Furthermore, many echo Karen Bojar's wish: "We hoped the course would
change our students' lives and the lives of their children. This is quite a burden
for a three credit course, but for many of us women's studies is a cause, not
simply an academic career."

Added to this complexity and urgency is a third theme which recurs again
and again throughout the book, which is the difficulty and necessity of getting
our students, who are mainly white, female and middle class, to grapple with
the societal difference and with their own positions of privilege. As Lisa Bowleg
puts it, rather than exploring the lives of women of color, "students wanted to
learn about women who were like themselves." Student resistance to Women's
Studies takes many forms, and is exacerbated in introductory courses by the
presence of people who are just there to fulfill a "diversity requirement," by
the fact that many classes have enrollments of over 50, and by the sheer intel-
lectual immaturity of many undergraduates, who have yet to learn about the
existence of alternative ways of seeing the world.

The authors here who write most poignantly about student resistance are not
surprisingly the professors of color and one white woman who is an "out"
lesbian. Bowleg, herself "black, middle-class, openly lesbian," reports that her
predominantly white students did not want to do an assignment about a woman
who was "different" from them: "we are all just people, aren't we?" Audre
Brooks and France Winddance Twine had to deal with student complaints to
the administration, as some could not handle a course centering on the experi-
ences of women of color, taught by a black-white team. Margaret Duncombe,
in confronting her students' fear of lesbianism, asks what are they really afraid
or? She concludes that it is feminism, not lesbianism, which is the real threat
to the gender system. "Feminism decenters men and as such is a violation of
deeply held gender norms, which exposes young women to risk." She has learned
to confront the power of the lesbian label and to work for a classroom which is not
conventionally "safe"; rather she seeks to guarantee students that "their ideas
will be listened to attentively, taken seriously, and responded to civilly."

Each of the essays in this book deals with problems like these, and each
offers, if not solutions, then approaches which have confronted the problems
and yielded success with students, at least some students, at least in some of
the contexts in which they were tried. No one claims universal applicability
here. Because Women's Studies, particularly "Intro," is about all the women
in the world, or rather about gender relations, which include race and class
relations, all over the world, and because our teachers and our students are so
various, and because we all, teachers and students, want the course to speak to
our lives and our commitments and not just our academic knowledge, there can
be no general "Intro" course, in the way that there can perhaps be a generally
accepted body of knowledge for, say, "Introductory Psych."

But does that mean that none of these essays can speak beyond its own
context? On the contrary. The probelms described above are shared by many of
the authors here. And the approaches are detailed, imaginative, and varied

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