Coming Back to Feminism

The first rule of any contentious discussion should be to define your terms. People on opposite sides of an issue can talk at each other and argue, but they won't achieve much if they can't agree on the foundations of the disagreement.

I anticipated that last week's panel on feminism at Harvard would suffer from such an unstructured debate, and to a certain extent it did. After all, as the panelists kept repeating, feminism means different things to different people. But in spite of the imperfectly defined subject matter, the discussion was a success because each panelist gave his or her own definition of feminism at the outset and a uniform opinion emerged--that at its most basic level, feminism is the expectation or demand that women be viewed as equal to men in the eyes of the law and of society.

If those of us at the panel walked away with anything, it should have been that seemingly fundamental definition and the will to share it with others. Thirty years ago, you might have been hard-pressed to put six people--three liberals and three conservatives--on a public platform and reach such a moral and political conclusion.

Last week's panel has formed the basis for a much more in-depth discussion of feminism and the role of women at Harvard. The nitty-gritty details get more complicated, of course. The most proactive feminist on the panel defined feminism as a way of life. The conservative males in turn said that feminism was in fact a legal force that had succeeded in its goal of making women equal to men.

I stand somewhere in between. I've been pleased with my life at Harvard as far as gender is concerned and have never once felt that my being a woman has denied me any opportunities or impeded my academic progress. Students here, I like to think, are on a level playing field regardless of their gender. And on the basis of observation, I believe my own experience has been hardly unique.

On the other hand, I do know many people who do not feel the same way, and I know that there are some things at Harvard that can make a woman's life more difficult than it should be. I know people who feel their teaching fellows don't call on them in section because they're female. I sympathize with those who have missed being taught by one of the too-few tenured female faculty members. And I share many students' concern that the final clubs, unaffiliated with Harvard though they are, promote sexism toward women.

So if feminism is the expectation that women be treated equally to men, there's still work to be done. That work should be a gender-blind community effort. The discussion last Thursday was useful because men sat on the panel and because it reached men in the audience.

To be successful, a contentious discussion must also include all voices in the debate. It is that concept of inclusion which makes me question the ultimate purpose of groups such as the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS). If they are intended to be support groups for women seeking advice and guidance, excellent. I know women who have been helped by having access to such a comfortable environment. But the problem with RUS is that it limits the discussion of gender equality--the most basic tenet of feminism no matter how you define it--to a discussion most often involving women only. If men and women can agree that we are all equal, surely students of both genders can agree to work together to ensure that equality really exists on campus.

What I took from the debate was the firm belief that the role of TFs in calling on students, male and female alike, should be the subject of a formal study whose results would be released to the community. Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, sitting in the audience, referred to a study done by the Bok Center which revealed a gap between the number of men and women called on in section. How about actively publicizing those findings and doing another study to check on the current situation?

While we're at it, let's examine the strength of TFs in general, release the findings and see how the quality of teaching can be improved. Likewise, the discussion about and search for talented female professors should continue, and the sexist environment of the final clubs should be made better known to first-years.

I'll go out on a limb and expand the basic definition of feminism to which everyone at the panel agreed. Yes, feminism is the demand that women be treated as equal to men. But true feminism is ultimately the humanistic goal that everyone be treated equally in society. We all have a profound stake in the realization of that goal.

Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.