University outreach does not guarantee women's visibility, but there is potential. Distance education can heighten women's awareness of their own experiences. It can help them to become more attuned to each other. It can provide information about women's lives and access to feminist frameworks for understanding. Courses can help to identify women as a viable group with rights and legitimate collective interests in their communities and families. Finally, the existence of women's studies as a long distance offering can make off-campus women a visible constituency within the university's institutional structure.

I think if there's one thing I would like to see, it's a change in the way women perceive themselves. If we could change the way we perceive ourselves, we would be perceived by others in a better light...if more women could realize that they are important, that they do have worth, not just as somebody's mother, although that's very important, or somebody's wife they have their own identity and their own selves, arid they can fulfill themselves in their own way.

I left my book, Labour Pains (subtitled Women's Work in Crisis), on the coffee table for my fifteen-year-old to have a look at and he said, "Mom, why am I going to read a book on labour pains? That's for women." I said, "Why don't you read it and find out?" He went through a couple of pages and he was surprised that "labour pains" could be anything but having babies.

We would like to suggest the enormous potential of a multi-media approach for enhancing women's visibility by describing some of the techniques we have used: We introduced our students to many feminists through readings and also through videotapes produced at the university. Students gained access to the experiences of mainland Canadian women through purchased films and readings. They learned about other women's situations in Newfoundland and Labrador through weekly teleconferences, through video-tapes drawing on both historical materials and interviews, and through readings, especially about women's work in the region. Weekly teleconferences and written assignments in which students related their personal lives to those of other women made their experiences more visible. The teleconferences were useful because women compared their experiences, highlighting both the similarities and the differences.

I come from a small community just outside of Port aux Basques and we have a fish plant. The men do the heavy work, wheeling the fish in, loading the boats with ice and all this, and the women get the fish when it's partly dressed and all they have to do is worm it or bone it and then pack it in nice little packages. So really it seems that the women are given the more domestic type jobs while the men are given the more physical type ones.

Up here (Labrador City) at the Iron Ore Company, women do the same work as men. They use wheelbarrows; they work on the labour crews; they get the same money, but, when the time comes for layoffs, or anything like that, generally people expect that a woman should step aside and give up her job and let some man keep his.

Validation

I've taken eight history courses now. I've heard about a few great women, but nothing else. I mean, was the "Golden Age of Greece" a golden age for women?

Women's studies can make isolated women feel that their experiences are important and their perspectives valid. For example, the first time this distance education version was offered, it became apparent that many students had no sense of the historical importance of women's work in Newfoundland and Labrador, especially in the family fishery. The majority felt that local women had only recently entered the labour force. The failure to recognize as "working women" those who salt-cured fish in the past and who work in fish plants today is reinforced by their disappearance from the official record.

Prior to the 1935 census, the only occupation the census enumerated for women was the catching and curing of fish...In the censuses conducted between 1891 and 1921, the totals of women employed in the catching and curing of fish had ranged from 18,000 to nearly 25,000. Such women were now summarily excluded from the census-defined labour force. 1

One of the most important contributions women's studies makes to women's understanding of themselves as workers is through the introduction of a feminist perspective not otherwise available in isolated communities. This perspective links women's contemporary labour force participation to their historical contributions as workers.