Women against Women

In my first paper, I divulged the gender discrimination I had faced  at the hands of my high school administration. What had both appalled and intrigued me was the role played by female authority figures in stripping me and several others of the opportunities that were so crucial in molding our future. The perplexity of this notion was heightened after I took the Black at Bryn Mawr Tour, where I was exposed to yet another instance of a victim of discrimination, also enacting some form of oppressive discrimination on other vulnerable social groups. Through my revision of this paper, I do not claim to obtain direct answers for the questions that have vexed me for so long, but to develop a deeper understanding of multiple forms of prejudice and why our personal experiences of being discriminated against, sometimes fail to prevent us from judging people solely on intrinsic physical characteristics, like race or gender.  

The female administrators in my high school had spent their whole lives in a patriarchal society that had certain expectations from them. They had had ideals of the perfect Pakistani Muslim woman imposed on them, which in the long run dictated the course of their lives. On various occasions did I hear such stories from female faculty members, descriptions of being groped by men in public transportation despite being covered in an amorphous garment from head to feet, and restrictions imposed on the kinds of occupations that were fit for women to undertake. Such anecdotes always inculcated empathy in my heart for women who had undergone the agonizing results of baseless biases, yet these were also the women, who became vessels of the same prejudice that had suppressed them. When the school was organizing a senior trip to a hill station, these were the very ladies who came up to us and told us it was only for male students. "Why?" "Because they're boys."  

Maybe it is selfishness that moved them to act in these ways. They had jobs to hold and self interest indeed preceded any form of goodwill. Moreover, the desire to not be alone in experiencing discrimination, could also have served as trigger. As a female professor in my successive high school once said, "sometimes women are more instrumental in maintaining the structures of patriarchy because they feel that the discrimination they had faced could be justified only if females from following generations were also subjected to the same oppression." Was the forced experience of shared pain, supposed to bring us closer? To what effect?  

On the contrary, while taking the Black at Bryn Mawr tours, I was informed about former Bryn Mawr president M Carey Thomas, the exceedingly racist white woman, who advocated women's right to higher education on one hand, and on the other, prevented  their colored counterparts from having the same experience. This complicates the notion of extending oppression resulting from discrimination to similar vulnerable groups, because where Thomas was employing her efforts in providing the same education to women, as was being given to men, she was only doing so for white, upper middle class women. This can be perceived as a manifestation of selfish interest that aimed at proving her place in society, and affirming that not only was she equal to men, she was superior than most by employing such a strong position of power in an institution that served to promulgate the same beliefs to other women like her. However, she was not progressive about extending the same opportunity towards colored women, because her core beliefs about race remained the same, and were not moved because they were not in line with her own interests. Moreover, the fact that Thomas had public homosexual reationships, seemed quite contradictory to me, as I could not comprehend how one person could be so progressive in one aspect of their lives, and so regressive in another. Now, after relating this to the position of women in my own high school, I feel like this is yet another manifestation of self interest.  

Indeed a concept as abstract and variable as discrimination is bound to have more than one underlying cause, and I am still left with unanswered questions in my mind. However, in my opinion self interest is the common cause of discrimination in both of the aforementioned cases. Furthermore, there are various forms of self interest that govern such acts, and range from wanting to prove a point to elevate our position in the world, to merely achieving some sort of consolation by imposing on others similar negative experiences as the ones we have undergone. 

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