Foundations for a Feminist Restructuring of the Academic Disciplines

Here is a useful and illustrative guide for those interested in the impact of feminist scholarship on traditional academic disciplines. This important book explores the changes that have taken place in the academic world as a result of feminist approaches to scholarship, including issues of staffing, organization, administration, recruitment, student support, faculty advancement, and learning. Appropriate for readers not familiar with feminist scholarship as well as for those who are deeply interested in the message of feminist scholarship, Foundations for a Feminist Restructuring of the Academic Disciplines comes out of the experiences of women who are intimately involved with feminist pedagogy and curriculum transformation. The contributors describe a variety of educational environments that feminists have established in the academy, reflecting various disciplines.This profoundly important book raises new questions about the bias in traditional education and challenges basic assumptions about women--in education and society. In chapter after chapter, readers discover changes in perspective and knowledge brought on by feminist approaches to scholarship:

• the common images of women in literature written by men and contrast them with women writers’revisions of these traditional images
• the elimination and/or misrepresentation of women in the history books
• a feminist perspective on and critique of the image of women as traditionally analyzed by economists
• the major feminist challenges to political science
• the traditional and contemporary approaches to women in psychological theory and research
• how the teaching and practice of medicine, as it is related to women and women’s health issues, has served to communicate an unfair and erroneous image of woman

Michele Paludi, Gertrude Steuernagel, llen Cole, Esther D. Rothblum