The rise of second-wave feminism coincided with the coming of age of the Baby Boom generation, expanding welfare state systems and a revolution in communications technologies that made it possible to transfer progressive ideas, writings, and social discourses across national borders at unprecedented speeds. Universities became contested sites and laboratories for social change throughout the 1960s and 1970s, marked by various student protest movements and new demands for equal opportunity. Expanded access to higher education, in turn, supplied the foundation for women's “long march” through other significant political, economic, and social institutions through the 1980s and 1990s. Women now constitute a majority of the students at many academic institutions, testifying to the success of the feminist movement. Taking their equal opportunities for granted, younger women are often oblivious to the historical struggles of that movement and its larger contributions to societal change. For the generation that actively participated in these struggles, feminism was a life-transforming experience, even if most of us were too tired at the end of the day to chronicle the major turning points in our own lives. Thus a book concentrating on the feminist transformation of university life in a large sense is long overdue.
Miriam David, based at the University of London, sets out to write a “collective biography” of female academics, emphasizing the ways in which they came to see themselves as feminists and how they have helped to transform universities by way of “feminist knowledge and wisdom” (2) across a span of 50 years. The author begins by posing broad questions about the “globalizing” nature of academic feminism:
How successful has the feminist project been in educating women and girls across the globe about their rights in both their public and private lives? How has the education system itself been transformed? Just what do feminist academic activists, like me, think of changes that we have achieved over the last 50 years … What are the educational and political obstacles still to be overcome, especially in an era of near global neo-liberalism? What precisely is the legacy for future generations within and outside of global universities? (2).
The first two questions lead the reader to expect a systematic, comparative treatment of changing enrollment patterns, trends in faculty composition across the disciplines, as well as an assessment of barriers to the “balanced participation of women and men” in university decision making around the world. Unfortunately this book falls short of those expectations. Instead of offering concrete evidence of changing personnel policies, institutionalized curricular changes, or even concrete descriptions of new pedagogical methods that distinguish feminist approaches from traditional modes of instruction, the author quickly shifts to personalizing the political, indicating that her real aim is to write a “collective memoir” based largely on her own experiences in the educational sciences—presented as “feminist genealogies” and the “details of individuals' lives” (52). As the author herself notes, “My women were virtually all known to me prior to our conversations” (55), raising serious questions as to the “globalized nature” of her claims.
The book opens with a chapter on “Feminism as an Education Project to Transform Women's Lives.” Although the aim is to gather “international feminist ‘voices,’ but all in English” (13), the individuals who responded to her “online quasi-questionnaire, with written answers via email, with occasional follow-up telephone, Skype or face-to-face conversations” stem from “Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States” (13). In fact, 83 of 110 participants (18) hail from the UK; the overwhelming majority were personally acquainted with David. Indeed, she refers to many of them throughout the text by their first names, as they do in their responses to each other, leaving any reader who does not know the members of this inner circle feeling rather excluded.
Given the preponderance of women born in or working in the UK, the description of their formal status is confusing at best: 82 are described as “professors in the US sense of being ‘full’ professors (although in the UK not necessarily tenured)”; of those, 99 were some kind of “doctor,” though not necessarily PhDs; three-fourths are already retired (17). These women are then divided into three “cohorts,” the exact parameters of which are first revealed on page 57: those born between 1935 and 1950, from 1950 to 1965, and between 1965 and 1980, respectively; these groups are loosely linked to “second-,” “third-,” and “fourth-” wave feminism. The categorizations used here are problematic for scholars pursuing standard demographic research, which differentiates between generational, cohort, and life-cycle effects. Demographers normally rely on 20–25 year intervals to distinguish among “generations,” while “cohorts” are understood as having been shaped by some common cultural phenomenon extending beyond mere time of birth. David tends to use these terms interchangeably. The interval 1935–1950, for example, fails to capture the very different opportunity structures encountered by women born before and after World War II; nor do the birth years 1965 to 1980 reflect many structural barriers women born in the 1960s still had to combat upon entering the university in the early 1980s, as opposed to those born in the late 1970s who entered college under the progressive auspices of European Union “equal treatment” and “positive action” mandates.
Chapter two bears the title, “Gender Equality in Global Higher Education: The Misogynistic Numbers Game.” Despite the “global” label, the author supplies six tables focusing solely on the United Kingdom and one table on France, followed several pages later by a brief summary of “She Figures 2009” involving the 27 countries in the EU (44–45). Because the latter do not appear in table form, it is difficult for the reader to draw any solid comparative conclusions across Europe, much less at the international level; nor is it clear why the numbers are “misogynistic,” given the obvious increases in female enrollments over time. The following chapters offer life histories and “collective” biographies of academic feminists and address second-wave feminism's entry into the universities and its ripple effects. David assures readers that “Academic Feminism Today” might still be capable of pulling off “A Feminized Future in Global Academe.” If, we take her very small sample of “cohort 3” respondents seriously, however, we have little grounds for optimism: several did not even want to call themselves feminists, nor are they likely to turn the so-called “global neoliberal university” around any time soon. For a political scientist used to evaluating European public policies, this work is difficult to review. As feminist social scientists, we have an obligation to provide concrete evidence in support of our core arguments. Thus, the definitive book on global feminist transformations of academic life has yet to be written.
