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Professor strives to expand women’s studies
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PROFESSOR Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Center for Women Studies at Wellesley, is an old friend of China.
She attended grassroots activities during the World Women’s Conference held in Beijing in 1995, participated in projects at Li Xiaojiang’s Women’s Research Center in Dalian, northeast China, and has lectured not only in major universities such as Peking University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai, but has gone south to lecture to minority students in Kunming, deep in southwest China.
Recently, in the keynote speech at the “5th Conference on Writing by Chinese Women at Home and Abroad” in Beijing Capital Normal University, hosted by the Research Base for Chinese Women’s Studies, Professor McKintosh announced that her “best known work is on privilege,” by which term she meant, “unearned advantage caused by circumstances of birth.”
Professor McIntosh held her audience spellbound by expounding on how literature could and should be taught in ways that reduce privilege — “male privilege, white privilege, class privilege, and Western privilege,” and she stated that “this is a major theme in US Women’s Studies today.”
She rejected the kind of curriculum that focused exclusively on oppression, and designed courses that focused on women’s daily lives. She told her spellbound audience how she had used “letters, diaries, journalists, poems, informal essays and autobiographies, and even the writings of students themselves.” Professor McIntosh noted that this kind of “insectionality” highlights the fact that actually, “many different kinds of oppression and privilege work together in any life or community.”
Peggy McIntosh can also claim to be the non-native scholar who has made the single largest donation of foreign publications to a Chinese institution of higher learning — 30,000 volumes in all.
Peggy McIntosh stands out from among her peers in that her teaching is not exclusively limited to the rights and wrongs of women. She is co-founder of the SEED Project — which is now in 37 states in the US, as well as 14 countries — a curriculum that endeavors to seek educational equity and diversity.
She says “I like the fact that there are no fixed textbooks in women’s studies either in the US or around the world. Teachers create their own courses,” and pointed out that at present, some subjects are gaining prominence — studies on intersections of various kinds of privilege and oppression: the environment, the climate, global hegemony, violence, internalized oppression, poverty, modern day slavery, an economic culture of greed.
Through these subjects, according to SEED, students become aware of “women’s creativity and leading agency in making and mending the fabric of society.” In practice, this innovative program is taking on feminist, social and economic issues.
As she offered her insights, Professor McIntosh was glad to see the expansion of women’s studies in China, as seen in the newly endowed Research Base for Chinese Women’s Studies, which had grown steadily in size and influence.
Zhu Hong is a retired professor from the Academy of Social Sciences.
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