Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a general statement about universities and about the universities' response to and interaction with feminism. From the late nineteenth century to the current decade, feminists have confronted the university structure, infiltrated it as they have resisted and rejected it. Within the parameters of this tension and contradiction, feminist scholarship has paradoxically transformed the nature and content of academe while it has fought against the barriers higher education has imposed, to both feminist philosophy and to women. In this analysis, the author explores how such a contradiction was manifested in the mid to late ninteenth-century university, in the late 1960's, and in the 1980's in the modern research university in North America. She examines how the university as we know it, politically, economically and socially implements women's subordination through its institutional polity, its academic disciplines, and its ideological aerobics in promoting the private/public spheres. Finally, the author boldly suggests that the dissent of feminism offers perhaps the greatest and the most plausible alternative both to the ills which beset the contemporary academy and to the future of academe. In a word, such an academy must be created or face intellectual extinction-- not just for women, but for humanity.
