The end of women’s colleges?
Madeline Fry Schultz
When no one knows what a woman is, who gets to decide who goes to women’s colleges? That’s the question many of them are wrestling with at the moment, as it’s not good enough to admit women, or even transgender women, to institutions that have long ago lost their mission.
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts bills itself as “a women’s college that is gender diverse,” accepting women, students who say they are women, and students who say they are nonbinary, no matter their biological sex.
Wellesley College, certainly no bastion of conservative principles, limits applications to “all those who live as women and consistently identify as women,” meaning that women and biological men who identify as transgender women can enroll at the college. Transgender men, however, cannot.
This has been a sore subject for the school’s left-wing students, who approved a nonbinding referendum on Tuesday to call for the admission of transgender male and nonbinary applicants. Also on the referendum was a proposal to adopt gender-neutral language, swapping “students” for “women” and “they” or “them” for “she” and “her.”
Wellesley is “still, and always will be, a school to educate people who are of marginalized genders,” student body president Alexandra Brooks told the New York Times. When “woman” is just one of 72 other marginalized genders, why not just turn women’s colleges into marginalized gender schools?
Lawrence A. Rosenwald, a retired professor who previously taught at Wellesley, said the college has always been a haven for those “not in positions of power in a patriarchal society.” (Unsurprisingly, Rosenwald supported the referendum.)
Brooks, Rosenwald, and others are merely repeating the tenets of intersectional feminism, echoing the idea that feminism isn’t just for biological women, but for others who take on their identity and share their oppression.
Wellesley College, which boasts Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton as alumnae, says that its mission is “to provide an excellent education to women who will make a difference in the world.”
But to its students and many of its faculty, it isn’t enough to educate women. Soon the school’s mission may be “to provide an excellent education to women, nonbinary people, transgender men and women, and all others of equal or great oppression who will make a difference in the world.”
When the meaning of “woman” is reduced to a political class, what is the point of women’s colleges, anyway? If womanhood is about oppression, then anyone who professes to be a victim can join the club.