“I want to tell you a little bit about my class, the class of 1962 … How long ago was it? It was so long ago that while I was here, Wellesley actually threw six young women out for lesbianism. It was so long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you had a boy in your room, you had to leave the door open six inches, and if you closed the door you had to put a sock on the doorknob. In my class of, I don’t know, maybe 375 young women, there were six Asians and five blacks. There was a strict quota on the number of Jews … We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect. Non Ministrare sed Ministrari — you know the old joke, not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives.“
—Nora Ephron, Wellesley 1996 Commencement Speech
25 Famous Women on Their College Lives, The Cut
I didn’t always identify as a feminist. I only started becoming comfortable with the identifier when I began actively dialoguing with other women about feminist issues. It started becoming real to me when we started talking about being sexually abused, dealing with sexist “friends,” and having to defend certain choices we make (not taking your husband’s last name, supporting the Reproductive Health Law, not having children, etc.).
Now I feel incredulous, at once feeling uneasy, but back then I used to equate identifying as feminist to condoning feminist rage and aggression. That was just the surface emotion though. The truth was I was also afraid of having to open myself up to discourse because I didn’t want to be judged. It’s a defense mechanism born out of years of being conditioned to keep quiet and to conform. I came from a background that sounds a lot like Nora Ehpron’s 1966 Wellesley.
In film and in real life, any “elite” school prides itself on its traditions and values and the premise of Mona Lisa Smile (also set in Wellesley, or Dead Poets Society, if you want the male version) is how school administrators/board members ensure they carry out these values ad infinitum. We have a movie when you pit the traditionalists against the liberals/non-conformists.
Feminism is essentially an exercise in empathy and in recognizing otherness. Women especially have a lot of issues and abuses that are unique to their gender. A lot of it has been so ingrained in our culture and I’m glad my generation can now question machismo and religious guilt without it being labeled as a radical or subversive thing. Men don’t have to worry the way we do when we’re walking alone late at night. Men aren’t crucified the way women are when they sleep around. Men are not usually subjected to questions like “Why don’t you have any kids yet?” or “Oh, are you into this video game because your boyfriend plays it?”
I can only hope that we’re slowly shaping a society where we realize the necessity for empathy and our shared humanity. Talking through the hurtful things I experienced in the past with a feminist vocabulary allowed me to close a lot wounds. It got spurred on because I came to the realization that I care about how women are getting abused and I wanted to understand the places of privilege and power that allow for this to happen. I only was able to take a bigger step towards caring about feminist issues because some of my friends identified as feminist. So now I identify as one.
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