Integrating Third World Women into the Women's Studies Curriculum

Abstract

From 1980 to 1982, Old Dominion University had a faculty development grant, awarded by the United States Department of Education, to help integrate Third World materials and perspectives into the curriculum. ODU, located in Norfolk, Virginia, is a state university serving over 15,000 students. I was one of ten faculty members, each from a different field, selected to participate. At weekly seminars, we discussed books about the Third World by such scholars as Paul Harrison, Robert P. Clark, Paul Bairoch, Pierre Jolke, and Peter Worsley. For eleven years now, I have been aware of how invisible women are in most books and courses, yet I was still shocked to discover the extent to which women did not exist in the minds of these authors. I was even more disturbed to find that, when occasionally women were mentioned, they were discussed only as breeders of children. When I started my research, which was to focus on Third World women, I found that the feminist movement had had some impact, especially upon female scholars, and that books such as Women in Africa, edited by Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, and Women and National Development, edited by the Wellesley Editorial Committee, did exist.1 Generally, however, I found that in scholarly research, as in economic development projects, the contributions of women were ignored. Since female labor is usually unpaid and therefore does not show up in the gross national product, it is seldom acknowledged; similarly, and with still less justification, books and journals about African literature rarely mention African women writers. Yet the women's movement that resurfaced in 1968 is having some influence upon global research. The United Nations, for example, has begun to devote some of its resources to women. A U.N. report noted that women make up one-third of the world's labor force and put in nearly two-thirds of the work hours, yet these women receive only one-tenth of the world's income. International Labour Office studies show that although females make up half of the world's population, they own less than one-hundredth of the world's property. 2 Just as we now know that three-fourths of the poor in the United States are female, we now recognize that the vast majority of the poor, the anemic, and the illiterate in the developing world are female. One-half of the world's people are illiterate, and of those, two-thirds are female. Four-fifths of the women in Africa and Asia cannot read or write. So forgotten and invisible are these women that Elise Boulding has labeled them the As the poorest of the poor, these women are even more neglected than the men of the and fourth worlds (categories suggested by Boulding to distinguish between the poor and the extremely poor developing countries).3 Ironically, however, until recently most women's studies teachers were as guilty as most teachers of Third World studies of ignoring this fifth world. This may be explained, in part, by Rosemary Ruether's description in New Woman, New Earth of the process of women's awakening. First a woman focuses upon her individual experience. Then she focuses upon what she has in common with other females. Not until the third stage in