Bryn Mawr's Legacy of Silencing

Bryn Mawr’s Legacy of Silencing

My brain is pounding into my ears as I trek to my next meeting, hammering the familiar tune of a stress headache into my head. It is only the second week of classes, but my usual spirited fast-walk has already turned into a trudging gait that betrays my exhaustion. My mind, as is its nature, will not let me rest, promptly running an ongoing script of to-do lists and meetings through my head.

“Hi! How’re you?” a voice cuts through my contemplation. A smiling acquaintance has stepped out of the nearest building and is walking rapidly past me. Automatically, a wide smile affixes itself to my face as I turn to face her. “I’m doing good! You?” I chirp. She keeps up her brisk walk, probably to her own next obligation “Great, thanks!” I sigh, moment interrupted.

Bryn Mawr College is self-selecting; a tiny, unique environment where most are deeply committed to something. Most of us see this place as fertile ground for our own growth, where we can meet people to help us find our own “brilliant” thoughts and proclaim their brilliance. But oftentimes, the Bryn Mawr community feels silencing, especially in casual, daily interactions, where I have observed an aesthetic, affected performance of joy between peers instead of honesty. Our need to constantly perform our own overachievement for the community makes it so that everyone is overburdened with commitments, struggling to stay afloat in this high-pressure academic and social environment. And yet, for the most part, we are do not communicate with each other how much our rushed, overscheduled lives are taking a toll on us.

Margaret Price writes in Mad at School, “[there is a] desire to protect academic discourse as a ‘rational’ realm, a place where emotion does not intrude.”[1]Price expands that higher academics does not accommodate for disability, whether that be physical, mental, or psychological. Bryn Mawr students are constantly cognizant of this rationality, taking it even further by hiding emotions and any kind of neurosis from our daily interactions, putting on a farce of happiness. This perpetuates a vicious cycle of silence, in which students are afraid to speak for the fear that they are showing weakness by being neurodivergent.

In order to properly examine this cycle of silence at Bryn Mawr, it is important to recognize the institutional and systemic factors that have caused it. Consider the narrative of frailness and hysteria associated with female bodies, which has followed Bryn Mawr students and other collegiate women into the twenty-first century. As referenced by Anne Dalke and Clare Mullaney in “On Being Transminded: Disabling Achievement, Enabling Exchange”, “[The Harvard Medical School Professor] Clarke argued [in the late 19^th century] that only by avoiding college studies could a young woman "retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system" (41-42).”[2] This narrative, so bent on keeping young women away from academic life, was strongly countered by M. Carey Thomas, the second president of Bryn Mawr College. She advocated strongly for women’s education, arguing that the proper intellectual environment that she hoped to build at Bryn Mawr would allow women to live up to their academic potential. The irony in that argument, as Dalke states, “[is that the] an outcome of her vision has been the current perpetuation of what we see as isolating academic practices.” [3]

Thomas established the groundwork for generations of Bryn Mawr students determined to refute the myth of female fragility. To fight the stereotypes, Mawrters overcompensate with the need to portray themselves as invincible to their own community, modeling stability and reason to their classmates. In doing so, however, we isolate ourselves while silencing members of the undergraduate community who are neurodivergent or have a disability. These students embody the Bryn Mawr feminist’s worst fear: failure. Thus, we put on an elaborate performance of perfection in the hopes that it will create stability, though this “fake it till you make it” approach leads to an isolating, stressful environment that does not reap the intellectual benefits that M. Carey Thomas speaks so highly of.

Recent years have seen the rise of a Self Care movement at Bryn Mawr, meant to combat the high-pressure environment. It was begun by administration as a positive way to deal with stress, but has turned into an exclusionary movement that has not accounted for the shift in the diversity of racial and class makeup at Bryn Mawr. The Self Care movement, at least the main understanding of it within the community, is centered on the concept that it is acceptable to take breaks from academics and life at times. This can be alienating to students who come from cultural backgrounds unaccustomed to taking breaks to deal with stress, and/or from class backgrounds that cause them to be dependent on scholarships which require them to be on top of their studies at all times.

It is clear that our tendency to silence one another and ourselves about our own mental disability stems from a long history of disability being attributed to female bodies. However, for the sake of our community, we must fight the urge to isolate ourselves in our stress and mask our madness. Until we find a more comprehensive strategy for Self Care that cultivates honesty among peers, bursting the bubble of politeness and perfection, we will continue to silence each other and ourselves.