Search

Inventing a Feminist Institution in Boston: An Informal History of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College RUTH PERRY Massachusetts Institute of Technology JOYCE ANTLER Brandeis University RENEE FALL Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College LAURA LEVINE FRADER Northeastern University and Center for European Studies, Harvard University CAROL HURD GREEN Boston College BARBARA HABER Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College ALICE JARDINE Harvard University CHRISTIANE ZEHL ROMERO Tufts University The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College began as a conversation among friends in 1988. Everything followed from this beginning: as feminist scholars we dreamed up the Consortium because we wanted to work together in an institution of our own. That the

IT LONG HAS BEEN ASSUMED that democracy-that egalitarian political practice expressed in the simple formula that "all men are created equal" -is good for women and compatible with feminism. It is assumed that women, however devalued and disempowered, will benefit from the democratic extension of powerand be counted among those who are considered equal. Our culture's stories about women's participation in the revolutions of the eighteenth century-Betsy Ross and her friends stitching the new flag or the fierce Frenchwomen in the streets of Paris calling for the blood of aristocrats-reinforce this impression. Yet by the time Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, it was clear that the political inequality of the sexes was not ameliorated by a belief in democratic process. Engels theorized that it was their unequal participation in the productive labor force that kept women subordinate. When women participated equally in waged labor, he predicted, political discrimination would wither away. Yet we have seen that equal participation in productive labor has simply lengthened women's work day without changing the political reality that government is largely of men, by men, and in the interests of men. We also know by now that a belief in enfranchising the underclass does not necessarily entail a belief in women's rights. It is a notorious fact that the present women's movement emerged from the new left movement of the 60s-a movement which insisted on the more equitable distribution of society's resources and power-and that women's liberation began as a protest on the part of women activists to their devaluation, as women, within the movement. Contemporary feminists theorize that a chronic cultural misunderstanding of the relationship between production and reproduction causes political and economic sexual inequality.' The point of this article is to demonstrate that some

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT had far-reaching ideological effects on the definitions of rationality and feeling, and the social construction of gender. But the ultimate meaning of the cultural revisions of that period is still being debated. That it became intellectually possible, in the course of the seventeenth century, to imagine a radical split between the knowing subject and the object to be known, a dislocation T. S. Eliot has called "the dissociation of sensibility" when describing its effects on English poetry, has implications for the development of our modern science, and for a definition of gender that pivots on this very categorization of thought.' The mind of England changed, Eliot says, such that serious thought was compartmentalized away from the rest of life, purified of contact "with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking." By the middle of the eighteenth century, poets no longer "felt" their thoughts with the immediacy of "the odour of a rose."2 This apparent separation between cognitive and emotional-sensual functions coincided historically with the development of societies of learning in Europe (the Royal Society in England, the Academie francaise and the Academie royal des Sciences in France, and the K'oniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in