To the Editors of The Crimson:

I am appalled by the partisan presentation and display of ignorance in the October 23 article concerning the creation of a Women's Studies Concentration. Both the quotations of the professors and the structure of the article itself were obviously biased. Almost all the comments on the front page were negative and were made by male professors not on the Women's Studies Committee. The quotations by professors who are involved in the committee--and thus are well-informed on the subject--are relegated to page nine of the 10-page paper. This makes me wonder about the integrity and objectivity of the Crimson.

The quotations are obviously meant to provoke. According to Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, women "do not constitute a community like Blacks do." What exactly does he mean by the term "community"? It is quite obvious that women have a different social experience which unifies them, much in the way the Black experience unifies Blacks. This assertion is supported by "hard" statistics relating to the connections between women and clinical depression, suicide, addictions, fear of success, low self-confidence and diseases that are almost exclusively female, such as bulimia and anorexia. Such afflictions are not congenital--they are learned. They are the demonstrable results of the female social experience, which is strikingly different from the male social experience.

What Mansfield dismisses as "feminist propaganda" is the study of theories that attempt to account for these statistics. I suppose then that other courses are also "vehicles for propaganda"--including Christian propaganda, Marxist propaganda or secular-humanist propaganda. I would guess that the Afro-American Studies courses are sympathetic to the plight of Blacks; does that make the field less legitimate? One would hope that the new concentration would indeed by objective and worthy of the term "scholarly pursuit." Pauline B. Lim '88