In Atlantic Canada, attempts have been made to use teleconferencing networks to link women in isolated locations with each other and with the instructor. Clearly, there are advantages to this. The telephone is a communication tool that most women are comfortable with. There is the possibility of making students responsible for segments of the curriculum, breaking down the teacher-learner hierarchy. Some interaction is possible between all participants who are therefore able to collaborate more actively in the learning process. This approach does little, however, to overcome the lack of private space and time that any student needs, or the non-supportive environment in which these women live.

The role of the universities, and women's studies programs in particular, among rural women must be examined carefully. Are we offering a new tyranny of the experts, which will serve further to alienate women from their own experience and stifle their voices? Are we imposing another alien value system on rural women which no more reflects their reality than did the one it replaces?

The universities do have a responsibility to teach rural women not what their experience is or what it means but how to tap into that experience and find ways of expressing it. Feminism has become in many ways as elitist and exclusionary as the patriarchal system it seeks to replace by reflecting the reality and the consciousness of a segment of society sufficiently privileged and secure to question current social and academic structures. Feminist educators should use their strength to develop ways in which rural women can also be empowered to reclaim their own history. By reaching out to rural women, university-based feminism can provide assistance in community development, in organization, in building networks. Rather than interpreting experience for rural women, the universities should be assisting them to build the supports the need to rediscover and articulate their own reality.

Reprinted from WEdf, 7989, Volume 7, No.1.

Beth Westfall has been involved in education of the geographically isolated for the past 75 years. She is currently the Director of Extension at Brandon University in Manitoba.

References

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rich, Adrienne. "Towards a Woman-Centered University." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York. W.W. Norton 1979.