“I want to see girls with educations. I think women are the future of Africa,”
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 But I’ve found that the syllabi haven’t changed in the 15 years since I took an intro course, and they were woefully outdated then.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?

What do you think?