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Who belongs at a women’s college? Who belongs at Bryn Mawr College, specifically?

To answer that, I think it is important to look at what the point of a women’s college is. Why is it a good thing that there be a college (numerous college, in fact, all across the world) exclusively for women? Someone mentioned in class that women and men were segregated educationally because they were taught different things. While that may be true elsewhere, to my knowledge, Bryn Mawr College has always been an institution of higher learning that focused on true education. It was not founded as a finishing school, or a way to catch a husband. Actually, the first degree Bryn Mawr gave out was a Ph.D. in 1888.   

I think that women’s colleges are also not merely about biological females being together at a educational institution. While some people argue that males and females have inherently different brains and thus learn differently, that’s a rather controversial topic. Given that Bryn Mawr students can major at Haverford, and Haverford students can major at Bryn Mawr, I assume that it is not Bryn Mawr’s position that BMC is a women’s college because females cannot learn by being taught in the same way that males are taught.

I think that what is useful and bright and wonderful about Bryn Mawr being a women’s college goes beyond its students’ sexes or genders.  Therefore, I do not believe that every student at Bryn Mawr must identify as a woman in order to belong at Bryn Mawr. I love Bryn Mawr. I am a senior and a very proud Mawrtyr. I love Bryn Mawr, and I love the Traditions, and I love that Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sisters. I would not want Bryn Mawr to go “co-ed.” That said, I do not necessarily identify as a woman, and I firmly believe that I belong here at Bryn Mawr as much as anyone else. I say this to let you know where I’m coming from and to make it clear that this is personal. To me, this is not merely a theoretical argument about the abstract concept of women’s colleges. This affects actual people and whether they feel welcome at their own college, on their own campus.

To me, the importance of Bryn Mawr’s being a women’s college has to do with a commitment to educating women/females/people who have been discriminated against based on their sex/gender or perceived sex/gender. It’s not just to give women as a special category a college all their own, like a college for blonde people, or eldest children, or left-handed people, or short people. It’s about lifting up people who face sexism and who originally did not have other opportunities for this kind of education (back in the day when many other institutions of higher education excluded women). It’s about the experiences that people have had, being socialized as girls, or treated as women, or experiencing life as women. There needs not be one experience that Bryn Mawr students have had, in my opinion, to belong at Bryn Mawr, even as a women’s college.   

I was socialized to be a girl, just like everyone else at Bryn Mawr probably was. I’ve internalized a lot of society’s messages about how girls/females are supposed to act, dress, think, behave. Society views me as a woman, and, no matter how I view myself, it will continue to view me as a woman and treat me accordingly. My personal gender identity, or lack thereof, will have little affect on how the world treats me. I will face sexism. As far as I am concerned, that is a fact. Bryn Mawr attempts to prepare its graduates to deal with living in a sexist world, or at least to help its students become strong enough to deal with sexism (depending on whether you believe that living in the “Bryn Mawr bubble” prepares people to deal with sexism--if it doesn’t, I believe that the hope is that at least Bryn Mawr grads will be confident and strong enough to deal with sexism, even if they don’t have much experience with it). I need that, too.

Like I said before, I love Bryn Mawr. Bryn Mawr is my college. I am a Mawrtyr. I fully recognize that Bryn Mawr is a women’s college, and I do not want to change that. My question is, what do we mean by “women’s college”? I was in favor of the Plenary resolution requiring gender-neutral terms and pronouns in the Constitution and the Honor Code. I am in favor of the “everyone welcome” signs on the bathrooms, instead of signs saying “women and men.” I am in full support of the trans men and genderqueer people and trans folk and other nontraditionally gendered people who are current Bryn Mawr students and/or alums. And I believe that none of this threatens Bryn Mawr as a women’s institution. Things may change, but the spirit is the same.

Bryn Mawr has dealt with many changes in the student body, from integrating Jewish students into the dorms to allowing students of color into the college as full members of the community, and all of these changes have only made Bryn Mawr stronger. Who qualifies as a Bryn Mawr student now has changed greatly since Bryn Mawr was founded, yet some things remain the same. “An intense intellectual commitment, a self-directed and purposeful vision of [one’s] life, and a desire to make a meaningful contribution to the world”--these characteristics are not gendered. This is what makes a Bryn Mawr student, not some narrow definition of the word “woman.”    

Bryn Mawr is a women’s college. What does that mean to you?