Putting It on the Table: A Mini-Course on Gender Differences

Abstract

asked students to read Susan Glaspell's Trifles, Charlotte Perkins Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House as a unit. Girls were happy to see women highlighted as protagonists after having been fed a steady diet of male protagonists in novels such as Brave New World and Lord of the Flies their freshman year. Despite the fact that these works are sixty years old or more, they still had the power to disconcert. I could tell that the unit made boys uncomfortable, and then one day, one brave sophomore said what was on all their minds, we going to spend the whole semester reading things that make men look like ignorant scum who only want to rule over women? My intention to inject the course with feminist texts was meant, in part, to lead my students to an understanding of feminism, not to distance half of the students in the course and prevent them from wanting to know more about the role of women in society. Clearly, I had a problem. How could I lead students to discuss issues of gender in an open, nonthreatening way? How could I raise their consciousness about women's roles through history but not make either gender feel inadequate? And how could I educate students about what feminism means, dispelling the myths the students-many of them girls-had begun believing? Though I tried to do this with my teaching in my English classes, I wasn't sure that was the best way. Later that semester as I was reading John Gray's best selling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, I hit upon it: I would create a minicourse that dealt solely with gender issues. I wanted to put the issues out on the table and give students the time and language to appropriately discuss gender in society. In my school, an independent preparatory school, we offered a two-week period of alternative classes between semesters, called Interim. It was the perfect time to study gender issues outside the context of the literature-based class and to directly approach some of the issues that were troubling the males and females in my classes. This brainstorm was the beginning of a popular course entitled Gender Bender that I ended up teaching for three years.