Women’s Studies gets last laugh in National Post editorial

The New Brunswick Silent Witness Project is on display at UNB Memorial Hall until February 26.

I am standing in a room full of shadows. The faceless figures stare back at me, begging to tell their stories.

My eyes fixate on their shiny gold badges. The horror of their lives are written on their chests, marking them.

“Bludgeoned to death by her estranged husband in her apartment,” reads one silhouette. She is wearing a green sari.

“A loving, supportive mother,” reads another. “… shot by her husband July 12, 1987 in the parking lot of her workplace.”

My footsteps echo throughout the empty room as I move on to the next victim.

“… stabbed by her domestic partner, a former police officer, at her home on March 20, 1999… Her friends recall that she was always there to help anyone in their time of need.”

The display is part of an international movement aimed at honouring the victims of domestic abuse, dedicating a wooden silhouette to women who died at the hands of their partners. It started in Minnesota 20 years ago, with the goal of bringing the number of domestic murders to zero by 2010. New Brunswick is one of several provinces upholding the cause.

The odds of them reaching that goal are slim, but the vision behind it speaks volumes. The Silent Witness project exists in 50 states and more than 15 countries, spreading red silhouettes across the world in an effort to eventually reach their goal.

It is because of that small group of Minnesota women that I am standing in this dimly lit room, reading their stories, and wanting to do more.

The National Post claims Women’s Studies programs are obsolete. Even worse, they say the existence of such programs has tarnished Canadians with such dastardly things as employment equity, diversity training and universal daycare.

While these hyperbolic statements may be nothing more than a ruse to stimulate a dwindling readership, they are a slap in the face for those lonely silhouettes and the women they represent.

“The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women,” the January 26 editorial read.

“…In sum, there would be little of rational worth left even if Women’s Studies were to disappear.”

I challenge the authors of such sweeping remarks to stand in that room of silhouettes and read the stories on their golden chests.

I encourage them to note how all 19 New Brunswick women were killed by men they once trusted, and perhaps most importantly, they were all killed within the last 20 years, years the National Post claims have been riddled with gender equality and anti-patriarchal brainwashing, all at the hands of radical Women’s Studies professors.

One step in that room and the triviality of the Post’s assumption that feminism is no longer needed becomes painfully evident.

Dr. Wendy Robbins

“It’s just wrong information,” says Dr. Wendy Robbins, co-founder of the UNB Women’s Studies program. “It’s a shame that something like this gets sent to a national audience without anybody checking the facts.”

The editorial was the final blow in a series of attacks headed by National Post columnist Barbara Kay, beginning with her December 30 column which referred to the switch from calling Women’s Studies to Gender Studies as a way of trapping students into heterosexual male-bashing. Kay appeared on CBC’s The Current January 12, squaring off against Toronto Star columnist Catherine Porter on the validity of Women’s Studies to a university curriculum. The Post published several more unsavory columns by Kay before running the collective editorial on January 26.

“One of the attacks Barbara Kay made is that [Women’s Studies] is all about ideological brainwashing,” Robbins says. “It’s really not like that at all. People who take these classes already have an interest in it, that’s why they took the class.”

What Barbara Kay and her colleagues at the National Post fail to recognize is that students choose to take these courses, and are fully inclined to drop out at any time. So even for those students who find the “radical feminism” a little too much, they are hardly glued to their seats.

Rather than take offense to this misinformed babble, perhaps supporters of Women’s Studies programs should focus on the obvious; that is, by naming such programs as the source of social policies such as universal daycare, employment equity and constitutional freedoms, they are actually giving them a well-deserved pat on the back.

“I actually hope it’s going to do some good,” Robbins says. “One of the things we’re concerned about is our relative invisibility. But to be accredited for changes in the court systems and other social policies, well it’s kind of like a badge of honour.”

Unfortunately the National Post editors aren’t the only ones who hold this opinion of Women’s Studies, but the existence of such beliefs does nothing but fuel the need for such courses.

And while the Post may have garnered a few additional hits to its online site or sold an extra stack at the newsstands, the Women’s Studies departments are getting the last laugh.

Short URL: http://www.newbrunswickbeacon.ca/?p=4474

Posted by Gilean Watts on Feb 9, 2010. Filed under Opinion, This Week's Edition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.