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I'd heard the party line often enough through the years, maybe as long ago as my first visit to Smith College in 1958 on a blind date. And over the next 40 years, as my date became my wife and she in turn went to work for her college, I accepted the principle that for many women the very best education is that provided by a women's-only institution. My attitude was: If you say so, who am I to disagree? During the last three decades that principle has been under serious challenge, yet Smith and a dwindling number of other women's colleges remain steadfast in their mission--and I thought I understood why. But I really had no notion of what being a woman at a women's college meant until one Saturday last September, when I found myself in a raucous Smith audience listening to six mature women describe with fervor the prejudice and unfairness that they and all other women face day in and day out, year after year, in good times and bad. As the stories of discrimination unfolded and the outbursts of cheers and vocal support swelled, I felt like an intruder at a meeting of a political party of which I was not a member, and which I would never be able to join because my experience as a man was so vastly different. The women on the panel were hardly crybabies, lamenting that their college degree had enabled them to obtain only marginal jobs. They were among the best and brightest in their fields-a congresswoman from California; a professor with appointments to not one, but two prestigious law school faculties; a senior officer from New England's largest banking company; a chief judge of a federal appeals court; a radio and television journalist; and finally, Gloria Steinem, a feminist icon who defies categorization. All but one of the six high-achieving women were Smith graduates. All six had similar stories to tell about ways in which they had been discriminated against because of their gender, how they dealt with bias and what insights they had gained about themselves and the role of women in our society as a consequence. The discussion, "Women's Equality and the Public Good," was part of a weekend of activities honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, who sat in the front row of the audience beside Ruth Simmons, president of Smith College. With a mixture of humor and bitterness, the panelists addressed the tangled issues of justice and equality before an overflow crowd that spilled into a basement space to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Many of the speakers said the most difficult choice for them was to select only a single incident of prejudice from hundreds of affronts, overt and subtle, to encapsulate the struggle they and other women face, despite legal protections and a citizenry that presumably has become more enlightened over the years. As I listened to the discussion and heard the students react, I had something of an epiphany. Only at a women's college, with an audience largely made up of women who shared their struggle, could these panelists command the serious attention their stories and opinions merited. At a coed institution, half of the population would have little interest in getting a status report on women's equality; the other half would be uncomfortable focusing solely on the concerns of women. Only here in this setting and on this day, before women of all political hues, could this riveting, often angry story be told in all its detail to energize an audience in such a powerful way. What was striking is that the speakers, however large their achievement and tough their own struggle, did not take the lofty view that if they could do it, any woman can. Rather, they emphasized the need for women to value all women's experiences and to be helpful to other women, their sisters in the struggle. The journalist, Nina Totenberg, recalled that when she was a young reporter and was baffled by a Supreme Court brief, she telephoned Ruth Ginsburg, then a law professor, for clarification. Even though they were total strangers, Professor Ginsburg spent an hour and a half on the phone giving the journalist a quick course in constitutional law. The journalist told this story while looking proudly at the justice sitting below her in the audience. Among the specific political and legal proposals to emerge from the discussion was U.S. Rep. Jane Lakes Harman's call for resurrection of support for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, an issue that ran out of steam some 15 years ago. The federal judge, Stephanie Kulp Seymour, also suggested that many of the inequities that confront women would be erased once a women was elected president. Good point. There was support for that observation, although, in light of the tone of most of the other comments during the program, the prospect seems a distant one. As we left the hall, I felt a palpable sense of solidarity, of having been on hand for an intellectual exchange that was intoxicating, a feeling exuberantly conveyed by the exiting students. It reminded me of how I used to feel many years ago when the final song had been sung at a concert by the Weavers, an evening devoted to songs of protest, suffering and injustice as well as anthems of hope. Years later, those anthems of hope are harder to hear. Just so was the euphoria of the Smith event tempered only two days later by the front-page New York Times headline: "Wage difference between women and men widens." |
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