Figure 1

The authors explore these five stages, illustrating them richly and compellingly with excerpts from their interviews. They ask whether women's knowledge develops because of or in spite of standard academic institutions, as these institutions seems devalue women's ways of knowing. Consideration is suggested for the particular needs of women in an educational setting. These, the authors write, fall into nine categories:

1. Confirmation
   Women need to know not merely that they have the capacity to become knowledgeable but that they already know something. These are prerequisites for women, rather than the consequences of development.

2. Facilitative teaching
   This is teaching in which the "expert" examines the needs and capacities of the learner and composes a message appropriate to her. The expert is not intent on exerting power but on helping the student on her own terms.

3. Relating knowledge to first-hand experience
   Women interviewed were drawn to knowledge that emerges from first-hand observation while most of the educational institutions they attended emphasized abstract "out-of-context" learning. Most were not opposed to abstraction as such. They found concepts useful in making sense of their experiences, but they balked when the abstractions preceded the experience.

4. Changes in program structure
   Women's intellectual development is often stunted by incessant academic pressure. Overly rigid standards and structures along with excessive expectations act more as impediments than goads to independent thinking, distracting attention from the intellectual substance of the work and transforming efforts to learn into efforts to please.

5. Encouragement for the authentic voice
   Rebellion against the authority of the institution sometimes produced a turning point in women's education. Refusing to continue trying to please their teachers, such women began to use their authentic voice in papers and in the classroom, discovering that teachers had a new respect for the real voice. It came late for most women. Much time had been wasted being good, and for many women the relentless effort to be good had prevented the development of a more authentic voice.

6. A combination of freedom and support
   Women need to be encouraged to make their own decisions and to write their own curriculum in areas where this is feasible. They need a combination of freedom and support as they move toward autonomy in their chosen field of work.

7. Revealed thinking processes
   Women need to see the thinking processes teachers go through in developing their polished products and understand that theories and models are not divine truths but the products of human minds. Teachers, especially in areas such as the sciences, need to do all that they can to avoid the appearance of omniscience. Belenky et al. point out that 'Women have been taught by generations of males that males have greater powers of rationality than females have. When a male instructor presents only the impeccable products of his thinking, it is especially difficult for a woman student to believe that she can produce such a thought. ...Women students need opportunities to observe both male and female instructors solve (and fail to solve) problems. They need models of thinking as a human, imperfect, and attainable activity."(p.217).