Teaching Women s Studies The Problems

Problems REMEMBER bow excited I was when I first came across the expression 'women's studies1. It was in the early 80s and there was this book I had picked up from the British Library, Half the Sky, acollection of scholarly articles on a variety of women's issues.Itsaid a lot of things which I recognised to be true, either because Ihad experienced it myself, or had observed it, but had never thought of analysing and articulating. It sounds dreadfully common place today to say that the personal is political but when one discovers it for the first time there is exhilaration in knowing that something which you have all the time tried to deny even to yourself is actually a valid way of looking at things. And to be told, as that book told me, that all this is 'knowledge', worthy of being recorded, researched and theorised, and actually put into textbooks, made one feel that there is some meaning to life after all. It opened up a whole new world in which the possibilities seemed infinite.