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 The feeling I am getting from other posts on the forum is that they are speaking about how Bryn Mawr College is no longer radical, at least not in the way it used to be. I both agree and disagree with this statement. The fact that Bryn Mawr doesn't have daily protests and has to bribe people with food to attend plenary would indicate a lull in activism on campus, but I think we have to look further. All the points people have been making are completely valid, but to say Bryn Mawr is not radical at all is unfair to the institution. I mean first of all, just look at this class. When I talk to my friends back home about the topics we discuss in class, they sigh and blame it on the fact that I go to an all-women's college. But that's exactly it! While going to an all-women's college doesn't have the same radical edge it had a hundred years ago, it's still radical. There are only so many all-women higher-educational institutions and we're still here. I got so much crap from friends, teachers, and even family about choosing to go to an all-women's institution, because it's still not seen as "normal." As for comfort, I do think everything on campus seems really comfortable, but I do think that's mostly an insiders view. From the outside, what we do here is not "comfortable." Whether people are openly gay, openly feminist, or openly liberal it doesn't seem like a lot on campus, but it is a lot in the real world. And not everyone is trying to cushion our college experience, Anne herself said it was her goal to make Bryn Mawr as "uncomfortable as possible." I'm not trying to say that Bryn Mawr is super radical and doesn't need to change anything, because it isn't and it does. But I do want to give it some credit as well.

Off of that point... I also wanted to say how much I enjoyed learning about Anne and Kristen's history on how they became feminists. It made me want to delve into my own history, though short it may be. It's funny because my dad went to Dartmouth and my mom went to Bryn Mawr. Having Kristen, who attended both, talk about how male dominated Dartmouth was and then going off to Bryn Mawr, made me see a little of my own history in her. My dad is so proud that he attended Dartmouth (and still talks about it too much) that I've always rebelled against the idea of a large, historically male-dominated institution. My mom on the other hand, even though she went to Bryn Mawr, never talked about her college unless it was completely relevant to the conversation at hand. Therefore, there was no cause for me to rebel against Bryn Mawr. In fact, because my mom didn't talk about Bryn Mawr often, it intrigued me more and, I think, sealed my fate in coming here. There is so much more that has made me the feminist I am today, such as being raised by a single mom for some years and having family roots in a very traditional, male-dominated Suriname, but I'll leave those for another day.