It is not the 1960s anymore. The heady exhilaration of that decade, the devotion to causes and ideals and issues seems to have drifted into an early retirement. Instead of burning our bras, women today compare the best sportsbras or even (so help us) invest in Wonderbras.
True, what started as the Women's Liberation Front and gradually matured into the Women's Movement often seems presented nowadays as More Women Complaining. Feminists appear on talk show panels with KKK leftovers, gigolos, dominatrices and men who were women who love men, and in the process the feminist issues begin to seem somewhat leftover too.
Is the Women's Movement finished then? The Dartmouth Review staffers are surely not the only ones who would have us believe it is, but on this campus, they are the ones who announce its demise in print. As they bravely expounded in "The Week in Review"
of their Oct. 3 issue, "For a generation which has experienced nothing but co-education, for whom sex equity is so evident it is a non-issue, the endless chasing of discrimination which is not really there grows tiresome." This erudite observation was provoked by what The Review calls the "trumpeting" of the "supposedly momentous fact that the class of '99 has more women than men."
Those four extra women in the Class of 1999 are not a big deal. They aren't bowling pins or marbles or so many pick-up sticks to be counted and scored. Lynn Sherr, the "20/20" anchorwoman who was on campus to speak about Susan B. Anthony last week, commented on it best: "There are more women than men in the country," she said. "Seems fair to me."
Gender equity is a state of being and a state of mind. It is not a number. It cannot be reduced to a simple equation. If The Review is going to argue that when women are in equal numbers they are on equal ground, by rights they would also have to argue that in theClass of 1999, the men, numbering four fewer, are in fact oppressed. Anyone can see that this extrapolation makes the original premise laughable.
In other words, gender parity may have been achieved in numbers, in specific communities and in certain fields of study, but overall, women still have ignorance to combat and equality for which to battle. The mistaken message that The Review has proclaimed to Dartmouth's students needs to be confronted and dispelled.
The Dartmouth Review actually proves my own case for me, two pages later in their most recent issue. In an article entitled "Community at Dartmouth?" a '99 is quoted as saying that during that evening, "A great deal of time, at least two separate skits, was spent addressing the issues of rape and sexual abuse -- topics very important to the female population of Dartmouth. Other issues which may have a great impact on men ... were hardly addressed, if at all."
The characterization of rape and sexual abuse as issues "important to the female population" shows the very lack of cross-gender understanding and communication which indicates that we are still in the metaphorical dark ages before equity.
Violence against women is a crime that involves both sexes. The fact that men are most often the aggressors, and that most college-age rape victims are assaulted by someone they know, makes it a topic all the more important to be raised early for the first-year students, both male and female. I am not appointing this '99 the representative of the student body or even his own class. I have much more faith in the male population of Dartmouth than to believe that everyone thinks this way. But it does show that so-called women's issues are still vitally important to this campus as well as the rest of the world.
As long as Neanderthal attitudes prevail, parity will be no more than a fleeting utopian dream, and the women of Dartmouth will continue what The Review refers to as our "bleating demands" for a gender equity that we have yet to achieve.
