“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions. More importantly, it seems to me that artificially inflating the importance of the few female authors that might have existed would falsify the historical record. After all, the whole point of the feminist critique is that female voices were suppressed. This suppression is important to talk about, but you can’t rely on the suppressed voices in order to do so.”

I…

The…

Ehhh.

Read the whole article. It does have some interesting, and difficult-to-resolve, points about academic freedom, but especially in light of the quoted statement I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the professor just doesn’t get it.

Originally shared by Laura Gibbs

When I read articles like this, it makes me very glad that I have opted instead for building courses in which the students choose the reading, and it is my job to find a truly wide variety of readings that I can make available to them. The students then choose, and the students learn from their own choices as well as from seeing the choices made by the students with whom they are interacting through their blogs and projects, etc. This top-down approach (by professor and/or by committee) does not appeal to me at all. As for the attitude of the professor, every time I have challenged myself to improve my range of reading choices by going out and looking for more, I have often surprised myself by the great things I found by looking. It sounds to me like he is not looking very hard…

I have wondered why, if agriculture was so hard compared with hunting and gathering, so many people made the transition.

Turns out it only works that way if you ignore the kind of work that, in industrial societies like those of the (male) theorists who proposed this, is done by unpaid women. (It was generally done by women in the hunter-gatherer societies, too, I suspect.)

The article mentions the “Man the Hunter” conference. I recently listened to an episode of the excellent food podcast Gastropod in which several female anthropologists pointed out that women also hunted in a number of societies, and that in general the conference ignored or diminished the role of women in making both hunter-gathering and agriculture work.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

TL;DR: It was not a mistake if you take the amount of food preparation work in to account.