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cantaloupe's picture

women roles and mawrters

I think the comment below me about who belongs at a woman's college is interesting.  I agree; it isn't about the gender, but the type of person who goes here.   A Mawrter is a very unique kind of person that has nothing to do with being a woman.  I am envious of the previous poster because she feels so at home at Bryn Mawr and being a Mawrter.  I don't.  Somewhere between coming here and now I lost the sense of being a Mawrter.  I understand what it is like to attend this college - I know the traditions and what this college means to so many students here.  Yet, somehow I have become detached.  This, of course, is not due to my gender.  I identify as being a woman, but I lurk somewhere on the outskirts of the college.  If someone who identifies as something other than a woman feels that this college is their home, then they absolutely belong here.  A women's college started because it was a safe haven for a group of people who were seen as inferior to learn.  Now, a woman going to college isn't abnormal, but we remain a college for that group of people.  In doing so I think we are inviting other types of people - people floating on the gender binary or the sexuality spectrum or anything else - to come to Bryn Mawr as a safe haven to learn.  It's a secret to the outside world who still sees us as just a women's college.  I think we are also empowering a giant spectrum of people.

 

On a completely different note, I want to respond to the readings by Sherry Ortner too.  I enjoyed reading "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture" because it made an idea I had last year more clear.  In my csem I wrote a paper about the natural limitations of being female.  It is actually on this website because I was in Anne's class - it's called Appetite of a Woman.  It was a muddled thought that was based on the fact that men were more free than women because they can impregnate a woman and then run off.  A woman will always be inherently attached to something because she can have a child.  I couldn't quite express the idea, but Ortner put it into words.  Women are closer to nature because of their child bearing ability.  Men, unable to create life, have to turn to something else to create which, according to Ortner, is culture.  It's an interesting though - one that  I am not sure leads to the fact that women are lower in society than men - but definately one that leads to the roles that are inherently taken by men and women.

 

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