Inspired by the nostalgia brought on by Barnard's graduation earlier this week and by my declining fear of being identified on this blog, I pulled up an essay I wrote months ago about claims that women's colleges offer a much-needed boost to their students. I originally wrote the essay in response to this post on Slate's XXFactor blog.
It drives me crazy that people look at my educational history and decide that I am a feminist. I am a feminist, in the way that I think most of my friends are – a fiercely held view that there is nothing I should be prevented from doing because I am a woman. But, that world view was not shaped exclusively by four years at Barnard.
I am a feminist, because it never occurred to me not to be. Because there were rarely any times when I thought that being female was a disadvantage, or that it should be. But, because of where I went to school people assume that my decisions—often my religious decisions—are the direct byproduct of some mysterious four years of feminist boot camp. I don’t know what world they grew up in, but one year in a Modern-Orthodox school in Israel and four years in college--during which I would have told you that I associated with the Columbia Daily Spectator as much if not more so than I associated with Barnard--does not a person make.
When I was in eleventh grade, my teacher wrote on my report card, “with a bunch of loud-mouthed boys in her class, she needs to learn to hold her own.” One of those loud mouthed boys is still one of my best friends. I don’t remember being intimidated by the boys in my class in eleventh grade, but apparently, sometimes I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Still, in a grade of 40 girls and 16 boys, an equal number of boys and girls sports teams, and more leadership positions than there were students, I don’t think the girls ever felt cheated by the co-ed classrooms.
In my first year college, I took eight courses. There were boys in four, maybe five of them (I cannot, for the life of me, remember who was in intro to fiction writing). I don’t remember the boys making it any harder to participate. In one class, my group was made up of three girls and a boy, and I’m pretty sure we ganged up to make him do the work we didn’t want to do, but other than that, gender rarely came up.
With the exception of the classes that were required for my major and the first-year seminars, almost all my classes were co-ed. At the same time, I was spending more than 30 hours a week at the newspaper. At the newspaper, I worked under three female news editors, three female editors-in chief or managing editors, four male news editors, and four male editors in chief or managing editors (technically six, but I don’t think I could have told you who the ME and EIC were my first year). For the most part, gender was irrelevant there too. (For anyone counting, the imbalance is due to sample size more than anything else; some of the later boards were almost entirely female).
The only place gender was obviously an issue was in my Judaism, but that’s a different essay altogether.
In short, I was rarely in the all-female environment that is supposedly empowering or that is supposed to compensate me for those high school history classes with loud-mouthed boys (again, the question of whether or not the high school teacher would have described loud-mouthed girls, is also another essay).
But Barnard College still waves those statistics about women’s colleges producing more CEOs and more doctorates than their co-ed counterparts; even though I never took a class about women, it was clear to me that Barnard was proud of its place as a women’s school, and sees the work the school does as important.
And so it should be. I did graduate Barnard feeling empowered, and, in many ways, feeling more appreciated than my Columbia College peers across the street.
(click to read more)
But if few of my classes and none of my extracurricular activities were all female, did it really matter that Barnard only accepts women?
Yes and no.(click to read more)
