Paula and I have been friends for a long time and have certainly talked about women's issues outside the classroom. We've worked on many projects that deal with women, but have never spent the same amount of time talking, thinking, agonizing, rejoicing about our own practice with women in the classroom as we have during this project. I know that being part of CCLOW's project legitimized doing that in my mind. That's a sorry comment on my state of commitment, but unfortunately a true one. It's almost as though I was waiting for some kind of permission to do what intellectually I know is the right thing to do.

Feminist teachers, woman-positive classrooms

One of the things that we became aware of as the research progressed was the interchangeable use we were making of two terms: feminist and woman- positive. In all written material about phase one and phase two of this research, Betty-Ann Lloyd consistently used the term woman-positive to identify the focus of the work. In contrast, when we discussed what we hoped to do in our literacy writing group, we often substituted the word feminist in place of woman-positive. At first this did not seem to be a problem and in fact we were not even aware of making such a switch. As time wore on, however, and we began to question more and more the lack of feminist practice in our classrooms, the significance of our use of this word became apparent.

For us, the term feminism brings with it a political and social analysis of the causes of women's oppression, whereas the term woman-positive does not. To be feminist is to have a conceptual framework that places specific acts of sexism within a larger context. Feminism implies a need to be active in the political arena on a more collective level in order to ultimately deal with individual women's oppression.

Being woman-positive came to mean encouraging women to express their ideas and opinions, to examine and reflect on their lives and experiences as women, and to support them in this process. A definition of feminism by Ruth Pierson highlights the difference for us.

Feminists start from an insistence on the importance of women and women's experience, but a woman-centered perspective alone does not constitute feminism. Before a woman-centered perspective becomes a feminist perspective, it has to have been politicized by the experience of women in pursuit of self determination coming into conflict with a sex/ gender system of male dominance. (cited in Lewis, 1992, p. 170)

The difference between these definitions, and the implications that difference has for our classroom practice, only became apparent after the writing class had ended. Throughout the research itself we continually questioned the lack of feminist, but not woman-positive, activity in our classes. We felt we had become more consciously, woman-positive and, in that process recognized how much we were not articulating or practicing feminism.