Questions, questions, questions. A panel of distinguished adjudicators interviewed me about every facet of my proposal. Well-prepared for the interview, I felt reasonably confident until an older man, a school inspector from the old school, asked me sternly "I note that you propose this to be a credit course. Do you also propose that it be a compulsory course?"

I felt the trap door open beneath me. I had expounded about the importance of both men and women becoming aware of the changes taking place in marriage in the work force, in society in general. I had suggested the urgency of young women having role models, of learning "her story" as well as history. Certainly I felt such a course should be compulsory, but I also knew that the philosophy of the department was to eliminate as many required courses as possible, that student freedom was the new order of the day.

"I would like it to be. I feel that in particular young men will not take the course unless it is and that the very young women who most need it will pass it by, but no, no I would not make it a compulsory course. I think we have to move away from deciding what students on the verge of adulthood need to know. Ideally in a few years the course will be integrated into the whole K-12 curriculum and will disappear as a separate course anyhow."

"Pity" he said in magisterial tones, "It's a course that should be required of every student in the high school."

Caught with my stereotypes in full flower, I wanted to kiss him. With his blessing the course was off the ground.

I taught the course for six years. In that time a number of other women teachers developed and taught courses or units of courses on women's studies. Sara Berger, Heather Henderson and Linda McDowell worked to develop a kit containing a wealth of contemporary and historical material about women. Under a succession of women's studies consultants, Heather, then Claudia Engel, and Grace Parasiuk, Manitoba developed a great deal of top-notch resource materials: Today's Women - Today's Work (a tape/slide show with workbooks and teachers manual), confronting the Stereotypes, The Hidden Message in Primary Readers (a tape/slide show).

The 1979 Department of Education curriculum support series, "Resource Materials Presenting Positive Female Images", is a rich tribute to the hard work of many Manitoba teachers at all levels of the curriculum.

Unfortunately, just at the point that a storehouse of materials was available to teachers, a number of influences served to check the progress of women's studies. Most important. the handful of dedicated feminists who were the driving force behind women's studies courses moved into positions which forced them to: leave behind the courses they had propelled through the second half of the seventies.

I like to think that the momentum, the driving force, has not been lost: that in a myriad of ways women's studies lives in the raised consciousness of all teachers. Certainly I know that the last class of students I taught were very different from the first.

Many in the first class took the course, I am sure, thinking that it was an extension of the "charm school" type sessions I had arranged for them in the past by inviting the fashion coordinator from Eaton's to give them advice on dressing and grooming for on-the-job success. I shall always remember one of those students, a carefully over-made-up young woman whose small diamond acclaimed her success at school far more than her diploma would a few months later. Her shock was palpable when speaker, a film-maker, explained quite matter-of-fact that no she was not married and didn't plan to get married any time soon. Marriage would get in the way of her dream of becoming an important film-maker. There was more to life than being married.



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