On classrooms, women, and rage (with thanks to Jo Scott Coe)

Now that most teaching in the Humanities and in K-12 is done by women, does this mean that feminist issues are bypassed in the classroom? Women have power, after all. We stand at the front of the room. We wield the chalk or the marker, and we wield grades, and signatory sheets on Ph.D. examinations.  We are, some argue, clearly in the post-feminist phase of education. 

Gender problems solved!  Hooray! 

But I’m seeing something different.  There is still – at least in education (and I suspect elsewhere) -- a persistent questioning of women in authority:  with the authorizing of women as agents of expertise, mastery, and judgment.  And those problems come – more often than not – from other women.   

I am seeing it come from younger women.  Whether these students see me as their evil mother, grandmother, or babysitter is unclear. But what is clear is the rage that I see many young women bringing into the classroom.  And it is sometimes directed against me personally.  Such a thing happened to me recently.  Twice.

Other versions of this story circulate. It isn’t always inter-generational.

A young female colleague has confessed to me that she has the same problem.  She has a female graduate student who persistently seeks to undercut her, subvert what she is doing in class.  She feels disrespected. She is disrespected.  She tried talking to the student.  The student had a fit and said she was being disrespected.  The result? Silence. The long-standing hate-filled, pursed-lipped silence between women. The power struggle that dare not speak its name.  Another instance of feminist solidarity broken apart, ruined, spoiled.  Tainted.

Who do we talk to about this?  Students have the ombudsperson.  To whom do female professors and teachers go?  We have no one. Are we being “harassed”?  Not exactly.  Are we being physically threatened?  No.  But my colleague and I are being undermined. What office do you go to for that? 

I don’t know how to begin, even, to talk about this semi-spoken rage, this Schopenhauerian ressentiment that circulates between women teachers, graduate students, and undergraduate students and that radiates outward to staff (an increasingly female cohort) – making education a practice in bitchery, incompetence, and denial.

But I want to name it. 

There are exceptions to this trend of course. Wonderful relationships that develop between women teachers, and women grad students, and undergraduates.  I work with an undergraduate staff person, whom I admire deeply.  I believe that we are good colleagues. 

But there are these other power-relations. 

And these ones are not good. 

I scan my student roster nervously.  I fear to see certain female names on it. 

And fear in education is never a positive thing.

I speak this fear because I do not believe it is necessary or inevitable; I address the problem of rage, in hopes that we can change the way we interact with each other now that we have – finally – managed to enter the corridors of power. 

I speak it because I think we can’t get to the next place – the next stage of freedom  (be it 4^th wave or 5^th wave feminism)– until we fix this unspoken, repressed and unaddressed problem in the ways that we interact with each other in the increasingly "feminized" but not yet truly feminist educational arena.