encounters Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a class at a women’s college. Moreover, the answers to the question are not obvious, and not simple; I’m still figuring them out. I still assign The Metamorphoses, in my course on ancient myth, but I now have rather different expectations for our class discussions. In fact, this brief question about Ovid’s “handbook on rape” is so rich in implications for teaching and learning about literature that it and others like it have changed my ideas about what allows real learning to take place in a classroom filled with women. For example, I have come to see that the student questioning my assigning The Metamorphoses would have to trust her responses before I can teach her to analyze them. She would need to say to herself, “It’s not just because my friend was raped that I’ve responded to the text this way. There really is something about these descriptions of male gods ravishing female mortals that carries with it some of the power dynamic that is present in real-world rape.” Trusting their own responses is something that is particularly difficult for young women in our culture. But the task gets even more complicated: Even while she’s trusting her emotional response, this student needs to ask herself analytical questions about that response. While holding on to her sense that the text is somehow designed to silence her, she needs to remember that it is a literary text and therefore might have multiple levels of meaning. “What about the author here? Is he the same as the narrator in these passages that seem like rapes to me?” she might ask. “Is Ovid offering any kind of interpretation of these rapes within the text?” “How should I take into account the differences between the world in which I’m reading this book and the world in which it was written?” I see now that this kind of thinking is difficult. It requires both the hard, slogging work of logical thinking and the ability to keep in mind a shifting array of contradictory possibilities. Gradually my perspective on what had first seemed like challenges to the real work of teaching began to change, as did what happens in my classroom. Both of those changes arose in part because of the very basic difference between a women’s college and any other college or university: at a women’s college we think about women. This difference is crucial to what my students learn about themselves and about the roles they might create for themselves. It has also been crucial to the development of my book. I didn’t realize how crucial it has been until I started talking with colleagues about this project. One of the standard greetings in the academic world is, “What are you working on?” which means, “What are you writing?” for your writing is the work that most of the rest of the academic community sees. For the years I’ve been writing this book my answer has been in part, “I’m working on a book about teaching at a women’s college.” More often than not the first response I’ve gotten has been, “Well, have you taught at a men’s college? Have you taught men so you know what you’re comparing your experience to?” Each time I heard it, this question threw me. It seemed so completely beside the point to
me, so far from the concerns I was thinking and writing about. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. So embedded in our culture is the notion that men are the norm or the standard that at first I didn’t think to wonder about the assumptions behind this question. Finally I realized that my interlocutors were assuming that thinking about women’s experiences is only valuable if we view those experiences in relation to the supposed norms of men’s experiences. Indeed, their seemingly innocuous question assumed that women’s experiences have to be held up to that male standard to be visible at all. With this realization about the assumptions behind my colleagues’ responses to my work came another realization: what a luxury it is to be teaching at a women’s college. For at a women’s school it is possible to assume something quite different. By this I mean the seemingly simple yet far-reaching conviction that women’s experiences, women’s opinions, women’s interactions are fascinating, valuable, thoughtprovoking, perhaps even world-changing in themselves. That assumption is a gift that is available to all of us associated with women’s schools, and it is one that I recognized most fully when it was challenged by that simple question about whether or not I’d taught men. Teaching at a women’s college has made me ever more aware of what is possible in a classroom filled with women, and that is in large part what my book is about. My goal here is to look as carefully and as thoughtfully as I can at my students’ experiences reading and writing about the very challenging literature I teach. I want to see what a generous interpretation of the intellectual and pedagogical issues that have come to the fore in my classes has to offer in terms of insights about teaching and learning. By a generous interpretation I simply mean one that makes the assumption that a women’s college allows us to make:
I still assign The Metamorphoses, in my course on ancient myth, but I now have rather different expectations for our class discussions. —Madeleine Kahn that these women have something important to say, and that their experience is worthy of respectful analysis. Students at Mills have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. They have repeatedly challenged my own preconceptions about how the literature classroom should work, what the relationship between student and professor should be, and what is the true value of what I am able to teach them about literature. And they have—sometimes tentatively, sometimes aggressively—demonstrated in my classroom how much the conventional curriculum and the academic space for discussion both change when those so-called extra-academic concerns are integrated into our intellectual investigations. Along the way they have often created together new and provocative versions of the books we have discussed, along with new possibilities for both teaching and learning in collaboration with each other. Excerpt from Kahn’s book “Why Are We a Handbook on Rape?”: Tales of Teaching and Learning at a Women’s College. Copyright © by Madeleine Kahn, 2002. Do not cite without permission. M I L L S Q U A R T E R LY W I N T E R 2 0 0 3
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