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From: erm2@midway.uchicago.EDU (elizabeth r morgan)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: sexist space
Message-ID: <1991Mar4.150345.7223@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 5 Mar 91 18:02:45 GMT
Organization: University of Chicago
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I used to be vehemently opposed to single sex schools, but found
myself forced to change my mind during my senior year of high school.I
went to a high school associated with Hunter College in New York, and
their education department occasionally used us as a subject of
research. My senior year, they seperated the AP Calculus classes into
an all-male class, an all female class, and two co-ed classes, and
studied patterns of class participation by sex.

I was in the all-female class, and it was shocking. For the first six
weeks to two months, the classroom sounded like a graveyard. No hands
were raised, no suggestions were offered, participation occurred only
when the teacher called on someone by name. Then, around the end of
October, everyone woke up, realized there were no men around, and
began to participate. This was in a very self- consciously "PC"
school; women spoke freely in most classes, and anyone saying anything
blatantly sexist would have been laughed at, but women still did not
feel free to compete in a "male" subject like math.

In February, the men's teacher left the school for medical reasons,
and the classes were recombined. Two weeks after the recombination,
all the women had shut up again.

The value of a single-sex environment (and I suppose a racially
segregated environment, as in black colleges like Howard, although I'm
less sure of the benefits there) is that it allows women a time during
which they are treated as completely equal to those they are competing
with, and allows them to build habits expecting non-sexist treatment.
Involuntary, nonmalicious, habitual sexism is a much stronger, more
pervasive force than I had thought, and the only way to counteract it
is to first become able to see it. If you had told me what results I
was going to see from the calculus experiment before it happened, I
wouldn't have believed you. I 'knew' that my high school was a
thoroughly non-sexist environment.

On this basis, I'd believe there may be some analagous value to single
sex education for men as well, although, as a woman, I've obviously
nexer experienced an all-male environment. I also support the
existence of single sex social groups; non-business related of course.

Elizabeth