Letters to the Editor
LeCastor
Published Letters: 1916 Editor's Choice: 86
-
Co-ed is no-ed?
[Read the article: Closing the doors on single-sex education?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Alumnae and student protesters camped out, sang school songs and held quippy signs with slogans like "'Co-ed' is a four-letter word" and "Co-ed is No-Ed,"
Wait, excuse me? Co-ed is no-ed? And you're calling this "quippy"? What if the Virginia Military Institute boys had protesed with the same signs when women were finally let in? would it be "quippy" then, or just plain ignorant?
It's easy to empathize with the Randolph-Macon undergrads and alumnae carrying parasols to protest the change (harkening back to the sartorial customs of 1891, when the women's college was founded), and mourning the impending loss of archaic traditions like making daisy chains and exchanging gifts during "ring week."
Ring week? Parasols? i don't find it easy to empathize with these people. This just shows where many women's "colleges" came from -- they were boarding schools or finishing schools, having much less to do with any education, and more to do with grooming young maidens to be presentable and charming. Talk about no-ed!
I'm sorry, i really don't understand Broadsheet's obsession with single-sex higher education, and it's undying support for it. For 90% of men and women, interacting with the opposite sex at the age of 18 is very desirable. I really don't undrstand this fear of men that seems to permeate the discource on this, calling men's presence tainting and otherwise negatively characterising it. Yes, in high school, maby boys were not conducive to education, but in college, men's precense in the classroom and beyond is no longer threatening or disturbing. And the young women who go to single-sex schools, they never find out about this development, and they keep an image of men in their heads that is from high school. They don't see men age and become mroe mature, classy, respectful, intelligent alongside them, they think they are the only ones learning, while all the men are at Party U getting their freak on with some sluts.
This isn't modern, or productive at all.
-
"groound-level confidence"
[Read the article: Closing the doors on single-sex education?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]we notice that our successes in doctoral programs seemed to have had everything to do with being able to take it for granted that we belonged in the conversation, to cope with sexism as it arose, and to work independently without significant mentoring through crucial stretches of our research. Women's colleges had given us the ground-level confidence we needed, strengthened and directed through the kinds of active participation in feminist movements that were part of our lives at women's colleges. We discuss other women we'd met in graduate school (all of us found our way into traditionally male disciplines). They had a harder time than we did. We realize--collectively, suddenly, deeply--that the things they had told us about women's college had come true.
Here's my question: supposing all of this is true, why do women's colleges, and not co-ed, give women "ground level confidence"? Why does being in a room full of women give women more confidence than a co-ed environment? Even when you're in a room full of women, you still have to raise your hand and compete with them for the time of the professor, and for the grades.
-
looking is fine, sucking is different.
[Read the article: The breast of times]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Denise Riffle,
(1) For me, my initial disgust came not from the display of breasts -- i have nothing against it. It came from the child's oral contact with his mother's breast. Say what you will, but, while i don't really care of the people across the airshaft see my breasts while i'm changing, i would care very much if one of them tried to put his or her mouth on my breast.
(2) Even assuming breast milk is good for you, the author freely acknowledges that there's very little actual milk involved anymore, so that's not really an argument.
-
"women's minds"?! Is it 1890?!
[Read the article: Closing the doors on single-sex education?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hypocrisy
Women's colleges provide women with a different learning environment that focuses on educating women's minds and providing them with the skills to be tomorrow’s leaders.
I believe the supporters of the right of VMI made similiar statements as it applied to men. Guess what, THEY WERE WRONG AND SO ARE YOU.
Equal rights means there can only be women's only colleges if there are men's only colleges. You can't have it both ways.
-- Apemantus
i'm with apemantus, whoever wrote about "educating women's minds" also stunned me for using such dated, charged, and very connotative language.
The supporters of the VMI made very similar statements. What had happened is, there was a ruling that said that Virginia, if it wanted to keep a state-supported male-only military institute, needed to establish an equivalent institution for women.
Virginia established a place called something like Women's Leadership institute. It was (1) in a crappy campus, (2) brand new, so didn't have the same prestigious reputation, (3) didn't have as good a faculty or general resources, but MOST IMPORTANTLY, (4) instead of providing a military education like the one at VMI, it was softened down, and taught women wishy washy leadership skills, and in general, was nothing like VMI or its method.
To defend these differences, Virginia argued that men and women have different learning styles, and were different, and therefore the softy women's college methods were justified. And Ruth Ginsberg struck Virginia down right and left, analogizing on many points to the cases of the beginning of the racial desegregation movement, in which black students at black law schools sued their states because the black law schools were not equal in any way to their corresponding white institutions.
So that is the reason for the hostility -- the completely outdated idea that women need different teaching to be able to compete with men, that mixed classrooms stifle women because men are so dominant, etc. Stop infantilizing women and treating them as fragile creatures that need extra nurturing -- this does nothing to help women, it only provides reasons to exclude them and treat them "specially."