 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Originally published Aug. 21, 2000 on studentadvantage.com. This is the fourth in a series of articles and columns on the lives of women in college today. Dr. Elizabeth Stone is a professor of English, communications and media studies at Fordham University.
The '60s were an exciting time to be a college student — and a hard time to be a white male. The Civil Rights movement in the south made everyone newly aware of racial inequities. It led to movements throughout the country in support of equal rights not only for blacks, but also for women, Hispanics, gays and migrant workers. Even our protests against the Vietnam War were fueled by the perception that white, male, American culture was off oppressing Asians halfway around the globe. In 1965, my junior year, I transferred from Brooklyn College (where the dress code required me to wear skirts or dresses to class) to the University of California at Berkeley. A semester earlier, the campus grabbed headlines nationwide when a graduate student named Mario Savio shut it down by leading massive protests against the administration's attempt to prevent student organizations from being political advocates. Those protests sparked the Free Speech Movement, a defining period for modern-day civil rights activists. It may surprise you to know that change happened unevenly. Despite Berkeley's reputation for radical protests staged by stoned students in tie-dye shirts, my professors still addressed me as "Miss Stone" and many of us — myself included — lived in single-sex dorms where the nightly curfew was 11 p.m. The dorm was off limits to guys, except Sundays from 3 to 5 p.m. — and during that time, the rule was you had to leave your door open the width of a matchbook. (And just about everybody had matchbooks, because just about everybody smoked something or other.) In my transitional undergraduate days, most girls came to college to get their "M.R.S.," according to a disparaging clich&#eacute; of the times — in other words, they came to find a husband. ("Ms." wasn't even part of our language till Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1972.) Knowing that once they had children they would quit their jobs, most girls didn't even think about real professions. The most ambitious of us planned to go to graduate school for either their Masters of Social Work, with which they could become social workers, or their Ph.D.s, with which they could become college professors themselves. I didn't know a single woman who went on for an advanced degree in law, medicine, business or even journalism. How did we get from my undergraduate days to yours? The answer is pretty easy, really. The liberal-thinking college students of yesterday became the college professors of today, and we brought our political insights (some would say agendas) with us, expanding on the earliest changes that had already been made by our own professors. Our convictions that diversity was good replaced the earlier "melting pot" view of American culture. And that value is reflected in the Cultural Pluralism and Global Studies courses that are now everywhere. These days, you're unlikely to find a 20th-century American Literature course anywhere that only covers the works of dead white men. Meanwhile, majors that didn't exist in the 1960s are now campus fixtures. I speak not only of Women's Studies, African-American Studies and Native-American Studies, but also everything from Colonial and Holocaust Studies to Irish and Disability Studies. And yet for all its gains, today's academic world still has a way to go. When I came to Fordham Universityin 1980, I was offered a lower salary than a male colleague with less experience who was hired at the same time (we later compared notes). And although today I am a full professor in my department — the highest professorial rank you can attain — I am entirely aware that more men than women are promoted to this rank nationwide. According to data recently printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, women earn less than their male counterparts at every single academic rank — from full professor down to lecturer. At my rank, the average man earns $78,000; the average woman, $12,000 less. That's almost 20 percent! In addition, although women earn a third of all Ph.D.s granted, only one-sixth of all full professors are women. Women are mostly concentrated in the lower ranks. At the very lowest — lecturer — there are actually more women than men. And job discrimination against women remains rampant. The worst story I heard (at a college that shall remain nameless) concerned a woman who was chosen by a departmental hiring committee over all the other applicants. But the school's administration then learned that the professor, while at her present college, had filed a sexual harrassment suit against a male colleague. They decided she was a "troublemaker" and refused to hire her at all! If there is good news, it is that women today make up slightly more than 50 percent of the undergraduate population nationwide, so they are at last fairly represented in college classrooms. They don't have a dress code, and neither do I, which means I can wear jeans to class if I want to. And sometimes I do. Love this column? Hate it? Tell us all about it. The
copyright to this column is held by Student Advantage, Inc. The Women in College series: The
Long Road to Equality |
 |
|
 |
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|