When all else fails – blame the girls – The misogynistic movement to reclaim power in schools

• In Event: Rethinking Girls’ Education in Shifting Worlds: Dialogues Across Perspectives, Contexts, and Knowledges

Proposal

The overuse of the word “backlash” diminishes the real dangers that are emerging in an era of increasing attempts to restrict, dismantle and demolish efforts to promote girls’ education. In 2018 the European Union found that areas such as “institutional and policy framework for gender equality…(education, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and preventing and combating violence against women) as well as the working environment/operating space for women’s human rights NGOs” have all faced challenges in recent times (Juhász & Pap, 2018, p. 8).

Authoritarian leaders thrive on traditional models of relationships between men and women. Recent research illustrates these practices where “submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (“benevolent sexism”) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (“hostile sexism”)”(Brechenmacher, 2024, n.p.). In addition, the image of a manly and strong leader is integrated into new models of “muscular nationalism” (Banerjee, 2012). Through these strategies, a larger narrative on the role and use of education in girls’ and women’s lives is questioned, and the resurgence of the power of femininity, through marriage, motherhood and nationhood are increasingly sanctified.

Situated in this context, this paper presents an argument on how narratives of nationhood are seeking to justify the chipping away of girls’ education in global spaces and through policy actors. By arguing that the economic, social, cultural and political power of a country depends on traditional roles for women and girls to ensure national primacy, and with the presence of authoritarian leaders in some of the largest and most populous countries in the world, access to girl’s education is increasingly threatened. The push to ensure quality, as argued by Baily and Holmarsdottir (2015) a decade ago seems like a pleasant and optimistic fantasy as we look at the political shifts in 2025. The subversive, covert and overt actions taken in concert as like-minded leaders absorb more power, is grounded in local, regional, national and international actions.

By framing this panel through three intersecting movements, namely: “how contemporary global shifts are reshaping the conditions under which girls ’access”, “experience and make use of education; the interrogation of whose knowledge counts in defining educational “problems” and “solutions;”” and finally exploring “how educators, communities, and girls themselves are producing alternatives to dominant frameworks”, and in relation to the conference theme of “re-examining education and peace in a divided world,” this paper offers an interdisciplinary perspective to examine the ways in which girls’ education challenges and counters nationalist, misogynistic and authoritarian regimes. While recognizing the significant constraints facing girls’ education, across the lifespan of the educational enterprise, from early childhood to post-secondary and higher education, the power of girl’s education remains a powerful tool to promote peaceful, sustainable, democratic, progressive and humanist values.

Author

• Supriya Baily, George Mason University