Woman and Human Wholeness

Year Published:  1983
Resource Type:  Organization
Cx Number:  CX2693

Abstract: 
WOMEN AND HUMAN WHOLENESS is one unit of a curriculum on social justice issues for use in high schools, yought groups, and churches. Others units are on: work, militarism, development, and human rights. The units begin with the students' owm experience and explore a wide range of issues, making local and global connections. The program includes teacher, background information, readings, activities, discussion guides, lesson outlines, and resources suggestions.

The unit of WOMEN AND WHOLENESS focuses on women's experience, oppression, spirituality, and struggles for change and liberation. The units point out that most of what we learn about the world, we learn from a white male perspective. Thus, there is a need to look at the issue fo women's oppression from a women's perspective in order to really understand it and to identify forces for changes. The material shows how oppression take a variety of forms which affect women around the word: discrimination whitin the workplace or educational systems, economic disparities, violence against women, cultural or media manifestations ofthe denigration of women.

"Sexism" is definied in the unit as "the descrimination or oppression of women or female children on the basis of gender." Sexism is manifest in personal relationships, for example, when a man beats the woman he lives with, when an employer refuses to hire women for certain jobs, or when a school counsellor advises able young women to be nurses rather than doctors. Sexism is also reflected in the economy (in women's consistently inferior economic position relative to men), in educational systems, in the media. in legal structures, in the churches.

WOMEN AND HUMAN WHOLENESS also identifies signs of hope, of change, of alternatives to sex roles or oppressive structures. The authors put forth a vision of human wholeness which is rooted in Scripture, in Christian tradition and in women's experience. The vision is not that of mere equality or that women adopt male roles, but rather that "both women and men transcend present stereotypes and prisions and achieve the liberation of full humanness which really does reflect the image of the God who created us."

This organization no longer exists.
This abstract was published in the Connexions Digest in 1983.