introduction 7
hundred years since women achieved the right to vote. There is still a lot
of relearning for all of us to do.
Dominance and privilege cause everyone pain, including boys and
men. What a burden it must be for men to feel like they must repress
emotions or hide their vulnerabilities and human frailty. How chal-
lenging to feel that they must always be the breadwinners and carry
the burden of their family alone. Interdependence makes so much more
sense for both men and women. Interdependence encourages a relation-
ship between the sexes where each depends on the other and each is
open and helpful to the other, emotionally and physically—supporting,
encouraging, and sometimes taking over when the other is feeling weak
or unable. My mother used to say that men have to go to war, therefore
women must be strong in the home. Today, women are also able to go to
war, and men find themselves taking care of home and children.
We can never know what it is like to walk in the shoes of another
person—or a whole people—but we can listen to all our stories in the
hope of better understanding one another. And, thus, become interde-
pendent as Clinebell (1973) suggested over thirty years ago. Or as bell
hooks says in Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000, x):
“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females
and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of
mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction. . . . Feminist revolution
alone will not create such a world. . . . But it will make it possible for us
to be fully self-actualized females and males able to create beloved com-
munity, to live together, realizing our dreams of freedom and justice,
living the truth that we are all ‘created equal.’”
No matter how we think about the genders or the “isms,” if we are
intentional in our self-exploration, we are bound to discover that our
beliefs, prejudices, and attitudes affect how we interact with the boys
and girls in our classrooms.
Gender identity aFFects oUr
interactions With children and FaMilies
I have been writing about how early childhood experiences, emotional
memories, and biases affect my interactions with people I teach, whether
they are young children or college students (Jacobson 2003, 2008). In
my books I talk about the connections I make between personal and
professional behaviors. One of the examples I describe relates to my