Sometimes I think I am the only person at this institution who chose it BECAUSE it's a lady school and not despite it.
Some things about it bother me. I don't like that sometimes when you first meet someone there has to be the equivalent of the "I'm-not-gay" pat, e.g. mentioning your boyfriend or ex-boyfriend at an inappropriately early point in the conversation. And I don't like that some students here think it's ok to make anti-feminist comments if they preface them with "I go to Barnard, but..."
However, it is really inspiring to me every time I walk around the campus that here is this entire institution built around helping women to be smart and successful. And, even if the people who go here or work here don't subscribe to the same sort of feminism that I do, or even if they don't believe in feminism at all, here they are anyway, spending every day of their lives devoted in some way to the most fundamental element of that cause--helping ladies.
...
Anna made kale and chorizo soup tonight that was amazing--creamy and hearty and so good that I actually ate most of the potatoes in it, even though I believe that putting potatoes in soups and sauces is a sometimes-necessary evil, and eating them in soups and sauces is a sin. Anyhow, I'm having a second go at it now, sitting by the radiator in our common room which is the only spot in the apartment that is not freezing and is the only spot where I can get internet. Lucky coincidence. But the radiator's off right now, so I'm holding the soup on my lap for warmth and it's the perfect thing.
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I'm really inspired that this institution is determined to help me be a better embroiderist!
ReplyDeleteJUST KIDDING
For real though, lady schools are the balm. Of Gilead.
i love this vignette of your life.
ReplyDeletei had a fascinating debate the other night with a friend of mine, which maybe i'll write about, but the upshot was kind of what you're saying, i.e. that i felt grateful that we have so many more choices about who to be and what to think now than our mothers did.
like, for example, my friend can choose to believe that an open relationship is an ideal to be aspired to. and i can choose to believe that monogamy is primarily and especially beneficial to women.
That sounds like an interesting debate. Was your friend, perchance, a dude?
ReplyDeleteYeah, whenever anyone asks me what time period I wish I were from (seems like people are always wishing they were born in the 20s, or during the American Revolution), without hesitation I say I'm totally grateful to have been born when and where I was. Relatively unrestricted access to birth control, good colleges, tampons, showers, feminist blogs, the ability to press charges if someone rapes you... It's easy to take those things for granted until you start thinking about how it would be to live life as a lady without all of those things.
Liza. That is possibly the best pun ever created. I am going to use it in every conversation for the rest of my life.
nah, she's a lady. and i don't know; my take is that she feels constrained to kind of contort her natural inclinations toward monogamy, to suppress her feelings so that she can, ultimately, be more sexually available to men.
ReplyDeletei don't know, it's so complicated. birth control really changed so much for women. without it, sex means babies, and in that situation, monogamy is a clear benefit to women. but with widely available and non-stigmatized birth control...i don't know. men get everything they want out of sex, and women i think still have the same set of emotions attached to sex. do they? that seems to be what most of the women i know experience, but maybe i hang out with old-fashioned old ladies. we're still figuring out what sexuality means when it doesn't have to mean babies.
Can I also add: sooooo greatful (a nod to seriously so blessed) for the rhogam shot for ladies who are rh negative mating with gentlemen who are positive, cause otherwise we would have no babies after eva in our family. not to mention laproscopic surgery, epidurals (the balm!), antibiotics, anesthesia, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, cramp narcotics and i.v.'s. All of these things make a lady's hardships easier to bear.
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