From: noraa@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Subject: Re: Plato's Views on Women
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 09:13:33 GMT
Keywords: Plato, politics, women, feminism

In article <40376@unix.SRI.COM> maslak@unix.SRI.COM (Valerie Maslak) writes:
>In article <1992Nov9.100337.12852@genie.slhs.udel.edu> starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) writes:
>>The thing that strikes me as odd about this is that in order to truly know
>>that half of the human race was shut out of most of history, one would have
>>to know the history of the half that's claimed to be shut out.  This is
>>illogical.  No wonder women's studies is faulted on methodological grounds,
>>if this is the sort of thought it tends towards.
>
>Wrong. One would only have to BE part of the half of the human race
>that was shut out....one would ony have to have been a woman and
>have gone through elementary school and junior high school and high school
>and most of college seeing no faces of women and hearing no words of women...
>before the resurgence of the feminist movement in the 1970s
>brought women back into history again.

"Again.!?"  So, they were there, then some evil men, maybe?, took them out,
then women put them back in again.  Could you develop this into a
dissertation?

OK, I'll bite.  My mother taught me at home.  My head start teachers
were women.  My kindergarten teacher was a woman.  My first grade
teacher was a woman.  My second grade teacher was a woman.  My third
grade teacher was a woman.  My fourth grade teacher was a woman.  My
fifth grade teacher was a woman.  One of my sixth grade teachers was a
woman, but she was my homeroom teacher, so I was in her clasroom about
3.5 hours a day.  In the last couple of years of high school, I had, for
the first time in my life, a majority of male teachers.  My collge
professors were mostly men, but I went to an all-male engineering
school, so what do you expect?  I still had women teachers even there,
though.

Many of the text books that I had were written by women.  I don't recall
the breakdown, maybe a majority were written by men.

But, my point is that my initiation into learning, like the initiation
of probably the vast majority of us, and the basic foundations upon
which we developed our understanding of the world and developed our
intellectual values, were taught to us by women.  If these women chose
to exclude their part and their own personal involvement with reality
(which I don't recall them actively trying to do), then I blame them.

Not me.

In fact, I don't seem to recall this instruction being particularly
anti-female, nor particularly focused in an attempt to exclude women
from our history.  In fact, sometimes it did seem kinda misandrist,
though.  Who always got to go first to lunch?  The girls (until fifth
grade).

Maybe, if you'd fill us on on what they supressed, we'd believe you.

So, which women should we have heard of, but didn't get to?  Why are
science and math sexist?

Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
TR@CBNEA.ATT.COM 

P.S.  The terrible oppression of women throughout history, the
subjugation of an entire gender, was not my doing.  I plead innocent.  
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.abortion.inequity,talk.abortion,alt.feminism,soc.men