Abstract
Broadly speaking, feminist activists and scholars within the field of gender and education in the West have theorised power though a central concern with how patriarchy exerts effects within institutions and specifically in schools, colleges and universities. In two thousand years of Western culture there have been moments when equality between men and women was actively espoused and practised, yet these moments have been remarkably short-lived in modernity. Researching gender, as Kim Thomas reminds us, ‘requires an examination of the cultural creation of male dominance as well as the creation of female subordination’ (1990, p. 2). Carol Pateman (1988) persuasively argues that the social contract theorist instigated a new kind of patriarchy that was predicated on a fraternal bond. Fraternal, in comparison to paternal, patriarchy created not only oppositional roles for women but laid the foundation for the hierarchical valuing of masculinity and femininity that came to accord low status to women’s places, social roles, work, knowledge and being. This chapter will outline relationships between gender, power and education by demonstrating how schools as public institutions continue to perpetrate the asymmetrical valuing of masculinity and femininity that was re-inscribed in the social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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© 2015 Gabrielle Ivinson
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Ivinson, G. (2015). Gender, Power and Education. In: Kupfer, A. (eds) Power and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415356_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415356_7
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