Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Sisters subverting sisters
The Arab-Muslim world will eventually accomodate modernity. The only question is how long it will take and how much blood will be shed. We really do not know how it will happen. Maybe the women will demand it. Are Wellesley, Byn Mawr, Barnard, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith leading the charge?
[T]his spring the admissions deans of the five leading women’s colleges — Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley and Smith — went recruiting to a place where single-sex education is more than a niche product: the Middle East.
For three weeks they visited schools in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, describing what a liberal-arts women’s college can offer academically ambitious students. (They skipped Saudi Arabia, where, their trip coordinator warned, they might need a male escort.)
Everywhere, they talked about how women benefited from having their own colleges where women make up a large part of the faculty and students are encouraged to excel in male-dominated fields like science and math. And they flaunted their accomplished alumnae, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Emily Dickinson, Diane Sawyer, Katharine Hepburn and Madeleine K. Albright.
The Seven Sisters, now reduced to five, have produced an astonishing proportion of the professionally successful American women over the age of 50 (Harvard, Princeton, and Yale admitted women around 1970, and have taken market share ever since). This group includes virtually every female on both sides of my family born before 1950 or so, some of whom broke down barriers without even knowing it (a great aunt, who would be 103 this year, was one of the first female securities analysts on Wall Street, specializing in defense and aerospace at a time when it was a very macho industry). What would be the impact of even a hundred or so such women re-entering the Arab-Muslim economy every year for the next generation? How would the imams react to a t-shirt with the slogan "A century of women on top"? Not well, I hope.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Jun 03, 11:33:00 AM:
Madeleine Albright? Did they have to go that low that quickly?
By 
GreenmanTim, at
Tue Jun 03, 11:56:00 AM:
Smith's T-shirts had their counterparts at Bryn Mawr. Somewhere in rural Namibia, someone is probably still wearing my "Bryn Mawr College: 100 years of Women Coming Together" shirt that I traded for a Ju'/hoan bushman bow and poisoned arrows. The other shirt, worn with pride by Mawrters and not a hint of irony, was "100 Years of Castrating Bitches." I lost that one in a poker game (strip, naturally). Ah, youth.
By Escort81, at
Tue Jun 03, 12:39:00 PM:
GT - Need to hear the end of that story about the poker game.
My father's mother graduated from Barnard 100 years ago, and my mother would have had her 60th reunion there last year.
Unfortunately,at this point, it is entirely possible that female students coming to the Five Sisters from the Middle East would be puzzled, dismayed or put off by the overweening attitude of Western inferiority and guilt vis-a-vis other cultures that is present on those campuses. The feeling of such students might be, "Geez, I came thousands of miles to get away from a backward-looking people, some of whom want to return to the 10th Century and keep me covered up, and now I have a professor telling me how 'valid and genuine' that is, just because it's non-Western?"
I wonder how effective the recruiting program will be. I guess it can't hurt.
By Jamie Irons, at
Tue Jun 03, 05:28:00 PM:
You're right about Yale's admitting women first in 1970. I was a member of the class of 1969, the very last all-male Yale graduating class. Our class was, however -- aided by the efforts of president Kingman Brewster and my late friend Clement Markert, along with others -- instrumental in seeing that women finally came to Yale.
Jamie Irons
By GreenmanTim, at
Tue Jun 03, 08:24:00 PM:
Escort81 - A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. But I will say that my inside knowledge of Bryn Mawr T-shirt design comes from being a Bryn Man, that extinct subspecies of Haverford male, and that my senior year I had a superb housing draw in a 3rd floor tower room at Bryn Mawr in an otherwise women's dorm where poker was taken very seriously. Lost my shirt on more than one occasion.
By Jamie Irons, at
Tue Jun 03, 11:46:00 PM:
Greenman-T,
From that account, I can only say that four years at all-male-Yale pales in comparison to the paradise you have limned here!
;-)
Jamie Irons
