I am writing this paper to feminists who belong to different generations inside and outside Canada, to those of you in the universities at all levels and to those of you not there, but aware of the power and possibilities of the university in our culture and society. The universities that we need to make changes in our lives and in our society, we also need to change.¹

While that work has been going on for decades, each of us comes into it from a different social location and at a different historical moment. How do we develop theories for this process that can support collective strategic action? My purpose here is to discuss the process of personal and political struggle as I have learned it from other women and have discovered through living it. My premise is that each of us in the world inhabits a strategic location from which we can see how very particular material power works. Most of us don't think of our lives as strategic locations, nor of our experiences as the basis for a vision of what is wrong and what is possible, but we can learn to do that. That kind of learning has been happening outside the academy through the global Women's Movement; when we work with women's groups to develop feminist possibilities, we create shared visions and language. While my strategic location has been in universities for some thirty-seven years, I did not see it as strategic for the first twenty. The argument I offer addresses the strategic locations inhabited by individual faculty women in the universities, locations which contain power that feminists can learn to use to transform teaching practices, collegial relations, forms of knowledge and research, the whole culture and institution of the university–if we understand it that way. To identify that power and learn both how to use it and what to use it for, feminists need the work of women's groups organizing at the local as well as global levels. The model I offer here I ground in my everyday life, theorize through the accounts of other women and live as a celebration of my right to be and to imagine. The goals are to create peace and social justice. The strategy is to outlive oppression by living into the university–a process that will change the university and us. I call this model of living strategically (as a feminist in the university): the praxis of feminist professing.²

The university is a key site for reproducing the knowledge, culture and power in our society. But universities are complex places, not just reproducing, but also contesting and creating knowledges, culture and power. They are a priority for feminist work for several reasons: first, because their status and history are being used to authorize and reproduce patriarchal, corporate, and state power; second, because universities are being dismantled as sites for accessible education, critical thought and political challenge; third, because universities hold a responsibility to all the people of our society and world for whom they act as a repository of knowledge and a source of education; and fourth, because we need them. They can keep alive our hope and become our meeting place for a collective praxis.

How can women who have found the space to work in universities make those spaces work to the benefit of all women? Being a professor means having a job, defined within bureaucracies and disciplines; and this is true even of Women's Studies or Feminist Studies. What insights and energies can women bring from our own histories to these professions and social locations? What is the role of the university in producing and reproducing patriarchy? What is the power of a feminist professor and how can I use it? Is it possible for me to see my institutional, epistemic, and cultural location strategically as a matrix for feminist action? I do not want to evacuate the university; there is too much here we need, there are too many who come to the university to learn. Can we transform the university, as feminists, by living into it - not subversively and secretly, but openly and politically?

I think we can, but only if we are willing to work differently and without permission. In my lifetime and through feminist work in which I have shared, more women in Canada than ever before are gaining access to university educations, to graduate school and to professorial positions. During the last ten years, however, the universities of Canada have been under a financial assault of cut-backs, under-funding, and conditional funding. The social impact of these cuts is differential. While elite members of our society maintain access to elite post-secondary education, public access to public education is being dismantled. The young people of our very large middle class are subjected to an ideology of fear constructed by government policy; by transferring the financial responsibility for a university education to students, federal and provincial governments have in consort with corporate capitalism created the material conditions for anxiety about employment and the possibility of every paying off their student loans. Driven by that fear, many young people have been seeking the most direct training routes to employment. Those going to university are harassed by doubt and debt. The documented reality, however, is that university degrees at all levels are correlated with life-long employment, higher incomes, and better economic return to our society (Robert C. Allen). While these data still show the gap between women and men in the wages we earn and the kinds of jobs we have, that gap has been slowly shrinking. To achieve these changes in women's abilities to look after ourselves and our families, it has been and still is important for women to go to university.

In the 1970s and 1980s feminists challenged universities to address their exclusionary practices in hiring and argued that a largely male professorate reproduced the values and knowledges that kept men in the centre of academic discourse and social decisions. The Peace Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s provided many in the universities with social awareness and the political will to connect scholarship with issues of social justice and personal responsibility. Women and some men began to offer Women's Studies courses to critique existing disciplines for bias and exclusion and to supply an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge for, by and about women. By the beginning of the 1990s, Women's Studies was established across the universities in Canada, though frequently as programs of courses taught by faculty borrowed from other departments and not as departments in their own right. Scholars with feminist PhDs and even a few Women's Studies PhDs began to appear and to be hired. However, their presence in the university has become normalized as a margin. While feminist scholarship is apparently recognized, there still is no category for it in the major research grants. And the whole context for the struggle is shifting. Students who arrive on campus are already worried about the value of a university education and do not want to get one by struggling against the grain. Gender inequality is less overt. Poverty among students looks to be shared by both male and female students. In just a few years, some of these young people are graduate students, thrilled to have survived so far. Too vulnerable and aware perhaps to claim meritocracy, nevertheless, many have yet to fashion their own praxis. Those of us in the university or concerned about its role and responsibilities need active feminist discussions about ourselves, our society, and the forms of power we are (re)producing.

I use the term praxis from Marxist theory to acknowledge that in the process of making feminist changes, we will also change our theories and ourselves as well as our vision of what is possible. Praxis means to develop new theories by thinking through what was learned by acting on old ones. In an early essay, Charlotte Bunch outlines four steps to build a feminist theory: description, analysis, vision and strategy. The last two differentiate feminist theory from other research processes. Vision refers to what we really want when we are not self-censoring, minimizing, and "being realistic" and may involve struggles to create language. Strategy names the processes we devise to move from what we have described and analyzed towards what we envision. When we act on that strategy, we learn new things and begin the process again. Through this process of revision, we sharpen our abilities to see and understand what was invisible and to engage it in our actions. I use "we" to acknowledge that I do not work alone. Feminist theory is ultimately a collective process of creating language, visions, and analytical frameworks each of us can use. Our aims for peace, justice and human rights are transformative.

The idea of feminist praxis conveys a shift in the whole vision of ourselves and our collective work. Even though praxis implies a recurrent cycle of theory into action into theory that creates partial change in our society and social structures, these provisional changes are qualitatively different from the idea of incremental change³ which the political right has been able to use so successfully in shifting the public responsibility for education, health, and social services from the state to the private individual and for-profit organization. A technique of dominance and colonialism, incremental change is a strategy to maintain control or access to resources while minimizing corresponding responsibilities. Multi-national corporations and the state use incremental change to skim resources from the public by disguising the cumulative effect and so undermining the possibility of political resistance. In feminist praxis, we work collectively to transform our society by deepening and expanding our vision of the whole system, locally and globally, personally and politically.

Feminist praxis links the theories and practices of women's groups, activists, and writers, who work sometimes within the universities but more frequently across these institutions, forming national and international networks. In the collective and interactive workings of these groups and individuals, women are shaping languages and analyses so that we can make sense of ourselves. Nicole Brossard explores how women generate new perspectives and possibilities in language (116-117). She calls it an aerial vision because it is not rooted in the meanings of past, but in the activities of our present meaning making. Because the language that women develop working with each other is exchanged, live, from group to group, it offers alternatives to abstraction. Women's groups verify our accounts by recognizing them and finding them reliable bases for action. We draw the authority of our meaning making from ourselves and provide it to each other. Women need each other to be able to think about women; I cannot make and refine language by myself, for making meaning in language is shared, collective work. The language necessary to feminist change work has not arisen from academic discourse, but from the groups and exchanges of the Women's Movement, locally and globally.

In my academic work I am accountable to the best of what I understand about the Women's Movement.⁴ It is not, of course, on most institutional flow charts. Praxis for feminism in the university, as well as for feminist professing, occurs in the complex contexts of the Women's Movement in Canada and globally. Its particularities are those of the academy: the production and reproduction of knowledge in our society through research and teaching, gate keeping through certification and degrees, a class culture of knowledge and authority, and the paradigms of disciplines. While Women's Studies took all these on in the early 1970s, many of the struggles are now shared more broadly among our colleagues on committees and in Faculty Associations. Feminist research is reshaping curriculum in disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary studies. Feminist scholars are connected through women's groups as well as through electronic lists and academic associations such as the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and the Canadian Women's Studies Association. We have developed journals like Atlantis, Canadian Woman's Studies and RFR.

Each of us as faculty in a university participates within collegial processes where we are feminist citizens, with the agency to act. To make feminist change, I need an understanding of the conditions in the universities and the way universities are part of the power structures in our society. But understanding these is not enough: we have to change the way we behave. The point of feminism is to analyze conditions of oppression in order to transform them⁵. Even if we are women newly numbered among the faculty, to contribute to a feminist transformation of the university as an institution, we have to do things differently from what has been accepted and expected. Simply joining the institutional and epistemic structures will not help. Our presence may benefit us within the ideological contexts of individualism, but it will not alter the conditions of oppression women experience in our own country and globally.⁶

At the International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal in 1987, the poet Audre Lorde observed that each of us has some power which we can use in the service of what we say we believe. If we do not use our power, she reminded us, someone will use it for us, and in our name: "So the only way for us not to be used as instruments of oppression is to actively engage ourselves in the liberation struggles..." (Womanist, Sept 1988, 4).⁷ As I try to identify my power, I connect her thought to Adrienne Rich's essay on "Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Politics of Location" from 1984 and to Himani Bannerji's observation in 1993 that the "relations of ruling become more visible where they converge most fully...in the structures of the daily lives of non-white women, particularly if they are working class, and I would add lesbian" (Bannerji xix). Realizing that my location is constructed through the relations of ruling alerts me to the political dimensions of my personal life, not just as I have been a single white mother to three now grown children, nor just as I undertake to live as a lesbian, nor just as a citizen who left the United States in resistance to the Vietnam War and became a Canadian, but also as I engage in my work as a professor. I inhabit social and political locations from which I can learn about the relations of ruling (in which I participate) and where I can draw on the power stored in that site. Social location is an imaginary, theoretical, name for how we live our lives. The forms of our lives, then, contain energy that is being used to oppress us. Feminist theory seeks to release that energy to trans-form ourselves, our social structures, and cultural values. These locations in the global relations of power in patriarchal capitalism can be seen as interstices in a matrix, a web of relations. Within the imaginary and material conditions of that web, I have some feminist agency and as well as responsibility. Audre Lorde talks about knowing where our power lies and how to use it.⁸ The only person I have the power to change is myself. But when I realize that this self inhabits a political location, animates a political culture, and reproduces political power, changing the self becomes a significant project.

To do feminist change work in the universities, we must set the agenda. It will not come from the academy. There are many examples of the praxis of feminist professing which I encourage us to share with each other. Among others, I have been involved in the development of Women's Studies, the Endowed Chairs in Women's Studies, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Human Rights complaints against Manitoba universities for systemic discrimination against all women, our Faculty Association contract negotiations, the women's studies journal Atlantis, and the Learning to Change Network of feminist academics. In major and yet almost incidental ways, I have learned from these strategies.

Catherine MacKinnon has written that "One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it" (16). And on some levels that is true: compliance, obedience, taking up the values of the system, working long hours on an institutional and capitalist agenda, becoming masculine and white identified, conforming to heterosexual and heterosexist expectations, self hatred...etc.⁹ But working together with groups of women, I have realized that on crucial levels, what is required to survive the system is precisely what is required to change it: gaining control of our own energy, health, intellectual questions and methods; forming our own organizations; and becoming citizens in fuller senses of the word–acquiring a global perspective, participating in policy decisions with different communities, making common cause with other disempowered groups, and decolonizing ourselves, our workplaces, and our languages.

While universities reproduce relations of power, historically, they have also been sites for academic freedom, contested knowledges and critical thinking. Our contemporary scholarly practices and methods are crucial in establishing critiques, including new voices, and in proposing new knowledges. Our academic traditions include rights to dissent and opportunities for creativity. These rights and opportunities contribute to the political and intellectual struggle for human freedom, however compromised. Universities have been important sites for resistance to oppression and war, but their academic independence is being eroded increasingly as the state adapts its funding priorities to the demands of international corporations. In the last two decades, per capita funding to Canadian universities has dropped by 30 per cent (Galt). Like Central American countries, universities are forced through state constructed debt to restructure, to rationalize, increasingly to be accessible to and handmaidens for corporate agendas and power. Class size has increased, corporate funding accepted, and courses are tailored tightly to jobs that might not even be there. Tuition fees have more than doubled. Students are controlled through the debt they are forced to shoulder, a burden that has been shifted to them from government.¹⁰ The opportunities to learn critical thinking are confined by the presence of debt and by the climate of job hysteria which evaluates each course according to whether it will directly help the student "get a job." Universities are training a reserve labour supply.

Women and other oppressed peoples do need the universities–to get useful and fulfilling employment, to live our lives, and to shape knowledge and academic standards humanely for the public benefit. The deeper the oppression, the greater the need for education to overcome some of the exclusions and to form some alternatives. One of the ironies of literacy is that, like liberalism, it is a source of problems, yet we cannot afford to do without it. Education and literacy are linked with survival. While women are not equitably present in the university, we are more numerous than ever before, making up at least half of the undergraduate population and moving slowly into the professorate and (even more slowly) through the ranks. The feminist vision of a university that I am proposing, however, is not just about the numbers of women present in these institutions, nor even of equal access to opportunity. The vision of the university I am talking about addresses the responsibility of a publicly funded university to create and educate for equality of distributed benefit. The knowledge created and reproduced in our universities should be the ground of the public good not the advantages of the elite.

We are still a long way from such a vision. Universities are still primary gate keepers to political and professional decision making; to participate in many of the areas, women (and men) must graduate from recognized and accredited universities. They come to university, however, also to learn about the world and about themselves, and to improve their lives, individually and collectively. Canadian universities still combine these objectives only for a small elite group in society. Others (like Aboriginal peoples, like minoritized groups, like women, like lesbians and gay men) can gain degrees at the expense of learning about themselves, their cultures and histories. Both elite and "others" can improve their lives only if they agree to the unwritten rules of privilege: their well-being and power will be within the context of a system which reproduces exploitation, poverty and war for someone else. It is an important feminist goal that people's need for growth and learning that takes them to the university should not be used against them to reproduce oppression. Learning for liberation is a way for educators and students not to become agents of oppression.

Universities have the responsibility to educate for equality, and here I mean a substantive equality of benefit, not just the "equal access to opportunity" which has been so successful in reproducing the "standards" of patriarchal institutions and practices. Women have a right to full participation in our society and the right to substantive equality–to be equal to our own aspirations, and not to the models patriarchy has constructed. The project of educating for equality will require that we transform these institutions, their structures, cultures, knowledge contents and educational practices. That is our task.

But we do have the university traditions of self-governance, academic freedom, and critique to build on.¹¹ The right of self-governance in universities is intertwined with the university's fragile independence from the state and (just as importantly) from corporate power. Our work is critical to the interconnected goals of global feminism to establish social justice, to protect the environment, and to eliminate oppression, war and poverty. And at this moment in history, the feminist struggle for a fair university coincides with the Canadian university's struggle for autonomy, self-governance and academic freedom from corporate and state control. It is a good moment to build coalitions.

Equal rights in education are among the rights and fundamental freedoms that should be enjoyed equally by women and men. Canada pledged itself to this international treaty obligation when it signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1980. Other areas of this human rights document include employment rights, economic and social benefits, equality before the law, political and public life and marriage and family law . Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, and feminist professing in all areas of the university contribute significantly to realizing these rights and freedoms. Certainly we have learned that equal rights in education will not lead to the elimination of discrimination against women if it is understood to mean the right of women to be educated along side men through a process and content that teaches the subordination of women. Contributors to the Forward Looking Strategies document agree that defining and creating a society "in which women participate in a real and full sense in economic, social and political life" is not simple or easy; it is comprehensive and revolutionary.¹²

Changing how we profess is part of the revolution.




Endnotes

1. Thanks to Monnah Green, whose response to my work suggested this phrasing to me. I dedicate this writing to all the students and women with whom I have learned to speak.

2. An earlier version of this work was delivered at "Women's Worlds: the 7^th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women" at Trømso, Norway, June 26, 1999. I am indebted to my colleagues in Manitoba, the Learning to Change Network, and those who attended and discussed these concerns with me in Norway, particularly Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Francine Descarries, Carmen Lambert, Berit Aas, Paula Melchiori, and Angela Miles. I also appreciate the discussion at the Round Table in meetings of the Canadian Women's Studies Association in Edmonton in 2000 and thank the women in the Joint M.A. in Women's Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, Saint Mary's University and Dalhousie, particularly Virginia Bonn, Theresa Robertson and Monnah Green. The title owes much to the doctoral research of Fiona Green on feminist mothering and praxis. The theory could be developed as a praxis of feminist nursing, or administration, or whatever way women are employed.

3. Muriel Smith focused my attention on why incremental change is not a strategy useful to feminists who seek a change in our entire vision.

4. In 1989, I was on a panel on Education as part of a conference for International Women's Day organized by the U.N. End of Decade Committee in Winnipeg. Because they asked me about my accountability within the university, I have clarified it for myself. That clarity has helped.

5. Linda Gordon describes feminism as the analysis of the oppression of women for the purpose of eliminating it. Angela Miles writes of the transformative practices of feminism, which she calls integrative feminism.

6. "What does it mean," Audre Lorde asks, "when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." In her famous address on "The Master's Tools," Lorde is speaking about the university. These tools "may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support" (Sister112).

7. This discussion is from her presentation at the International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal in 1987.

8. Audre Lorde speaks these words in her introduction to her reading of "Power," on the audio tape, Shore Lines.

9. MacKinnon goes on to write: "Until the cost of this is collectively experienced as unacceptable by those who have drawn the best of men's options for women, and glimpsed as changeable by those who have drawn the worst, we will continue to live–if it can be called living–under its aegis" (16-17). Feminist professors know that it is unacceptable and changeable.

10. "The Canadian Federation of Students estimates that the average debt load of graduating students is now $25,000, compared with a little less than $9000 a decade ago...." Virginia Galt, Globe and Mail, 13 December 1999, A16.

11. These traditions are being erased, reinterpreted, made invisible and dismantled; feminists should recognize that invalidating process as political.

12. End of Decade, "Education is the most important goal" paragraph 14-Arvonne 27.




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