Feminist Voices in the Debate over Single-Sex Schooling: Finding Common Ground

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Publication Date

2004

Volume

11

First Page

63

Abstract

(Excerpt)

In recent years, same-sex schooling has gained renewed appeal among educators, policymakers, and parents. This slow but steady trend, especially among publicly supported schools, has generated heated debate in academic, legal, and policy circles. Next to the funding of school athletics, single-sex education is probably the most divisive issue in the modern-day quest for gender equality in education. It has proven especially troublesome to reconcile among women's advocates.

As this controversy has unfolded in the press and in the academic literature, the most vocal and visible opposition has come from organized women's groups (although the American Civil Liberties Union also has played a key role). And so one might easily point to "feminism" as the primary enemy of single-sex schooling. That view, nevertheless, is overly simplistic and misleading. First of all, it mistakenly implies that feminism is both monolithic and static. It further suggests the negativity that some now attach to the feminist label, as well as the more radical oppositionist streams within feminism as a "movement."

This is not to ignore popular assertions that feminism itself is irrelevant or even "dead" or, in the least, has lost its compass. Certainly life-style trends and attitudes seem to point in that direction. For many young women in their twenties and thirties, secure in the power of education to unlock professional doors, the "fires of feminism" seem to have burned down at least initially to "the ashes of careerism,” and as recent public debates suggest, ultimately to full-time motherhood by choice. Nevertheless, the term still retains vitality as an overarching set of principles shared by those who are committed to advancing full political and social equality for women. Despite differences in approaches that continue to evolve, those who come under this umbrella voice widespread agreement on core issues that affect women nationally and globally—equal educational opportunities, equal pay for equal work, adequate child care, access to health care and disability benefits, preservation of bodily integrity, freedom from violence. When pushed to a level of consciousness, these concerns resonate even among young women, but more strongly among women in their forties and fifties who came of age at the height of feminist activism, although there are those who reject the "feminist" designation per se.

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