REVIEW

Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective
by Jane Gaskell and Arlene McLaren (eds.) Detselig Enterprises Limited.
Calgary, Alberta, 1987. 348 pp., $19.95

Review by Helen Breslauer

Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective is an educational book indeed. Jane Gaskell - and Arlene Mclaren have done two things very well. First, they have produced and edited work, a reader, which brings together sixteen diverse and interesting papers on a broad range of topics related to women and education in Canada. Second, they have put their own stamp on it, both in the way they have organized the book and through the thoughtful discussions that introduce each section.

The very first paragraph of the Introduction alerts the reader to what lies ahead:

This is a book that explores the relationship between feminist research and education. What unites the contributors to this volume is their insistence on the importance of female experiences, and their commitment to changes in education that will further women's equality with men.

This is followed by a well-documented overview of the roughly three phases of feminist scholarship on education: sex roles and sex role stereotyping; revaluing the female; and rethinking the whole. The authors liken these to the customary division of feminist thought into liberal, radical and socialist ideas. The phases provide a framework for the analysis of past and current work in the introductions to the subsequent four sections.

The first, "Women as Mothers, Women as Teachers," proceeds on the premise that not only teachers but also childcare providers and mothers are involved in education. For example, in the final paper, Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith examine mothering as both a personal and emotional experience and as work, and examine the way in which mothering experiences are tied to the social and institutional fabric of the school. They are concerned with creating a sociology for women, understanding the methodological practices necessary for a feminist sociology from the standpoint of women, and in the course of their discussion, they discover a relationship between mothering discourse and the organization of class and its reproduction through the educational process.

Jane Gaskell's own paper appears in the second section "Unequal Access to Knowledge." She examines how differences arise in high school course enrollments, in particular in business courses which are almost entirely populated by females. She found that the high school girls she interviewed "chose" courses which reproduced class and gender divisions in the labour market and in society as a whole. Changing those choices, then, must be accompanied by changing the way they experience other aspects of life. In the same section Neil Guppy, Susan Villutini and Doug Balson provide an historical overview of the increasing participation of women as students in Canadian universities while at the same time women constitute a very small proportion of the full time faculty. They are also concentrated at the lower ranks and receive less pay. Furthermore, it is observed that as women's participation in universities is increasing, funding for postsecondary education has declined, educational standards are being called into question and degrees and diplomas have lost some of their economic value.

In part three we arrive at "the heart of the feminist critique of education" (193) which is, the nature of the curriculum and its male bias. In this section is reprinted the now classic article by Dorothy Smith, "An Analysis of Ideological Structures and How Women are Excluded: Considerations for Academic Women." Originally published in 1975, this article assisted the thinking of many who were involved in developing women's studies as an area of scholarship and is still useful today.

From a more current point of view Alison Dewar presents the findings of a case study of an undergraduate physical education program in a Canadian university, which demonstrate that the structures and forms of knowledge produce messages about gender that reinforce stereotypical notions of the capabilities of men and women. She calls for more such feminist research to further the development of nonsexist educational practices. In the final section, "Beyond Schooling: Adult Education and Training," the authors point out that feminists are just beginning to explore the relationship between adult education/ training and women. In "Rethinking Femininity: Women in Adult Education," Arlene Tigar Mclaren summarizes the results of some very interesting interviews she held with adult women in an English women's college. She spoke to them about their childhood education, occupational and marital ambitions and experiences, and relationships with their mother, and found that in spite of their best efforts these women were trapped in "a social structure that gave them to little room to manoeuvre" (347).

Women and Education is an extremely thoughtprovoking book which should be enjoyed by all who think of themselves as educators (including childcare providers and mothers) and all of us involved in the lifelong process of learning.

Helen J. Breslauer has been working for nine years as Senior Research Officer for the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, and is responsible for status of women matters. She is also a private consultant on issues concerning women with special emphasis on universities, education and work.