Women’s organizing globally is not an invention of the twenty-first century. Nor is the kind of radical transformation that can occur with a global consciousness. For quite some time now, women have exhibited the courageous leadership necessary to become empowered advocates in the service of global social justice. 

As the European armies became ever more entrenched in World War I, which ultimately left 21 million wounded and 20 million dead, women traveled from their warring countries and met in The Hague in 1915 to proclaim their commitment to peace. This meeting defied the odds and was almost an act of treason. The resulting coalition, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), continues today to work for peace, expose oppression, and end exploitation.

A half century later, in 1967, another group of women came together to defy the unthinking patriotic fervor driving a different war--this one between the United States and Vietnam. They called themselves Another Mother for Peace (AMP). My faded embroidered AMP patch with its iconic slogan, “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” sits on the bookshelf in my office just below the four-volume Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women with its modest subtitle, “Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge.” I served as the encyclopedia’s section editor for the entries on women’s studies around the world (insofar as we could track it).

The juxtaposition of global peace issues on the one hand and knowledge making on the other is revealing. The goal of the encyclopedia's general editors, Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, was to capture through the perspectives of women themselves how gender could serve as a lens for understanding everything from democracy and development to terrorism and toxicity. The group of editors and writers from around the world was collectively determined to make visible what had been invisible until women’s studies provided a new window to the world. We were all too aware of how easily women’s history of agency and social change had been erased before, and we didn’t want to risk having it excised again.

The current issue of On Campus with Women provides new hope that women have learned valuable lessons from their history of practicing collective global work. The United Nation’s Decade of Women and Millennial Development Goals, along with the new technologies that turn distant tides into ones that lap at your ankles (or at least at your computer screen), have clarified common purposes and intensified networks. As this issue’s articles reveal, women are intertwining the powerful components of knowledge, research, political organizing, transformational leadership, and advocacy for the disinherited. They are aware that in addition to tracking the number of women college presidents or legislative representatives to assess progress, they must remediate conditions like poverty, violence, disease, and war that keep too many young girls from attending schools where they might dream their own dreams of change.

In this global context, higher education needs to be a far more proactive force for cultivating global consciousness and knowledge within students. Susan Lennon suggests in her OCWW article that women’s colleges are positioned to offer this kind of essential learning. But the overall record of co-educational institutions remains anemic. 

In 2003 Kevin Hovland, the director of Global Curriculum and Initiatives at AAC&U, conducted a Mellon Foundation-funded research scan of global learning goals and practices in one hundred colleges and universities. He found that almost half of the colleges had incorporated global learning goals into their mission statements, but almost none had developed comprehensive approaches to achieve these goals. Students typically grope in the dark to find more than language courses or a chance to study abroad (available to less than 5 percent of college students). Some stumble into a single required non-western course, but almost none of these classes are in science.

Through AAC&U’s Shared Futures initiative, we are working with colleges who want to strengthen the pathways to global knowledge. These institutions are creating fascinating new curricular models in general education to make global learning unavoidable for all students, no matter what they choose to study. Shared Futures argues that students need to acquire certain capacities to become effective global citizens. These include the ability to master a deep, comparative knowledge of the world’s people and problems; the recognition of similarities and differences in and among cultures, as well as the multiple perspectives, values, and identities these similarities and differences engender; the ability to be mindful of the consequences of actions in locally diverse and globally heterogeneous communities; the ability to sustain difficult conversations in the face of contested differences; and the belief that individual and collective action can make a difference in the world (Shared Futures: Global Learning and Liberal Education, 2006).

If men and women alike were to graduate with such expanded capabilities, perhaps their united efforts to create a “gender watch system” would move the UN Millennial Development Goals into the realm of accomplishments. Just think of what young girls walking safely to school in every village and city could dream then.

References

Hovland, K. 2006. Shared Futures: Global Learning and Liberal Education. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.