To exclude women from the public sphere and confine them to domesticity has been so clearly in the interests of the male makers and legitimators of reality that they have not needed to think, much less to talk, about it. But even if it were true (which it is not) that women's achievements have been domestic, while men's were public, it is a social decision to value the one and devalue the other.

What has all this to do with us at Harvard? Everything. Of late, women have been invited to enter a world that has been constructed by men for men's use, delectation, and betterment. The question is, do women merely want to participate in this world that we had no share in making. Don't we need to gain the space to look around and decide what things look like to us? Since reality is primarily a male construct, the female student is put in a peculiar position. She can either ignore the potential difference between the prevailing view and what she might see if she had a chance to look, and busily learn the accepted view of reality, or she can become interested in that potential for difference, inquire more deeply into her female roots and history, and explore them.

It is a psychological fact, that unfortunately all of us grow up so completely embedded in the prevailing paradigm of reality that we internalize it to the point where it seems the only possible and natural one. (Indeed, isn't that what it means to enter the fellowship of educated men and women--that one has at last learned to stop asking certain kinds of questions?)

Becoming conscious of this internalization is extremely difficult and requires a process that the exiled Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, has called "conscientizacao," sometimes translated "consciousness raising." In practice it is done most successfully by groups of people who have had similar experiences, marginal to the mainstream and who feel that the social accepted view of reality differs significantly from their own, though often in ways they cannot define or describe to their own satisfaction. By sharing their experiences of the ways in which the dominant view is not their own (and has often victimized them), they begin to see the world in new ways and to generate new and different constructs of reality. At the stage of analysis when the group is striving to create new visions, challenge and counter-argument are usually not helpful and are often destructive, particularly if they come from proponents of the traditional and accepted view from which the innovators themselves are only just beginning to emerge. In the long run, of course, the new model has to fend for itself, but while it is being born it needs to be sheltered against the requirement to measure "up" at every stage to the normative standard of the prevailing view.

This is why I believe that feminist theory must be generated by the collaborative efforts of feminists. Now it so happens, for rather obvious historical and social reasons, that feminists, by and large, are women. Those rare men who are indeed feminists would probably be the first to agree that there are large areas of feminist theory to which they have nothing to contribute. In our supremely sex-dichotomized society, that means that for the most part, men can usefully participate only in the product and not in the process. Therefore, any self-respecting program of women's studies or feminist studies--any program that puts forward new visions of reality--will have to leave women space in which to explore. Such a program will have to offer opportunities for intensive, self-searching theory building, some of which will for the present need to be limited to feminists (and/or females), just as advanced courses in biology are limited to biologists, in history, to historians (or to "others who satisfy the instructor that they have equivalent preparation"). At present, when this kind of material is dealt with in a mixed group, both the women and the men often feel that they are being stereotyped and watched. Moreover, the women sometimes begin to feel as though, for the men, they were part of the subject matter of the course. Clearly, there will also have to be more descriptive courses that introduce any interested person to the subject.

The problem at Harvard now is that among an offering of approximately 700 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, about half a dozen deal explicitly with women's experiences and only one or two do so from a feminist perspective. These few courses cannot possibly satisfy all comers. It is to be hoped that once this university realizes that it is a defect not to offer courses in women's studies, it will also understand that the female experience and/or a thorough acquaintance with feminist theory will have to be a prerequisite for some, though by no means all, of them.

In summary, then, I believe: (1) that we need first of all the recognition that the interdisciplinary field of Women's Studies is a vital area of modern scholarship and that this university must offer courses in it; (2) that these courses must be pitched at different levels so that people with no prior knowledge can be introduced to the voluminous and rapidly growing literature, while those who are ready for advanced work can do that (3) that different courses must be taught by people with different outlooks on feminism and on what should be included in Women's Studies, so that the style of learning and teaching can evolve along with the content. The possibilities in this area are exciting, as they are in any new field that is defining itself. This university must foster and encourage such explorations and not try to brand every innovation illegitimate.

This brings me to Harvard's use of Title IX in reverse. The intent of Title IX was to redress iniquities that have arisen as a result of an institution's history of discrimination. All the institutions that have generated our presentday Western reality and values have such a history. Title IX not only exempts programs designed "to overcome the effects of past exclusion," but "requires remedial action to overcome the effects of previous discrimination." I honestly do not understand how Title IX can be warped to apply to the selection of feminists and/or women for the kinds of courses in feminist theory that try to examine the basic assumptions of male-generated values and structures of reality from the perspective of women's experience.

Harvard and like institutions have invented an entire vocabulary of Newspeak to get around Title IX and Affirmative Action, with words like "equal access," "quality," and "standards." (Remember that George Orwell defined Newspeak as the introduction of new words and the simultaneous elimination of old ones, so as to make only the allowed thoughts thinkable.) Indeed, Harvard's tradition is so entirely based on discrimination that the present furor about the Currier House course makes one wonder where all the advocates of equality and justice have been all this time. Certainly they have not been crying with outrage at the daily indignities and discrimination that women, minorities and poor people encounter in this university, dominated by socially privileged white men.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman--whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the sense and hands... We may also infer...that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that in woman.   --Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise us, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable. These are the duties of a woman at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.   --J.J. Rousseau, Emile

[Ruth Hubbard is a professor of Biology at Harvard.]