The Promise of Freedom and the Regulation of Gender feminist pedagogy in the 1970s

Abstract

This article argues that we need to understand feminist interventions in education and other .social domains as both emancipatory and disciplining. While it is acknowledged that feminist reforms have made many positive and desirable changes in education, this article addresses the impact of these reforms from another perspective. It analyses the normative ambitions and the utopian hopes of feminist education and suggests that the Foucauldian concepts of 'technologies of the self' and 'governmentality' offer new and fruitful ways for theorising the relation between (feminist) strategies of social, educational and personal reform, These arguments are explored in dialogue with a historical case..