SAN FRANCISCO, CA—In the 1970s, when I was in high school, feminists asserted a girl’s right to take body shop instead of home economics in public schools. Society was no longer to make presumptions about a girl’s or a boy’s abilities on the basis of sex. Students and teachers were told that girls were just as capable as boys and should be treated equally.

Now feminists have made a U-turn. No longer is equality between the sexes enough; the 1990s feminists demand equity—and that, they assert, is not the same thing. Clinton’s failed nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, Lani Guinier (aka “The Quota Queen”), explained in her 1997 collaborative book Becoming Gentlemen,. . . sameness is not necessarily fairness. Often the same treatment is not just or fair treatment.”

Thus sounds the rallying cry from Guinier and her sympathizers for restructuring educational curriculum, from the top tier law schools to the local grammar schools. Their intent is not to promote equal opportunity but to ensure “gender equity,” which they have defined as equal results. The demand is not for equal treatment but for a different curricula geared exclusively towards girls. This new curricula must be taught with a new methodology based on new theories about how girls learn.

The push for girls-oriented curricula and methodology is based on the theory that any disparity in performance is due to fundamental and definable differences between the sexes as to how they each learn. Where such disparities in performance between boys and girls arise (which is actually quite rare until high school), gender feminists claim that the disparity, even if nominal, is due to the masculine nature of the system. Then they resort to the old stereotypes to justify “intervention strategies” for girls. Girls are told they need special instruction in math and science in order to succeed; that weaker scores on standardized tests are not due to individual ability but to genetics; and finally that women should not expect to do well in the rigorous Socratic method of teaching in law schools—and that the system should change as a result.

Why would any self-professed feminist want to recreate an educational system where girls are told they can’t achieve in certain areas where boys can? Why should schools engage in this kind of social engineering by steering girls towards certain professions, a practice that before the 1990s was abhorred by feminists themselves? The answer is simple: control. If feminist groups control the definitions of “girls’ needs,” they hold the keys to a whole new educational curricula. The recent debate over national standards illustrates just how powerful that curricula lock has become.

This change from the principle of equality to this new notion of “equity” (meaning special treatment for girls—a more than equal approach, so to speak) is now embraced by our educational institutions without much consideration for its potentially devastating effects on the rigors of academics and more importantly, on a girl’s own perception of her ability. By stressing sex differences in order to secure curricular control, feminists’ groups are unwittingly creating a system in which both teachers and students are told that girls can’t do the very things they were told they could do 25 years ago.

And that’s the rub. In the seventies, we fought hard for the right to have girls and boys treated equally in the classroom to ensure that no one made presumptions about ability based on sex. Our daughters deserved no less then, and definitely don’t deserve less now.

—Pamela Lewis

Senior Fellow in Women’s Studies

This article is based on her forthcoming research on gender politics.