Women's Crossroads

My post on diversity on PB&J has generated a lot of discussion. But once again I find myself having to defend the notion that women and non-Western, non-heterosexual, poor or minority folks should be given fair representation in our required core curriculum at Simon's Rock. Because they've been excluded from the Western canon historically, the argument goes, they're inferior, less important, and don't deserve students' time.

Here's the comment in question:

"The only way to introduce female writers into the curriculum is to take out works that are more important historically. For example, of the writers you listed [Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Rhys], the only name I recognize is Harriet Jacobs. I've read Jacobs, and her memoir is important and well written, but she says something very similar to what Frederick Douglas says. We already read Douglas, and Douglas is more important historically than Jacobs. If we substituted Jacobs for Douglas we would be using a lesser text in order to promote diversity. I think that defeats the whole purpose of seminar. We could add Jacobs in addition to Douglas to an already packed curriculum but that would just squeeze something else out.

"College students need to be familiar with Plato and Greek thought, they need to be familiar with Dante and the middle ages, they need to be familiar with Shakespeare, they need to understand Darwin. Sur Juana is less of a priority.

"Obviously we shouldn't select authors based on the results of a google search, but this gives you some idea of the relative influence of various authors in world culture:
Current readings:
William Shakespeare: 15.9 million pages
Plato: 14.4 million pages
Charles Darwin: 10.6 million pages
Frederick Douglas: 7.81 million pages
Karl Marx: 6.04 million pages
Jane Austen: 4.21 million pages
Virginia Woolf: 3.18 million pages
Franz Kafka: 2.03 million pages
Sophocles: 2 million pages
Dante Alighieri: 1.99 million pages*

Important writers not used:
Aristotle: 13.8 million pages
John Locke: 5.91 million pages
Thomas Aquinas: 2.36 million pages
Rene Descartes: 1.87 million pages
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 877,000 pages**

JBH's Suggestions:
Jean Rhys: 849,000 pages
Harriet Jacobs: 802,000 pages
Sor Juana: 430,000 pages
Christine de Pizan: 108,000 pages
*Searching for Dante alone resulted in 15.6 million pages
**A different transliteration (Dostoevsky) gives you another 600,000 pages"

So by this logic, educators should just go on teaching the traditional Western canon, practically devoid of women or non-Westerners, just because that's the way it's always been done. It's disturbing to find students, even at a supposedly progressive college like Simon's Rock, arguing such a conservative, traditionalist approach. Why is Harriet Jacobs less well-known than Frederick Douglass? Because as a woman, she was ignored by scholars and students. Does that mean she deserves to continue to be ignored? In my opinion, her autobiography is far more important and interesting than Douglass's. Does my opinion, as a feminist scholar, count less than the opinion of the male scholar in the next office? Apparently, to these students, the answer is yes.

It's frustrating. I thought we had the multicultural curricular wars already, more than 1o years ago, and I thought the importance of diversity in the college core curriculum had been well-established, at places like Stanford, Columbia, and even Harvard and Princeton. But apparently this is a battle that must be fought and fought again.

You know what? The problem is, we who believe in diversity have to spend so much time and energy proving and re-proving our arguments that our investment in scholarly work suffers. Instead of having this argument with students, I should be busy teaching Christine de Pizan and Harriet Jacobs!

Sigh.