Judge the Book by Its Cover

Thursday night at 12:01 a.m. The Women’s Guide to Harvard landed with a thud in my DeWolfe doorbox—five days after it had been delivered to the rest of campus. For a book whose publication was already a year-and-a-half past deadline, I wasn’t surprised by the delay. Much like the demise of Radcliffe College, which in Oct. 1999 finally equalized undergraduate women in the eyes of Harvard’s administration, the book arrived a little too late and without fanfare, passing unbeknownst to most students on campus, including some of the book’s own contributors.

Any book that offers itself as a “guide” to a group as heterogeneous as Harvard “women” should be approached with a fair dose of intrigue—and skepticism. The proposition that scantily clad final club groupies, carbo-loading varsity athletes and slightly neurotic left of center journalists can all find something meaningful in the content is ambitious, if not perhaps also naïve. Add to that the guide’s stated desire to serve the testosterone crowd as well—quite the lofty ambition for a book with just four men on its 58 person staff —and the guide seems even less likely to hit its mark.

But, to some extent, the 271 pages deliver, providing comprehensive listings of student resources intermixed with fairly thought-provoking analyses of women’s history and hot topics de jour.

All this philosophizing matters little, though, if no one actually reads the guide, and to that end the back cover boldly promises to answer the question: “What’s in it for you?” What follows are pithy paragraphs directed towards male and female readers explaining exactly what The Women’s Guide has to offer. However, what’s marketed in the prose on lovely lavender back flap is at odds with what’s inside of the book itself.

The content of The Women’s Guide is convincingly adamant about the need to prevent collective “amnesia” with regards to the rocky history of women at Harvard and to provide a forthright discussion of gender issues facing women (and men) today. But the back cover plea to find “female readers” begins on the defensive, replying to an invisible critic that “this book is in fact more than The Unofficial Guide without the restaurant listings.” With such unprovoked hostility, the female reader is left to wonder if the authors are really so certain of the book’s validity after all.

And what about the lack of female social space, the dearth of female faculty and the extent to which women undergraduates are underrepresented in the sciences? These controversies get coverage in the text, but not on the cover. Instead it’s implied that things are quite rosy today, but that the book might provide a good chuckle with its history of our “foresisters who had it way rougher than [us] back when ‘Cliffie bitch’ was a common term and Radcliffe was ‘the Annex.’”

The appeal to “male readers” offers little more in the way of substance. The preface of the book differentiates The Women’s Guide from previous gender-focused guides—in that it was “created with the intention of being distributed to female and male undergraduates alike.” The “underlying premise of this publication,” editor Peggy Lim ’01 states, is “that women’s history and women’s issues are questions in which both men and women at Harvard (as elsewhere) can and should engage.”

You won’t find this rationale on the cover, however. Instead, there are only veiled references to the fact that men might have a real stake in understanding so-called women’s issues. Any seriousness is masked by a sarcasm that begs men to look, if only for the eye candy. “You go to Hahvahd, don’t you?” it asks. Well, then “you’ve gotta have some kind of natural intellectual curiosity!” Read on, young man, but mind the parenthetical aside that you “can probably skip the part about gynecological exams.”

Some will ask why its useful to harp on two paragraphs that seem largely inconsistent with more than 200 pages of writing. Why pick apart some 20 lines of kitsch when there is more substantive analysis elsewhere? As children of the PC, love-people-for-what’s-on-the-inside era, how can we commit the egregious act of actually judging a book by its cover?

The answer, quite simply, is that on a subtle level the cover says as much about the uncertain position of women at Harvard as does the book itself. The defensiveness responds to an intellectual environment that still questions the validity of studying “women’s issues.” The need to remind women that they are marginally better off than their foresisters responds to an administrative reluctance to admit that there are still inequalities now. And the tounge-in-cheek plea for male allies responds to a social climate that assumes that no man would have a real reason to offer support.

That these insecurities to manage push their way to the surface in an ostensibly self-assured and forward thinking book speaks not to how far we’ve come toward equality, but to how far we still have to go. The Women’s Guide is a tentative first step, but what’s needed are leaps and bounds.

Lauren E. Baer ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.