Will misses on women's studies

By Pamela Hearn

On May 19, The Washington Post published a column, "Feminism Hijacked," by George Will. The column was syndicated in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers across the country. Because women's studies is so often misunderstood, even in academia, it seems important to correct some of the implications and generalizations in the column.

Will bases his conclusion on only two sources: Christine Stolba's "Lying in a Room of One's Own: How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students." and Virginia Woolf's famous essay, "A Room of One's Own."

Stolba's report is based on "five widely used women's studies textbooks" which are full of "meretricious rubbish," according to Will. First of all, five textbooks is much too small a sample to be of value for analysis when there are thousands in use across the country and in other countries. Many women's studies courses don't even use a textbook, instead drawing from many sources, both past and present. Further, most women's studies courses are based on a specific discipline such as literary criticism, psychology, political science or history.

In his first point, Will contemptuously discusses the wage gap between women and men in the United States. However, it should be noted that he never asserts that there isn't one. (It might be pointed out here that women's studies is not limited to issues concerning women in the United States. Many courses include readings and discussions that concern women in other countries and cultures.)

In his next point, he flatly denies that in the past "women have been shortchanged in medical research" by asserting that currently this situation is improved. To discover the real history of women and medicine in the past, one need only refer to the excellent text, "For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts' Advice to Women," by Deidre English and Barbara Ehrenreich. Although the horrors of the past, such as the "rest cure," have been abandoned by the medical community today, the facts of the past are still facts.

Will ends this discussion with the curious non sequitur that currently women are more likely than men to have medical insurance. What does insurance prove about medical history or research?

The next examples of Will's flawed reasoning pertain to educational bias against women, the fragmentation felt by many women and the idea that women have low self-esteem. All are ridiculed by Will, although all three can and have been documented in numerous ways by reliable research.

He goes on to subtly imply that women's studies courses encourage life without men, marriage and family life, again using a few unspecified quotations and examples for each idea.

Finally, he ends his column in a totally confusing way. He says, "The title of Stolba's report echoes that of Virginia Woolf's splendid 1929 essay, 'A room of One's Own,' in which Woolf deftly suggested ... why a sister of Shakespeare would have been handicapped compared with her brother." Stolba's title may echo Woolf, but the two pieces totally contradict one another. But on one thing we can agree: If Shakespeare's imaginary sister were so tormented by a poet's heart imprisoned in a woman's body that she committed suicide, then she was indeed handicapped, although that seems a bit of an understatement.

In the beginning of the column, Will says that women's studies should add to rather than subtract from understanding. At the very least, one would expect a national columnist to follow his own advice.

Pamela Hearn of Cape Girardeau is a professor emeritus in the Department of English and a former coordinator of women's studies at Southeast Missouri State University.