There are no prescriptions here for classroom practices that might accomplish our ends. How we go about our work is of our own making. But we have an obligation to tell what we know and to share what we know with our daughters and our sons. We have an obligation to image a future not bounded by prescriptive social roles designed to limit possibilities; designed, ultimately, to harness the work, energy, intelligence, hopes, and dreams of one segment of the population to serve the needs and interests of another.We have the obligation to pass on information, to share with our women students the strategies they need to know in order to do what they want to do. We have the obligation to mentor our women students and to pry open doors that have been bolted shut for centuries even as we are struggling to hold our own doors open for ourselves.

And we have the obligation to provide women students with a curriculum that includes them, in which they can see their own image as women capable of acting in the world. This is where hope for change lies. Even today, with the violence and violation that continues to rage in the Persian Gulf, I hold some hope in the ongoing struggle to make real a vision of the world that is not yet.

Madga Lewis is assistant professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Education, Queen's University, where she also teaches in the sociology department and the Women's Studies Program. Her present research work is in the area of women and education and feminist pedagogy. She has published a number of articles on the subject and is presently preparing a book manuscript.

1. See R. Deem, (ed.), Co-Education Reconsidered, (1984), Milton Keynes: Open University Press; D. Spender, and E. Sarah. (eds.), Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, (1980), London: The Women's Press Ltd; and G. Weiner, (ed.), Just a Bunch of Girls, (1985), Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

2. I use the term 'patriarchic' in contrast to the more common term 'patriarchal' because I wish to refer to the significant role, not of gendered social actors, but of specific social practices.