From Teachng[sic] to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations
on the Classroom
(New York: Peter Lang,
2002), pp. 126-128:
Each of the chapters of
this book, so far, ends with the same gesture. An echo resonates from Isaac Pennington, who speaks of our
life as ³love, and peace, and tenderness,² to Luce Irigaray, describing "a
style of loving relationships"; from Audre Lorde, on the hunger of loving
³easily,² to Kaye and I on the
work we do: ³A loving. An obsession.²
What¹s love got to do with it?
In Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender,
Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction, Eileen Schell argues that
an economic reality lies behind this ³mystified argument for the pedagogy of
maternal love¹²: our willingness to work for lower wages than men (33,
24). She quotes Redding Sugg¹s Motherteacher: ³The first profession opened to women consisted of the sale
of sexual love and was called prostitution; the second . . . was a traffic in maternal love and was called
pedagogy.² (20)
Schell debunks
the ³destructive myth² of part-time work for ³psychic income,² a sense of
satisfaction and fulfillment that can function as part of one¹s compensation.
She challenges the stereotype of the dabbling housewife, whose intellectual
work is unconnected to her status as worker. Not personal choices, Schell argues, but structural
factors--³sex-role socialization, market demands, hiring practices, and
sex-discrimination²--hold such women back from full-time careers. At considerable price: a ³loss of
control of one¹s working conditions, hence one¹s academic freedom² (36, 40-41,
49,119).
This is me. I am the bored housewife. Working for pin money. Not in control of the structures of my
employment. The operative paradigm here, the template of value, is that of
full-time work--which I have refused.
I am in the midst of lamenting, one afternoon, that I am
left out of campus decision-making. Linda-Susan shakes her head: ³I can¹t imagine what it must be like
to go through the world as a white woman.²
And so I try to imagine, try to say: what IS it like, to
be a woman who is white? And well-(enough)-to-do, with a husband who
was-a-poet-when-I-married-him, but turned into a corporate lawyer? The freedom, the ³incomparable
privilege² of ³irresponsibility²:
not ³having² to work, not for money, but for the satisfaction of doing
something that seems important.
Simone de Beauvoir denounces
such a position: ³Free from troublesome burdens and
cares . . .without ever being impressed with the necessity of taking charge of
[our] own existence . . . . [This is] complicity . . . cowardice. . . .[we
must] transcend our assigned role.² (The
Second Sex 801-802)