Teaching
Latin with a Feminist Consciousness
by Alice Garrett
Haverford High School, Havertown, PA
As Latin teachers, we introduce
our students not only to an ancient language and culture, which
have profoundly influenced our own, but also to the field of
Classical Studies. We owe it to our students as well as to ourselves
to keep up with important changes in our field. Unfortunately,
those of us who teach at the high school level (and even those
who write high school textbooks) do not always do this. I want
to talk about feminism and the way that it is transforming all
types of intellectual work, including the field of Classical
Studies. Then I would like to consider the direction I feel we
need to go in the development of Latin textbooks and in Latin
classes.
I will take my definition of
feminism from Barbara McManus' wonderful book Classics and
Feminism: Feminism is "a movement to create equal
opportunity for women as well as men in all areas of life and
... an intellectual commitment to transforming androcentric structures
of knowledge." The political and intellectual components
of this movement cannot be separated, just as every intellectual
activity has political implications. While feminists are currently
debating the extent and implication of the biological differences
between men and women, I think we all agree that no one can any
longer afford to look at a world of women and men from an androcentric
point of view.
What, you may ask, is an "androcentric"
point of view? It is a view of the human world and its history
that looks at men and women and sees only men. It is obviously
a severely limited perspective on humanity. You may think that
you would never look at the world that way. But I think that
you most likely already have done so. I know that I have done
this without any awareness, and especially when I was still in
school. My teachers presented me with an intellectual, historical,
cultural, and literary world which was exciting and lived in
by men only. There were female characters, women created in the
imaginations of men, but real women were conspicuously absent.
No one seemed to think that this was astounding, so neither did
I. But I questioned my worth as a female. And your students will
do the same, unless you make a commitment to bring them a world,
an intellectual world, a world of ideas, inhabited by real women
and men.
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