Gender, Poverty and Rock Stars
“I want to see girls with educations. I think women are the future of Africa,”
Madonna.
Madonna.
I believe this was the first issue of Vanity Fair that I read cover to cover. I had seen Bono on Oprah talking about his crusade, I’d followed Brad and Angelina’s trips and Madonna’s trips, and Oprah’s project to build a school. They made very little impact on me and my first world concerns. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But most of what I knew about Africa was corrupt post-colonial governments, the Mercedes tribe in Kenya - named for the brand of car politicians on the take tended to drive around Nairobi.
But there was something about this issue of Vanity Fair that grabbed me and stuck with me. Again and again, I read different people write about the need to educate women, both to prevent the spread of aids and to invest in them for the future. Have we given up on men, a part of me wondered? Can we raise a continent out of supreme poverty by simply educating women? And if women are the future of Africa, does that mean men remain the future for everywhere else?
I’ve been ruminating on these ideas a lot lately as I prepare to teach my first college level women’s studies course. I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at Women’s Studies syllabi, scanning for books, articles and major points that I need to hit over the course of a semester. But I’ve found that the syllabi haven’t changed in the 15 years since I took an intro course, and they were woefully outdated then. I want to turn my students on to the idea — even if just for just a brief period of time — that they put women at the center of their inquiry and analyze what it means to be a woman at the dawn of the 21st century.
I want to return to Madonna’s statement, and bring it back locally. The regional economy in the Berkshires is one that, on appearance, seems to have a cycle of poverty that traps poor women and writes women off too early in their lives. As the gap between the haves and have nots grows bigger in Africa and in North Adams, one of the questions we’ll be exploring is how can we empower young women to make the transition to the new American economy — one that will require that they be far better educated than most of the women (and men) who came before them? 
“I want to see girls with educations. I think women are the future of Northern Berkshires.”
…me
What do you think?
Dear Dr. Dennum,
I love when a comment spurs a real post.
Dear Dr. Dennum, 
Thanks for the arm chair psychoanalysis, the check is in the mail.
Actually, I think what you may be picking up on is a general shift in the direction of the blog. I’ve tried since the beginning not to be one of those bloggers who writes about all the minutia of daily lives - in the beginning, it was clearly a knitting blog, then a parent who knits blog, then an academic technology blog, and now, now it is just my blog. And as such, I use it as a space to work out ideas that I’m recognizing and or working through in real life.
I don’t deny much of what you wrote - I am an achiever, I have been focused on goals through most of my life - most of them were external (degrees, publishing dates, childbirth) and the ones I’m facing now are far more personal and far more satisfying. I feel like I’ve gotten to a point in my life where the scaffolding has come off and I’m able to fully support myself (and a family of four!) and I’m glad to realize that I still have more to discover. What you see as panic, I see as exhiliration. I love my life, I love the path I’ve carved out for myself and I am eager to explore what is in front of me.
That doesn’t mean I’m not able to enjoy the here and now - I just don’t tend to write about the small stuff - like how my eyes watered with pride that my 4 year old son figured out how to hold his pencil right after a week of crying that it was too hard, or the smile that came over me when my daughter informed that another child was not showing respect to his host at an outing at Whitney’s farm. I get the small stuff, I savor the small stuff, but I also know myself well enough to know that I need the big things as well, because, well, because that is who I am and I’m ok with that.