Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies

For an inside view of "Women's Studies" and how the Government demands that propaganda and hate comes before reason and history, read Professing Feminism, by two former Women's Studies Professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koetge.

Book Description
In this new and expanded edition of their controversial 1994 book, the authors update their analysis of what's gone wrong with Women's Studies programs. Their three new chapters provide a devastating and detailed examination of the routine practices found in feminst teaching and research.

Unmasking the sham on campus

Patai and Koertage have studied the hate training program called "Women's Studies" from a sociological perspective. They go into detail on how a badly flawed political training program masquerading as "studies" is now being promoted and taught at virtually every college. Instead of education, young women get dogma. Instead of intellectual challenges, young feminists are taught to accept the party line without question. The authors include reviews of government agency promotion of the dis-education now accepted on college campuses. Where "knowing" replaces scholarship, where victimology replaces competency, where hate replaces wisdom, that is today's "Women's Studies" program. Title IX is mentioned in passing, but the question of an equal education required by law is not asked. With over 700 colleges in the US now funding misandrist propaganda classes called "Women's Studies" why aren't any of them required to also teach equivalent classes for men under Title IX? Even as bad as Women's Studies comes off in this book there is other, and perhaps equally valid and more damning criticism left out.

The book needs to be widely read by every college administrator and by every legislator who has to vote on college budgets. The authors mince a few words, probably to keep from being stoned, but the message is clearly stated. Prejudicial agenda conformity and hate on campus is not education. Buy the book. Give one to your college age student. Donate another one to your favorite library and college.

Feminist gamesmanship

Koertge and Patai reveal the impact of "Women's Studies" programmes in North American universities. They examine the aims and practices in these study areas through interviews and analysis of curricula. The analysis is presented with a unique format - the authors couch their findings in the form of "games". Like all games, there are rules, playgrounds and players. The players are the teachers and students, but the spectators are the readers of this book. As taxpayers, the spectators often aren't aware of the game. This book can go far in enlightening the audience.

The underlying theme is the dominance of activism over scholarship. The authors note how activism by feminists in the 1960s and '70s led to the introduction of these special study areas. More attention given to the role of women in society led to courses in women writers, artists and politicians. Once in place in more university classrooms, Koertge and Patai show that the assault on "traditional" standards became even more widespread. The authors open the book describing the IDPOL game - "identity politics and ideological policiing". Teachers and students alike place high emphasis on acceptable roles and see that these are enforced. A major facet in establishing "identity" is the playing of TOTAL REJ - the eschewing of anything attributable to masculine origins. Examples are traditional philosophy, mathematics, science and technology. An extension of TOTAL REJ is BIODENIAL. The latter game introduces "social construction" to Womens' Studies by asserting anything related to gender is culturally based. This imported philosophical stance has been applied to wide areas in education, but impaired science and mathematics courses most severely according to the authors.

Fear of "backlash" reaction to the excesses of the programmes led the National Women's Studies Association to undertake a study. Koertge and Patai are at their most scathin[g in assessing the report produced by the NWSA. Virtually based on the book "Women's Ways of Knowing" that advocated a "connectionist approach" to learning. Self-expression, urged the NWSA, is more valuable than study, research and writing skills - "Empowerment over Epistemology". Epistemology is traditional, hence, masculine, hence unaceptable as a foundation for learning in the university. The authors offer a different solution. They urge the dimemberment of Women's Studies programmes by relocating the courses into the appropriate departments. Game-playing and "empowerment" would be shed for more meaningful scholarship.

Almost lost in this study is its most frightening statement: "feminist pedagogy . . . is being taken up by secondary and even elementary school educators and policy makers" [p. 44]. They define "academia" has a site for scholarship and debate while bewailing erosion of these values by feminist dogma in their conclusion. This dogma has emerged in the public school system [see C.H. Sommers' "The War Against Boys"] and shows little sign of abating. Anyone interested should glance at the list of university "Women's Studies" programmes readily available on the InterNet. The same courses, often taught by the same people, using the same curricula and reading material are still listed. This realisation will keep this book useful for some time. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada.]

Wow,that is scary.Especially the part about feminist dogma finding its way into secondary and elementary schools.As complacent as folks are today,I have no doubt that parents havent a clue what their children are being taught.I`m inclined to buy many copies of this book and offer them to as many people as possible.

The two authors are former "Women's Studies" Professors who wanted to teach about women rather than teaching anti-men hate and propagnada. They fought the system. There is a revised and updated edition of the book available.

The level of malevolance described by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koetge is effectively required by the US Goverment under it's Department of Education. The hatred of men is taught by tax paid workers at over 700 colleges and universities in the US.

Blessings

Bob

That just boggles the mind,that hatred of the entire male gender could actually be actively encouraged,taught,and government supported.

Everything that has ever been produced from the human (male) mind is taught in Universities. Almost every discipline originated in some (male) mind and almost every advance has built upon the product of other (men's) minds. They are dismissable, according to Womyn's Studies.

The Sciences, Technologies, Mathematics, Architecture, the Arts, the Humanities are all dismissable as 'male'. The Professors and staff of those departments and faculties are presumably hated too. Have they fought back? Have they defended themselves against the calumnies?

Some faculties - such as Law -have been infiltrated and poisoned from within (Professor katherine McKinnon example). The administration is held to ransom, objectors sacked (Larry Summers example). And not a word of protest.

The dilution of acedemia spreads with ertzatz disciplines and faculties replacing or sitting alongside the older established ones, and their 'professors' joining and supporting the feminazis (the Duke 88 example). The rot spreads, poisoning and destroying.

The silence from the 'old' university is defening.

Its a mirror of the general social silence and aquiescence.

One day someone will write a book analysing the paralysis of nations when faced with women's irrational hatred. No one has the guts to stop the rot. Academia, along with society is dying.

I would advocate starting a new discipline. Defenestration Studies. There are ivory towers aplenty with lots of windows at high level. There is a goodly supply of professors to take flying lessons.

Here is a {frightening) excerpt from a review of the book in the 9 December 1994 issue of The New York Times:

In "Professing Feminism," Ms. Patai and Ms. Koertge cite cases in which students are chastised for failing to toe the party line and are charged with "resistance." They recount the story of a woman who is accused by her colleagues of exhibiting "masculinist categories of thought" because she happens to be an economist and another story about an "art project" exhibited on a University of Maryland campus that "listed as 'potential rapists' male names pulled randomly from a student directory."

See what I mean by "frightening"? Randomly selecting males to be listed as rapists? And what the helll is it with " masculinist categories of thought"?

The review also includes this sentence, further emphasizing the "party line" protocol of women's studies: "Many teachers in these programs dismiss traditional science and intellectual inquiry as biased, while trying to replace them with alternaative systems of their own."

Read it and weep!