Forbidden Fruits of Knowledge: The Psychodymanics of the Education of Women and Women in Education

The history of women and education is a history of prohibitions and rebellions-prohibitions backed by the authority of God, the State, the Doctor, the Professor, the Father, the Husband and rebellions fueled by anger and longing. It is a history of silences and the breaking of silence, of repressions and the explosion of desire—desire for the Word, for the mind so often denied women by the prescriptions of culture. It is, in short, a history of the return of the repressed. What separates the human race from animals? Some say two kinds of power: the power of the Word and the power of the Sword—that is, the systematic construction of language and knowledge on the one hand and the systematic construction of a technology of violence on the other, one based in the desire to connect and unite, the other based in the desire to separate and destroy-Freud's theory of eros and the death instinct, if you will. It is precisely these two kinds of power—the Word and the Sword—which have been forbidden or circumscribed for women. Access to the Sword is still closed to women in most parts of the world, with women themselves negative or ambivalent about whether they even want the right to combat. Access to the Word—to language and the systems of knowledge it has made possible—is now relatively open to women in most parts of the world. The movement to increase the presence of women as students and teachers in the history of