Women in History

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I came to Bryn Mawr because the college’s goal was to empower women.  Bryn Mawr educated exceptional women who had great careers and futures.   My parents were thrilled for me to go to such a prestigious school because they raised a child who had a promising life of academics.  My guidance counselor in high school told me again and again that I should attend the school that was “the right fit for me,” not what anyone else wanted me to attend.  Yet, when I told him that I was thinking of taking a year off between high school and college, he said that was a pretty terrible idea because I’d be “wasting my potential.”  No one supported my idea to take a gap year, my parents nor my friends.  Taking a gap year was a failure of all my hard work.  So, I came to Bryn Mawr, and while I don’t regret it, I sometimes wonder if my education is liberating me or confining me to its mold.

In high school I was the one questioning the system.  I was the one who showed up to school in a shirt saying “silenced by homophobia” on Day of Silence and brought a girl to prom.  I was the one who was proud to be a strong woman.  I didn’t like high school at all.  I didn’t like how everyone was the same.  Everyone dressed the same and thought the same.  Our education only fed us with more single-minded ideas.  I took AP European History my senior year where we learned all the great kings and queens.  We learned about Napoleon and the church.  Three hundred years of European public power was drilled into our brains, along with Joan of Arc.  It was nice of them to add a token woman who played against the system.  All through high school I twiddled my thumbs knowing one day I would get to college.

I wanted to take a year off between high school and college because I was exhausted and disillusioned by the college admittance process.  I knew I was a smart kid; I couldn’t understand why it was such a game to get into college.  People played up their extracurricular activities to look good on applications.  They wrote essays about subjects that didn’t really interest them to make them look like they served the common good.  The colleges took a high and mighty stance boasting their prestige until I got accepted into a few.  And then they begged me to come.  It seemed more like a business caring about money and power rather than an institution invested in my further education.

Alas, I came to Bryn Mawr.  I was very excited about my classes and their content until I realized nothing had really changed.  I was still in classrooms with teachers who expected me to think a certain way and write papers to reflect that thinking.  I was tested on a hundred and twenty architects and their work, I wrote a paper on rising above being an immigrant, and I read Aristotle and Plato and wrote papers restating what they wrote to show that I understood.  It had the illusion of a place that was rising above standard education, but from my classes, I wasn’t convinced it was rising above anything.  They were just classes and just teachers. 

The fact that we are a women’s college does make us different.  We idolize Katherine Hepburn because she went to our school.  If we try hard enough, maybe we could be a woman that the college brochures would boast about too.  If we try hard enough, maybe we could be an exceptional woman in society that Bryn Mawr strives to make us.  Otherwise, maybe we would go to grad school or go on to become doctors, and Bryn Mawr would be proud of us then too, but not as proud as if we made a breakthrough scientific discovery.  The truth is, some (or most) of us are going to graduate Bryn Mawr (or leave early) and just lead normal lives with a normal, boring job.  Bryn Mawr doesn’t really strive to create those women, but they are bound to be mingled between the lawyers, doctors and actresses.  It’s nice that Bryn Mawr says they create exceptional women because it makes us feel important to the future, but it also just causes us to be stressed and anxious because there is the chance we might not be extraordinary.

Like me, for instance.  I am a sophomore who is searching frantically for a passion.  Women around me are talking about their future plans to practice public health in Africa, build buildings in New York City, work for the government, and I’m just hoping I can find something that makes me happy.  Making it into Bryn Mawr’s admission brochure isn’t important to me, but I do want to find something that I can wake up every day and say, “yes, this makes me smile.”  Problem is that there are so many high expectations on me I can’t even breathe long enough to find pleasure in any of it.  I have to write a ten page paper describing how the setting of a movie reflects its urbanism and how that relates to the social and economic place or time instead of wondering if architecture is the right major for me.  And if I like architecture, I like math, I like astronomy, and I like philosophy in small doses, what major do I fit into then?  There isn’t a major for me, unless I create my own, which has its own set of complications.  Pressure is put on me more and more to figure out my major and I’m still wondering what it would be like to be a firefighter.

I just want to learn.  I don’t want the politics of college, I just enjoy sitting down with a book.  I don’t want to think I have to be a woman that makes a difference in society.  If I’m happy in life, but didn’t do anything exceedingly amazing for mankind, I don’t want to think that I probably should have done more in life.

Bryn Mawr also shelters me and protects me so that I think I will never face hardship in my life.  I live amongst women, so I never have to face opposition as a woman.  I also live amongst many gay women, so I rarely face homophobia.  There is enough of a gay community here to battle any kind of homophobia.  The problem is that that isn’t the real world.  When I get thrown into a job situation where my boss doesn’t think I am capable of a task because I am a woman and I am gay, I won’t really know how to fight back.  I love the comfort of the Bryn Mawr community, but I’m also nervous of life beyond it. 

I’m not convinced Bryn Mawr is librating me as a woman, I’m afraid it’s confining me as a “Mawrter.”  Sooner or later we all seem to be preaching the same message and believing the same ideas.  Classes don’t represent women from all over the world with different beliefs and views, they represent Mawrters.  While I enjoy being at Bryn Mawr, I am aware that we are not learning that we are just women within a world and a society, we are taught that we must fight to be exceptional women.