Teaching Peace: The Challenge of Gendered Assumptions
Author(s)
Moylan, P. A.
Abstract
Two teaching stories form the crux of this article. In fall 1999 at Loyola’s Rome Center in Italy I taught a newly created course titled Peacemaking in the 20th Century. In creating the course I chose Teaching about International Conflict and Peace, edited by Merry M. Merryfield and Richard C. Remy, because of the seven chapters on 20th-century peacemaking tools and the chart of such tools by Chadwick Alger that included feminism as number 20 of 21 tools.1 This was a thin edge that allowed me to justify including Betty Reardon’s Sexism and the War System as another one of the texts.2 The students were so resistant to Reardon’s argument-a story I will get to in a moment-that when I revised the course to teach it in Chicago in fall 2001, I decided to use Birgit Brock-Utne’s Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education.3 Though student challenges to Brock-Utne’s argument were less adamant, there was still great resistance to some of her research conclusions on the socialization of boys and girls. So here are the two stories that provoked my reflection on the challenge of gendered assumptions in teaching peace history.
