have been students in colleges and universities, even the best ones, for a long time. The cruel fact remains, however, that we have been exposed mostly to matter by and about men, taught to us almost exclusively by men. Only recently have women begun to study their own perspectives and their own performers.

I believe Women's Studies will offer courses and bibliographies that will kindle fierce anger in many young women. But I also believe that the program contains a structure to channel that anger into the production of energies for research and creativity, which may shake the very stones of the academy.

And finally, such steady, rigorous investigation and discovery will bring the whole of society closer to radical changes in attitudes, behaviors, and language than any rally or rhetorical outpouring can hope to do. The latter form of human activity has the tremendous capacity to arouse but not to sustain the enthusiasm and hard work of people.

Change is seldom revolutionary, it seems to me. Much more usually, it's evolutionary. So that the brave and dogged pursuit of knowledge and ideas is perhaps the single human endeavor capable of altering society even a little bit. Our Women's Studies program seeks to turn anger into energy, verbal abuse into data collection, hard and soft, self-abnegation into respect, gained through the control over one's life that increased knowledge and understanding can bring.

As for the problems of models, we feel that having a clearly defined curriculum in Women's Studies, taught often by women professors, focusing on the accomplishments and problems of women, should naturally provide students with positive experience. Through reading biographies and autobiographies of the women they study, students, male as well as female, will be forced to reconsider the strengths and deeds of women in this culture and elsewhere.

The concern for role models has a peculiar lift at the University of Minnesota. Our data on faculty are the same as anywhere. But we do have the only graduate school of a major American university presently deaned by a woman, May Brodbeck. And we do have, fairly recently, a woman in a position as assistant vice president for academic administration, Shirley Clark.

So as women, pay attention to and name discrimination when you see it happening to you, your sisters, your children, your mothers. It will occur. And it seems to me we are not freakish or imbalanced to detect it. The University of Minnesota, like the State University of New York, which has had a study done of it, has a gradually decreasing scale of percentiles of women as they progress through the levels here.

I haven't bothered you with a lot of very upsetting statistics, but I think I will at least read these. The exact figures for that system, and the ones at Minnesota are so close, show 50% of college freshmen to be women, 43% of the sophomores, 40% of the juniors, 35% of the seniors, 21% of the graduate students, 14% of the instructors, 15% of the lecturers, who, of course, have no fringe benefits or hope of progression toward tenure or anything else, 20% of the assistant professors, 17% of the associate professors, and a stunning 5% of full professors. The figures for administrators at the highest level is simply too small to calculate.

It will not do to say, as many of my colleagues do, well, they just drop out because they decide to marry or something. Studies must be done. That's what universities are full of. Studies must be done to ascertain patterns of dropout and expressed reasons for it.

Such studies will never be statistically hard, since none of us stays or goes from her or his work as a scholar and teacher for easily measurable reasons. But efforts must be made to take seriously felt conditions and patterns of neglect or discrimination.

If I'm a graduate student in a department which can boast 49% or 51% women graduate students, but which has on its staff of professors none or one or two women out of 40 or 50 or 90 members, surely, the sense of my not being worth hiring filters through, even while I earn A's from my teachers and am allowed to assist in their research projects.

And if I'm an assistant professor in a department where the senior men in my field refuse to discuss that field with me, but prefer either to engage in mildly flirtatious repartee or to re-establish themselves as the holders of arcane information somehow permanently closed to me, surely, I must be heroic to conform sufficiently to the criteria of that department to be fit to stay in its midst. These covert forms of discrimination seem to be the most prevalent ones in universities and I would say in schools, which, after all, do house the heart of liberal America.

[LAUGHTER]

They also seem, and this is what is both saddening and maddening, the most unmalleable to legal or even moral policies or positions. But don't just name the ills if you see them happening to you and other women. If the women's movement has taught me one thing, it is that I can ask for and receive spirited and consistent support from other women in my own incomparable and even in vastly different positions.

One salient function of a sound Women's Studies program should be to announce to its university and the community in which that university is housed that no woman need stand or fall alone. That there is a group of like-minded people who help each other. And revive that oldest of all academic dreams, which like the American one, has seldom been fulfilled, that is a community of scholars, some young, some not so young, who search together for that terribly evanescent quality, truth, which long ago, by someone in a building very like this, was proclaimed as having the power to make us all wholly free. I hope you have a good day. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Keynote speaker Toni McNaron, coordinator of the Women's Studies program at the University of Minnesota.

[MARLO THOMAS, "GIRL LAND"] Toyland, Toyland

Beautiful Girl and Boy Land

They're closing up Girl Land, some say it's a shame

It used to be busy, then nobody came

And other folks tell you they're glad that it's done

'Cause Girl Land was never much fun

Welcome to Girl Land, my good little girls

Admission's a wink and a toss of your curls

There's fun for all, from 8 to 80

You go in a girl, and you come out a lady

CONNIE GOLDMAN: The seminar ended with the challenge, What Can You Do? That was the title of the address offered by Nina Rothchild, school board member from Mahtomedi, Minnesota, parent, and activist, a lady that has just written a book entitled, Sexism in Schools-- a Handbook for Action. We talk some about her concerns.

NINA ROTHCHILD: I don't think the sexism would be all that different between suburban and city schools. I think the one difference for my book is that my experience in what you can do within a local school district would differ from a small school to a large school. So that when you're dealing with the large city schools, you'll have many more layers of bureaucracy that you have to deal with. And it might be harder to find out just who does make decisions and who is doing what.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Well, your implication is that possibly in Bloomington or Saint Louis Park or Robbinsdale, it might be a lot easier for a parent or an interested citizen or an active teacher to implement some changes in the curriculum.

NINA ROTHCHILD: Yes, I do think-- of course, your influence in a school has a large part to do with the persons who are already in the school. If there is a superintendent who is sensitive and aware on this issue, then you're probably going to have more impact than in a school district where the superintendent really is resistant and hostile. So it will vary from place to place, depending on the persons within it.

I think it's usually easier to deal with a small group of people than with a very large bureaucracy. So to that extent, it is true. But I think there are many things that persons can do within their own home schools so even if you're in a large school city-- or large city school system, you still can go to a school where your children are and have some influence on the principal and the teachers and librarians within that individual school.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Well, let's talk in very absolute, practical terms. What suggestions might you make to the parent?

NINA ROTHCHILD: I normally suggest taking after the athletic budget first. And that's not because I consider athletics the overriding priority. But it is a place where you can really document the differences in treatment between boys and girls.

And so it serves as kind of a great consciousness-raising exercise for the school if you can actually get numbers which say they spend 10 times more money on boys than on girls. And you will get some changes in the athletic budget. And I think that is changing gradually now.

So I think starting with the athletic budget is a good way. But I think that you can also do much by just working within your local school with teachers, own child's teacher, if you find materials. And I think part of it is being aware and knowing what materials are available. Because teachers are busy people with a lot of pressures.

And if you can get hold of book lists of non-sex-typed books, or for school librarians, get materials for them. You can get hold of pictures of women in non-stereotyped roles that teachers could use in their career education. There are a lot of little things that you can just help teachers have the resources available so that they're more likely to want to do more in this area.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: It costs so much money to change texts. And it isn't done very often. What do you think of the idea of using texts that are recognized by some as sexist, educating the teacher to the biases there, and actually using them as a learning tool in reverse?

NINA ROTHCHILD: No, I think that's fine. I think horrible examples often serve to point up a problem. So that I think that's fine. But many teachers are really not aware of the sex-role typing that is in the children's books. And so I think that you have to certainly train them or help them to understand what typing does go on.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Have you had an opportunity to measure the influence of your study on changes that might happen here in the Twin Cities?

NINA ROTHCHILD: No. My book just came out on Friday, so I have no idea how useful it will be. When I wrote it, I did send copies of first drafts to friends of mine who were board members in other school districts and asked for their comments and suggestions because I wasn't sure how much of the experience within my own district would be the same as in other districts.

So I've tried to make it as much applicable to other school districts as to my own. But I have no way of knowing right now whether it will make some changes or not. I did, when I was first writing the book or before I wrote the book, looked around to see if there were any kind of books written about how you just go about influencing the schools on anything.

And there really are no books at all. There are all kinds of books criticizing schools and things that school people can do to change. But there's really very little written, as far as I know, having to do with what an individual parent and a community can do to try and influence the schools.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: What about a child influencing change? I might not mean an elementary school child, but what about a secondary school student?

NINA ROTHCHILD: I guess this is one of the places where I have been either disappointed or wrong. I started out thinking that most young people were more aware of this kind of thing. And when I passed out first drafts of my book, I was really jumped on.

And they pointed out, which I think is probably true, that most kids in junior high and high school age are trying to establish their identity. And they're at an age where they don't go against the prevailing norms. So it takes really an exceptional child, either from a home that's a very liberated home, or a particularly strong child to go against what's considered appropriate at that age group.

So I don't expect, other than maybe girls asking for more athletics, to see a great deal of changes coming from kids. Maybe it will in another five or more years. But right now, kids at that age are too worried about how their peers look at them. And they don't want to be too different.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: What you're implying is that they look at their sex roles in what some of us would consider old terms.

NINA ROTHCHILD: I think most of them do. And I think most people do, generally, too. I do not fool myself that the feminist movement is one that has enormously wide public support. I think the support is growing. I think there is more understanding about what it's about. But there are certainly many people who feel very threatened to change the roles that they've become accustomed to playing.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Your book is aimed at enlightening, educating, encouraging the parent to participate. Do you have any plans to do anything to encourage the student to be interested in the possible change of his identity?

NINA ROTHCHILD: Well, I think once persons within the school and teachers are more aware of this kind of thing, that that will help kids. I know that in our own district, we now have a sociology course where they actually talk about what goes into sex roles. They examine other societies to see what roles men and women play.

And kids become much more aware through this type of activity. But I think that it really-- kids' values come from their home and from their schools. And they're going to reflect what those are.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Interesting. The implication is that there's more rigidity in teenagers than one would ever imagine, brought on by the pressures of finding their own way, I suppose. But nevertheless, not the kind of openness that we often expect.

NINA ROTHCHILD: I think that's generally true. As I say, there always are exceptions. And you will find a few kids that are going against the prevailing norm. But it's a very difficult age for kids, because they're trying to find out who they are. And they're very concerned about what others think of them.

And I think that that makes it hard for them to be different from their peers. Now, they're very willing to be different from their parents. But that's kind of a different thing. They don't want to be different from kids their own age.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Well, how would you evaluate the whole impetus towards change at this point, either here or around the country? Are we all here today talking to ourselves because this is what we believe? Or is somebody out there aware and listening?

NINA ROTHCHILD: Well, I hope that other people are out and listening. There has been quite a bit in the mass media about it. The first writings about the feminist movement certainly were terrible putdowns and certainly made all so-called women's libbers to be freaky and crazy and all that stuff.

And I think there is a growing awareness that it is a legitimate movement for people to have choices in their life. How really widespread the feelings are, I don't know. I think most people have a sense of fairness. So that when it comes to issues like equal pay for equal work, most people will go along with it.

I think getting people to understand something like sex-role stereotyping, which is so much of our unconscious attitude, that that'll be a lot harder. And I really can't see where it's going or how far it will go.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: My conversation with Nina Rothchild, author of the book, Sexism in Schools-- a Handbook for Action. The conference was kind of a barometer reading, an indicator that educators, parents, teachers, citizens, and, yes, even students, are more and more aware of changing attitudes and changing opportunities, and also increasingly aware of sexist attitudes with us all, attitudes and ideas that we learned, that we reflected, that we absorbed a long time ago when we all were students too.

This has been a summary report of the League of Women Voters seminar on Sex Bias in Schools, held Monday, October 8, at Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church in Minneapolis. Music from the recording, Free to Be-- You and Me by Marlo Thomas. I'm Connie Goldman.

[MARLO THOMAS, "FREE TO BE YOU AND ME"] You and me

You and me

You and me

You and me are free to be you and me