Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching

Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching by Grumet, Madeleine R.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780870236136.

The text is arranged in a pattern that mirrors Grumets argument that women who teach make this passage between the so-called public and private worlds daily and that is also what we teach children to do. The chapters go back and forth between the experience of domesticity and the experience of teaching, between being with ones own children and being with the children of others, between being the child of ones own mother and the teacher of another mothers child, between feeling and form, family and colleagues. The first and last chapters address the familial relations that fall under the category of reproduction, a frame designed to emphasize the relations of reproduction and their importance to educational theory. The chapters closest to this margin are those that address womens work in schools, and the juxtaposition is chosen to accentuate the dialectical relation of our public and private meanings. The middle chapters are the ones most directly concerned with curriculum, that provisional ground that Grumet is naming as our mediating space, the place where we can heal. The fundamental argument of this text is that knowledge evolves in human relationships.