Lessons From
a Gender
Studies
Classroom
By Gail Krotky & Students
Sidwell Friends School, Washington, DC
A
t the start of each new semester, the Gender Studies class begins by reading Audre
Lorde’s essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979). The
now famous speech Lorde gave at the Second Sex Conference calling out discrimi-
natory practices of feminist scholars is more than a rebuke of White western feminism. Her
essay is a blueprint for how to build true solidarity and community through a recognition and
understanding of difference. It is also a call for self-examination and accountability as a critical
step in that process. As Lorde notes in the conclusion to her essay, “Racism and homophobia
are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach
down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of
any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can
begin to illuminate all our choices.” 1
Our schools and our classrooms are indeed a series of choices. What we teach, how we teach,
and, in independent schools, even whom we teach are choices made every day. This article is
not so much an advertisement for making the choice to teach gender studies 2 in our schools
(though I do believe it creates a unique and important space in our communities to engage
the personal and political), rather, I hope it demonstrates how we benefit when we make the
choice for all our classes to be feminist spaces.
1. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” From Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press
Feminist Series (1984).
2. My course is titled “Interdisciplinary Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies,” but it falls under a wider umbrella of
High School Feminism. On this topic I follow Ileana Jiménez, teacher at the Little Red School House and author of the blog
Feminist Teacher (https://feministteacher.com/)
Page 6 Summer 2019
CSEE Connections