Reply to comment

McIntosh's essay led me to reflect on my Bryn Mawr education, and the kind of ideas that Bryn Mawr does and does not enforce or try to teach its students.  McIntosh writes that "the liberal arts curriculum has ben particularly concerned with passing on to students the image of what the 'top' has been" (5).  Is this the case for Bryn Mawr, or to Bryn Mawr classes try to encourage us not only to look at the construction of the 'top', but also at the what forms the 'bottom'?  I feel that many of my Bryn Mawr classes ( this class included) have encouraged me to look at society, and that way in which it is built, in new ways, often paying close attention to those that are left out of the dominant narratives or hegemonic structures.  The fact that I have been taught that these structures and cultural norms are socially constructed speaks to the degree to which the Bryn Mawr curriculum has attempted to dissemble this pyramid.

McIntosh also write that the language used by college admissions "masks...the actual liberal arts function, which is, at present, to train a few students to climb up to pinacles and to seize them so as to have a position from which power can be felt, enjoyed, exercised, and imposed on others" (6).  This statement, I think, is partially true of Bryn Mawr, and so many other colleges.  What stuck out to me when reading this was the focus that so many schools have, Bryn Mawr included, on famous alums (think of how visible Katherine Hepburn is in BMC's culture).  I think that this emphasis on success is due in part to the fact that whether or not we are taught to dissemble the pyramid, and the extent to which we learn about those on the bottom, we are still forced to live in a society that accepts this hierarchical structure.

As a history major, I was also interested in McIntosh's discussion of the ways in which history is taught.  She writes that "history is usually constructed...to exclude those who didn't possess a good deal of public power." (7).  This is true in some history classes.  Often, history focuses on the "great man theory, the idea that a select few, the powerful men in society, have shaped history.  However, many history classes take a bottom-up approach, looking at the ways in which the people, those on the ground, have shaped history.  This is often the case in cultural history.   

In terms of another suggestion for a text to read: I was recently at a used bookstore and bought a book called Woman's World, by Graham Rawle.  The author has written the book entirely out of cut-out words from British women's magazines.