On Being a Feminist Role Model in the Classroom
By Lee Skallerup Bessette September 20, 2011 8:30 pm EDT
“Is it always like this?”
This question came from one of the three male students in my 50+ person literature class, almost ten years ago. I was a new, young PhD student and I was teaching an introductory literature course. The class, in the four years that I had taught it, never reached double-digits for male students in the class. So, yes, I answered, it was always like this.
I was proud of my classes. I taught at an R1 institution, one of the top in the country. That women were over-represented seemed like a nice problem to have. I knew there were plenty of men on campus, mostly in engineering and hard sciences. Most men simply weren’t interested in this course. I was young, naïve, and an admitted over-achiever. My role, I thought,
