On Our Minds, Spring 1988

on our minds A newsletter of the Women's Studies Program Towson State University Baltimore, MD 21204 Vol. II, No. 1 FIPSE NOTES: Curriculum Change Continues by Sara Coulter As more institutions initiate projects to integrate materials on women into the content of their curricula, the practical experience of the Towson faculty in the FIPSE project becomes more and more valuable. Towson continues to provide presentations and workshops at regional institutions and national conferences. The FIPSE dissemination grant to introduce ten community colleges in the Baltimore-Washington area to the issues of curriculum integration was completed in December, 1987. The major activity provided for each community college was a formal presentation to the faculty describing the traditional exclusion of women from the curriculum, the implications of this exclusion for the academic disciplines, and how to correct it. The Community College of Baltimore also sponsored workshops in specific disciplines in order to identify and begin to pursue issues relevant to those disciplines. Montgomery Community College has been especially active in pursuing this work (see article by Myrna Goldenberg m the fall '87 issue of this newsletter). Prince Georges Community College has also provided additional activities for its faculty, including a workshop on women and composition. While there is much interest among community college faculty in creating on-going workshops for the study of new materials and revision of course syllabi, their fifteen-hour teaching load plus committee responsibilities make it difficult for them to participate. To provide the time and support necessary for such workshops, grant funding is being sought. In the meantime, the Community College Advisory Committee to the FIPSE T.S.U. Dissemination Project is evaluating other ways that integration of material on women could be encouraged and supported within individual institutions. . . . Through a Quill Grant from the American Association of Colleges, Notre Dame College has launched a two-year project to provide faculty workshops for integrating more information about women into course content. Under the direction of Sally Wall, the project began last fall with a presentation on curriculum integration by Elaine Hedges and Sara Coulter, co-dirctors of the Towson FIPSE project. Workshops for fifteen faculty began in February, 1988. Faculty from the T.S.U. FIPSE project will conduct these workshops for three semesters during which Notre Dame faculty participants will review and discuss the scholarship on women for the purpose of revising one course each. Other institutions currently requesting assistance from the Towson project to further their own integration efforts include Ohio University (Athens, Ohio), Glassboro State College (Glassboro, New Jersey), Frostburg State College (Frostburg, Maryland), and Goucher College (Baltimore, Maryland). To encourage and support institutional initiatives, national organizations of higher education have been giving more attention to curriculum integration in the programs of their annual meetings. Faculty from the Towson project will present a workshop March 11 at the annual meeting in Washington of the American Association of Higher Education. This year, the Association's program focuses on the epistemological and pedagogical issues of curriculum integration; the program is recommended for those already involved in or contemplating such work (for information, contact Lo~is Albert, AAHE, One Dupont Circle, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20036, 202/293-6440). Increasingly, materials specifically designed to assist faculty to integrate information on women are available from professional organizations and major integration projects. Recent new materials include specially developed packets for political science, anthropology, and world history. Towson has been selected as one of eight dissemination sites for the world history materials, which are being developed under the direction of Margaret Stroebel, University of Illinois at Chicago. These materials are scheduled for fall '88 publiction. They will include the history of women in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As interest in curriculum integration work continues to grow, and as more and more materials become available, the need for a national resource center which would house such materials and distribute information about them becomes apparent. Currently with the assistance of Towson, Bernice Sandler's project on women at the American Association of Colleges is seeking funding for this purpose. Hite of Controversy by K Edgington In the fall of 1987 Shere Hite, author of two books on sexuality, published Women in Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, which examines women's attitudes toward love and marriage. Hite's findings, including that 80% of the women in her study are unhappy in their marriages, have set off vehement media criticism. However, when a scholarly panel* (including Hite) came to Hite's defense at the American Studies Association's annual conference in November 1987, the response of the academic audience reinforced that of the media, demonstrating how highly volatile the subject of relationships between women and men is . .