Minding Women: Reshaping the Educational Realm(HER Reprint Series)

Research on women and girls has exploded during the past twenty years. Since 1977, when the Harvard Educational Review published Carol Gilligan's now-classic article ""In a Different Voice,"" in which she argued so persuasively that women and girls must be understood on their own terms, researchers have been discovering, uncovering, and recovering women's ways of knowing, being, thinking, teaching, and learning. Minding Women charts the wealth of thought and writing related to women and girls and education that this process of discovery has produced. Minding Women begins with a ""Classics"" section--articles that call attention to the lack of research on girls and women and describe the effect this has had on knowledge and society. The contributors then discuss feminist pedagogy, and how it has changed and been refined over time. Girls and young women are the focus of the next section. Too often their voices and viewpoints are excluded from these discussions, so some of their own writings are included here. The book then explores women's educational history, showcasing some of the rich work in this area over the past twenty years. Identity issues are addressed in the final section, acknowledging that substantial differences exist among groups of women and girls on how they experience the world and their roles, prospects, and lives.

About the Author :
Edited by Christine A. Woyshner and Holly S. Gelfond

Review :
"Minding Women: Reshaping the Educational Realm" is a collection of articles by researchers, teachers, and students that have appeared in the "Harvard Educational Review" over the last thirty years. Its two-part title presents a dual challenge: the first, "Minding Women," defends and draws upon an already flourishing movement in teaching, scholarship, and publishing. It is, in the editor s words, to pay attention to and be concerned with the development and education of girls and women. The second, "Reshaping the Educational Realm," is dependent on the first but more difficult to achieve, and barely attempted to date. It means effecting pedagogical and structural reforms in schooling, informed by powerful gender analyses. It all entails explicitly confronting the intellectual foundations of teaching and learning systems the well-established, malestream systems of thought and disciplinary paradigms that are applied to education. It is evident that intellectual justice cannot be achieved by well-reasoned and empirically we grounded scholarship alone; insistent, unremitting, and contentious disputation is also required. Perhaps this volume will be a call to action. Geraldine Joncich Clifford, University of California at Berkeley" In the late 1970s, at the end of a decade that witnessed the rise of the contemporary women s movement and the emergence of pioneering new research on women and girls, the "Harvard Educational Review" published a series of landmark articles that subsequently transformed the way we think about educational research and educational institutions. Now, twenty years later, HER has delivered again." Minding Women: Reshaping the Educational Realm "embraces a generation of scholarship, beginning with now-classic studies by Carol Gilligan and Jane Roland Martin, culminating in major new work by leading scholars who are reconfiguring feminist research. This important collection will again change the way we think about race, history, education, and the lives of girls." Sally Schwager, Director Women's History Institute, Harvard University"