Students and Sexism

I've been grading student reader responses to some Latin American poetry we have read in class and the degree of sexism - that the students don't even notice - is nothing short of shocking. The two poets of the early XXth century we were reading are called Alfonsina Storni and Gabriela Mistral. Got it? Alfonsina and Gabriela.

Their lyrical and feminist poetry is addressed to men. In one poem, Storni addresses "a little, little man" who has imprisoned her and wouldn't let her be free. In another poem, Mistral says that "to see him again" is all she wants because she is dreaming of "winding my hands around his bloody neck." And so on.

In their responses, the absolute majority of students refered to both poets as "he." As a result they produced things like: "In this poem, the poet talks about his lover and wants to kill him."

Apparently, it's easier for them to imagine that poets in the early 20th century Latin America wrote openly gay poetry than to realize that those poets - called Gabriela and Alfonsina, in case you have forgotten, - were women.

I have read about these tests where college students are asked to draw a human being and they end up drawing - almost exclusively - male figures. Encountering within my own class this incapacity to equate an artist and a woman in spite of the obvious evidence is truly shocking.