A Lot to Learn: Girls, Women and Education in the 20th Century

By Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Toronto: Women's Press, 2005, 182 pages, paperback, CDN$24.95. Reviewed by Robert Imre in the July 2005 issue.

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A Lot to Learn employs a fascinating mixed-genre format which incorporates biographical elements in order to elucidate the social context of two generations of women in education. A major portion of the book relies on Lenskyj's contribution to women's studies and to critical pedagogy in the Toronto area in Canada in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. I finished high school in the same part of the world and went on to University study and completed my first degree in 1990 at a university directly affected by Lenskyj's brand of feminism and pedagogy. As such, I am situating myself as a de facto 'student' of Lenskyj's and telling my own story as it connects to this particular book.

First, the basics: this book focuses on a particular kind of historical and ideological journey in which we see the principal characters, Lenskyj and her mother, illustrate their respective moves through the education systems of the day and how the context changes for girls and women from the early days of the colonisation of the Australian continent when her mother attends grammar school in Australia [Margaret Evers was born in 1898], through to Lenskyj's own school experience in a wealthy area of Sydney in the 1950s and progressing onwards to her own feminist awakening in the late 1970s and eventual participation in the teaching system in Canada.

My own experience with the kind of curriculum Lenskyj discusses is something that has stayed with me until this day and informs my own work as a critical social scientist. Attending high school in the mid 1980s, it was quite clear that the curriculum itself included any number of things about gay and lesbian sexuality, about sexual violence, and emphasised equalities among a diverse set of peoples [this included a variety of ethnic groups as well]. I always had a sense that many of the teaching staff resisted these changes, but also had a feeling that most students embraced them as part of their own place in the 'modern' world. By the time we were attending university, many of us had assumed that Women's Studies as a separate topic of study may not need to focus on present-day inequalities as we assumed we had conquered our parents insistence on particular divisions of labour, unequal pay for equal work, and even homophobia of any kind. Most of us had gay and lesbian friends, many openly gay people were widely accepted in social circles and there did not seem to be the kind of social divisions our previous generation had experienced. In sum, resistance to the kinds of ideas Lenskyj discusses in the book came from a minority of conservative- minded individuals who did not approve of such change [regardless of how old they were in the late-1980s and early 1990s] and from a larger number who saw that most of these concerns about equity were surpassed by their [our] own brand of social organisation. We assumed we were beyond it all and that those days were never to be revisited. We were of course, desperately naïve, as the conservative backlash in the late 1990s in both Canada and Australia seems to have sent us backwards to an era when we can now justify discrimination and non- inclusive work and other social practices through a kind of neo- conservatism born in Thatcherism and Reaganism, and supported by the far right in Canada and Australia.

In these terms then, I have gone from discussing with my young peers, in the 1990s, the merits of having women join professional men's sports teams, to finding myself shocked by the attitudes of many of my own students in that it seems they belong in a re- animated version of the 1950s. All of the dangers that Lenskyj points out in the chapter on her own experiences in the 1950s, have been strongly revived in the public culture in Australia to the point where my optimistic understandings in the 1990s of 'social problems now solved' have been exposed as utterly incorrect. In a recent conversation with a colleague we expressed our collective dismay at the recent revival of the debate about same- sex or mixed gender classrooms. It appears as if there is still some merit, according to the Australian public, in training 'ladies for duties in later life' and that we are to expect a division of labour much the same. Further, it appears that the triumph of neo- conservatism is so total that many young women simply see themselves as individuals with choices and do not feel the need to look deeper for social causes and consequences of the society in which they live. I have been laughed at and ridiculed in university classes when I describe feminism as a rich source of social critique by people who are clearly in need of such tools to understand their world [something that, again, I would have assumed we got over nearly two decades ago, and that we were in a position, at least in universities, to discuss such things]. The next time it happens, I'll lend them my copy of Lenskyj's book and can look forward to the day when I can stop calling myself the 'only feminist in the room'.

In general, Lenskyj's book achieves the goal of showing us that gender relations are contextual, and that through women's experiences we can learn a great deal about how they change over time. It is a well written and interesting book dealing with a time of great change as seen through the eyes of two women, mother and daughter, and Lenskyj's own journey from Australia to Canada. It is a valuable contribution to Australian and Canadian social sciences and humanities in general, and to feminist writing in particular. I trust the Women's Press will continue to publish more of the same.

Citation

• Robert Imre. 'Review: A Lot to Learn: Girls, Women and Education in the 20th Century by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 21 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Using sources from women's history, women's studies, and critical social theory, Dr. Lenskyj situates two stories —her own and that of her mother— within the broader Australian socio-cultural context from 1900 to 1960. She presents the background for her mother's narrative, beginning in 1832 when her grandfather arrived in Sydney, Australia, as a convict. She then examines her own experience as a working-class child attending a private school in the 1950s.
  
  Moving to Toronto, the story continues by documenting the interventions of mothers involved in school-community activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Reflecting on her experiences since 1986 as an openly lesbian professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Dr. Lenskyj includes a critical analysis of lesbian and gay activism aimed at educational change, and of developments in feminist pedagogy in the last two decades.