Feminist Politics and Democratic Values in Education

Abstract

This exploratory article is threefold in purpose. In the first instance, it seeks to re-assess the contributions of feminist thought to our understanding of democratic values in education. We draw extensively upon the insights of feminist political theorists to conduct this re-assessment and suggest some new directions for the study of “Education Feminism” (see Stone, 1994). The second aim is to identify and describe the key feminist debates which have emerged about the gendering of liberal democracy. We revisit major but contrasting traditions of thought—that of liberal feminism and feminist theorizing from maternal, socialist, and post-structural positions—to illustrate shifts in thinking about democracy and democratic education. Our goal in conducting this re-evaluation is to highlight the necessity of developing a more explicit and systematic consideration of the relationship between feminism and democratic education. Our third aim is to describe the key levels of political analysis that have been favored by feminists in their efforts to understand the relationship between gender politics and democratic education.We then go on to argue that feminists must revisit the social and political dimensions of their work in order to engage more critically with “epistemic” concerns as they emerge in relation to the study of gender and democratic schooling. This view may seem somewhat out of step with postmodern/post-structural feminist theories that attempt to defend the illusory and performative nature of gender. It is our view, however, that feminists remain committed to the idea that “democratic values” must not only function to serve, but also represent, the political concerns of women “as gendered persons” from diverse contexts. This commitment implies that we view feminism as both a political representation of women’s difference/experience and as a necessary theoretical abstraction which has, at its core, an interest in struggling over the meaning and significance of feminist values in a democracy.