Minding Women

Book excerpt: "Minding Women embraces a generation of scholarship, culminating in major new work by leading scholars who are reconfiguring feminist research. This important collection will again change the way we think about race, history, education, and the lives of girls." --Sally Schwager, Director Women's History Institute, Harvard University Research on women and girls has exploded during the past twenty years. Since 1977, when the Harvard Educational Review published Carol Gilligan's now-classic article "In a Different Voice," in which she argued so persuasively that women and girls must be understood on their own terms, researchers have been discovering, uncovering, and recovering women's ways of knowing, being, thinking, teaching, and learning. Minding Women charts the wealth of thought and writing related to women and girls and education that this process of discovery has produced. Minding Women begins with a "Classics" section--articles that call attention to the lack of research on girls and women and describe the effect this has had on knowledge and society. The contributors then discuss feminist pedagogy, and how it has changed and been refined over time. Girls and young women are the focus of the next section. Too often their voices and viewpoints are excluded from these discussions, so some of their own writings are included here. The book then explores women's educational history, showcasing some of the rich work in this area over the past twenty years. Identity issues are addressed in the final section, acknowledging that substantial differences exist among groups of women and girls on how they experience the world and their roles, prospects, and lives.