Anne Sexton's "For My Lover...": Feminism in the Classroom

Abstract

ing predominantly white Italian working-class students. My students arrive from high school with elaborately constructed ideology. A whole host of opinions on sexuality, war, racism, welfare, socialism, labor, and revolution has been imposed on them by their daily experience and by the authorities in their lives. Luckily, there is no unanimity in their manner of thinking, but their dominantly conservative mode of thought indicates how potent the bourgeois mass media, the conservative parochial and lower education systems, the patriarchal family, and the male-dominated job market remain in fashioning their consciousnesses. Radical education designed to foster counter-consciousness has to be as com-