Between the Margins and the Mainstream: Women's studies and academic feminism

Abstract

This book is based on Louise Morley's doctoral thesis and draws on material from interviews (carried out in the period 1995-1997) with forty women based in the academy: twenty-five teaching staff and fifteen post-doctoral, doctoral and post graduate students, of whom twenty two were based in the United Kingdom, ten in Greece, 7 in Sweden, and 1 in Spain. There were three areas of enquiry: the institutional context; feminism in the academy-mainly women's studies courses and including issues such as feminist pedagogy and modules on mainstream courses; experiences of being feminist academics as either academics or students. The new data are integrated into comprehensive reviews of the existing literature, and, for the purposes of the book, organised into chapters on feminist research, equity and change in higher education, feminism and equity, gender and organisation, power pedagogy and empowerment, feminist students and feminist academics. Although the opening chapter on feminist research touches on the interaction of the self with the research process, and, in the introduction, Morley states that the book began in an autobiographical account (p. 1), nevertheless there is not much autobiography here. Apparently earlier drafts avoided the use of the first-person singular (p. 20). Morley sees this as a reflection of her discomfort about claiming authority, but she will be known to readers for her edited volumes (with Val Walsh) on feminist academics and women in higher education (Morley & Walsh, 1995; Morley & Walsh, 1996) and for numerous articles on both women's studies and feminist academics, drawing on over twenty years as an 'equity activist' [her words] (p. 54), both inside and outside the academy. Morley can claim authority in both speaking for and reflecting upon the paradoxical relationship between the conservative academy and feminist politics-the 'oxymoron of academic feminism' (pp. 12, 155)--from the liberatory origins of women's studies to its establishment in the curriculum and the institution. The study originated as an investigation into women's studies in the academy, but, as it proceeded, the scope enlarged into