Teaching the Feminist Minority

In women\u27s studies conferences during the past few years, I have heard many descriptions of pedagogical approaches to specific student groups—working women, displaced homemakers, business majors, and so on. I admire and learn from these presentations and at the same time I am uneasy. For some reason my classes are never like those described. The longer I teach them, the less homogeneous they seem. I am working out my role as a women\u27s studies teacher in a university in which—as in most others, I suspect—no class consists of just working-class women, just reentry women, just Native American women. It is time to discuss the work of the feminist teacher in a mixed classroom, where any constituent group may be a minority-and the smallest consistent minority group is feminist students. When the field of women\u27s studies began its phenomenal growth about ten years ago, teachers and students alike were beginners in a process of self-education. Most of us had been socialized as traditional women ; we learned together what that meant. By the time women\u27s studies classes were offered in our region—the Bible Belt—there were valuable resources, printed and experiential, to facilitate this reeducational process. Our first classes were demanded by women who had learned feminism from books and xeroxed essays and who had experienced its practical necessities in the state legislature, in marriage, in consciousness-raising groups. These women, self-educated feminists like their teachers, filled our first classes

Finding New Forms: Student Autonomy in a Patriarchal University

Oklahoma Women was a year-long experimental seminar at the University of Oklahoma designed to teach research skills and to discover what a few women could learn in a short time about the literature and history of the women of our region. In the first semester, we did research on Oklahoma women, and in the second, public programming based on that research Students learned directly how to do research in the humani ties and did individual work on research projects and group work on the public programs. A photographic exhibit for a local conference on women\u27s work, a community-wide series of programs in women\u27s history in the Lawton area, and a booklet on the seminar\u27s own group process were some of the results, but the heart of the seminar was a series of research papers which are now in the University of Oklahoma Library in the Western History Collection

The Finance Committee

One of the many challenges to the NWSA in Lawrence came from the Association\u27s Finance Committee, who, after a summary of the Association\u27s financial history, made several specific recommendations based on their reflection about the relationship between our past financial behavior and our continuing effort to understand ourselves as a feminist organization. The recommendations should be the beginning of a discussion among all our members of the relationship between feminism and money. The Finance Committee recommended that the NWSA as an organization dedicate itself to developing an attitude of fiscal responsibility in the Coordinating Council and the membership as a whole. To this end, the committee recommended that a membership drive be a top priority for the next year and that each member make that drive a personal responsibility, basing her efforts to enlist her friends\u27 and colleagues\u27 support on the importance of paying for the value received from sisters at least as much as we must pay for what we receive from the patriarchal marketplace

NWSA NEWS AND VIEWS

FROM THE STEERING COMMITTEE Responding to the 1979 charge of the Finance Committee and the Delegate Assembly, the Coordinating Council devoted a major portion of its February 14-17 meeting in College Park to a discussion of finances. The clear intent of all sessions was the consideration of fiscal responsibility in terms of feminist principles and the goals of NWSA. On February 13, several members of the 1979-80 Finance Committee (Liz Birch, Alice Stadthaus, Barbara Taylor, Mary Thornberry, and Robin Wright) met with the Steering Committee (Pat Gozemba, Jan Meriwether, and Kay Towns); the National Coordinator, Elaine Reuben; the National Staff Associate, Donna Whittlesey; and consultants from Women\u27s Resources of Philadelphia. At that time they planned means for addressing financial issues at the CC meeting

NWSA News and Views

The $100 Fund: To Sustain and Expand NWSA The National Women\u27s Studies Association, although strong in spirit and in truth, is not immune to the reality of inflation. If NWSA is to survive, it is imperative that a large amount of cash begin to flow into the treasury immediately to cover current and ongoing operating expenses

NWSA News and Views

You are cordially invited to participate in the Third Annual NWSA Convention— Women Respond to Racism —to be held May 31-June 4, 1981, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. At this Convention we will examine the conjunction of racism and sexism from an interdisciplinary, multicultural perspective as well as in the context of, for example, community organtzmg, curriculum development, the media, and public policy. The Convention schedule includes a broad selection of workshops and panel discussions on subjects as diverse as nonracist and nonsexist curricular materials, race and sex desegregation, nineteenth-century Black women activists, organizing against sterilization abuse nationally and internationally, art by women of color, women and development in the Third World, literature, pornography, and demography. There will, of course, be sessions addressing the interests of all the NWSA caucuses: Lesbian, Third World, Student, Staff, PreK-12, and Community College