wildfire/25_chap19.html

<h1>CHAPTER 19</h1>
<h2>Escape from the Semi/Versity<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></h2>
<p>Not long ago at the reception following my speech at a midwestem university, six or seven instructors from the Women's Studies Department stayed at the reception afterward until everyone else had gone. Then with tense, anxious faces they told me that they were miserable in their profession. They were realizing that they had edited themselves so severely in their teaching and scholarship - and often so unconsciously - that they had forgotten what they had once thought. They also saw that now they would never know how spiritually and intellectually high they might have soared if they had not been pinned to the ground by fear for their jobs. They were frightened by how insidiously they had slipped into compromising their principles and mourned the courage they had lost through accommodation.</p>
<p>Though each of them was totally dedicated to teaching women about their history, to illuminating women's position and the reasons for it, and to helping women discover their own power, they could hardly face going to work another day. Several of them stated unequivocally that they wanted to leave. They felt as if they had to or they would lose their moral bearings altogether. They would do it in a minute, they vowed, if they weren't so afraid of "economics."</p>
<p>Though as fed up as the others, one of them tried to persuade them that it was their duty to stick it out. "The women here <i>need</i> us," she pleaded with them. "For most of them, there's no other place to learn about themselves as women. But what's more important, they need us as <i>models</i>."</p>
<p>"But what are you modeling for them?" I asked. "Do you really think they need more models of women compromising their principles, sacrificing their integrity either for money or for what they perceive as others' needs? Women who are saying less, being less, muting and scaling themselves down, bowing to the yoke? I should think they have had enough of such models."</p>
<p>I asked them how they thought they could help other women find their sources of personal power when they themselves felt so powerless and thought so little of themselves that they accepted and played men's hierarchical, competitive game even though they knew it was in gross violation of all they valued. I told them I would have thought that instead their women students most desperately needed models of women having integrity, valuing their own women's culture, acting powerful and fearless, being free.</p>
<p>As we spoke together, I questioned whether it was even possible for women to glimpse our own real power and potential in universities where we are forced to conform to the rules and values patriarchy deliberately set up to keep women from having access to our Selves. If the means are the ends, surely this is impossible.</p>
<p>They asked what I would do if I were in their shoes. I replied that since I wasn't, I couldn't know, but that I trusted them to figure it out. To begin to open their minds to the possibilities, I told them a story I had heard about a group of women like them who, in the early 70s, had left their university positions and organized themselves to teach women's studies in the community. The story goes that they were successful enough to continue for at least a half dozen years.</p>
<p>Though perhaps apocryphal, this story is nevertheless absolutely true <i>in its possibility</i>. It could very well have happened, and could happen, or happen again, at any time. Individual women have done it - Kay Hagan in Atlanta, for example. Why couldn't a group of women set themselves up to teach women's studies in every community, perhaps naming it something more compelling-Kay calls hers "Feminars" - and teach <i>everything</i> they ever longed to teach in exactly the way they always longed to teach it? Not a "feminist university" - which seems to me an oxymoron, like military intelligence - but a whole new concept.</p>
<p>But, the argument against this goes (and you can probably hear it in your own head right now), no one would take such classes seriously because they wouldn't be recognized in the men's world, and men wouldn't award them "credits" toward "degrees."</p>
<p>The question this raises is obvious: why should we be, why are we, interested in being recognized by men? Why are we interested in their "degrees?" The answers bring us full circle: because we need men's imprimatur in order to get jobs teaching subjects such as women's studies in universities, or working in other patriarchal prisons.</p>
<p>Everywhere I go in the United States I find young women working toward degrees and older women returning to school for degrees. Though it is true that success in school gives women's confidence a sturdy boost, it is <i>not</i> true that it necessarily improves their economic situation. In Ohio, for instance, the average yearly income for college-educated women is $10,000 - an income that can barely support life, to say nothing of assuring that life of some reasonable quality. Older women, of course, fare worst.</p>
<p>Even if a woman has a doctorate and obtains a teaching position at a university, she will find no job security there. Until she gets locked into the tenure cell, she is usually at the mercy of yearly contract renewals that all too often do not come through - a terrorist tactic, one of men's crudest ways of controlling our lives. In California as well as in other states, this has made women university teachers the new Okies - itinerant, rootless, securityless, devalued, underpaid. University education is not working economically for women. Nothing is.</p>
<p>Some may ask, if women could have abundance without recourse to prostitution in the universities or in any of patriarchy's other garrisons, what evidence do we have that even then they would choose to give up the prestige dependent upon hierarchy and male approval? What evidence is there that such women do not so completely depend for their identity and sense of importance on patriarchy, are not so thoroughly co-opted morally and psychically, that they would actually choose peemess and integrity instead? Is there evidence that they would give up their privileged-prisoner rights for freedom?</p>
<p>If we look with the expectation of seeing it, perhaps there is more evidence that they would than we might at first think. Those women in that midwestem university <i>do</i> exist. They <i>do</i> know that they are servants of a system that survives only by destroying women, and they <i>are</i> suffering consciously from this knowledge.</p>
<p>Others like them <i>must</i> exist in every brainwashing, destructive institution of the fathers: businesses and corporations, schools, churches, legislatures, courts, and governments. Enough of them may have the courage to get up off their knees and deal on their own terms directly with other women. Especially if some of these other women are already busy creating a literal new society in which no woman needs to sell her soul to survive.</p>
<p>But (the argument about women's leaving the universities continues) women don't take women seriously. We particularly don't take seriously women acting without men's stamp of approval in ways that radically undermine male domination. So who is to say that women who escape from the universities and strip away their titles to engage in truly feminist learning experiments in daring new ways will attract anyone to participate with them?</p>
<p>No one can know for sure, of course. But so many women are so fed up with the dim little half-lives they are allowed, even compelled, to live, that if any other possibility presented itself with courage and passion, I have faith that, to save their lives, they would choose to join those of us who were intent on carrying it forward.</p>
<p>To attract participants, the prisoners of war who had so bravely escaped would have to make their prison break widely known. Potential collaborators would have to find out that a new prospect for women had now opened up. They would have to read persuasive notices, articles, and flyers describing and inviting in ways that made them feel valiant and proud. They would have to see a wide range of ideas offered for discussion, most of which university dons would not only never officially sanction but at their mere suggestion would wet their trousers. They would have to be assured that the escapees were not merely duplicating the male system. They would, that is, have to know that there would be no hierarchy, no titles, no competition, no grades, no condescension. And that there would be an honest search for a new and more valid form of female achievement than "male scholarshit."<a href="#fn2">[2]</a> Prospective participants would have to be persuaded that the objective genuinely was freedom and that it was being pursued with utmost boldness.</p>
<p>But most of all, word would have to get out that this experiment was changing women radically. If through these classes, women were able to leave behind their terror of men and men's approval, divesting themselves of the patriarchal claptrap that had previously determined their nearly every thought and feeling; if they came to think with outrageous nonconventionality, learning to love women and to take our ways seriously; if, inspired to view themselves as actors on a cosmic stage, they changed the structure and substance of their lives in large and stunning ways-then the renegade "women's studies" teachers would know they were creating the kind of model women genumely need, a feminist model of integrity, self-esteem, autonomy, and power.</p>
<p>And then in a moonlit ceremony, with the blessing of the wind and sky we could pronounce them all wild women. They could pronounce themselves a new species: <i>free women</i>.</p>

<hr>

<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Wilma Scott Heide, <i>Feminism for the Health of It</i>. Margaretdaughters, Inc: Buffalo, NY, 1985, p. 4: "There is no university in the sense of universal truth. There are only semiversities of essentially white, heterosexual, androcentric thought patterns."</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> As Marlene Mountain from Hampton, Tennessee so aptly describes it. This reminds me of a slip an acquaintance made in my home one night as she fervently described an authority figure in her life as "one of the world's foremost biblical <i>squalors</i>!"</p>