Is feminism dead? Many people seem to think so. Male and female students go to college in roughly equal numbers in the United States, women have breached fields long dominated by men and the mainstream American public is starting to embrace a wide spectrum of gender identities.
Although women may have gained rights they did not have half a century ago, they are still subject to discrimination and judgments in male?dominated society. Whether it manifests as a fear of walking alone across campus at night or anxiety about the repercussions of Arizona's mandatory 24?hour abortion waiting period or smoldering anger at the knowledge that American women earn around 77 cents to each man's dollar, women frequently face discrimination, though it is more subtle than it has been in the past.
Even on the Tufts campus, women tangibly have less of a voice: There are nine fraternities but only three sororities, and about two thirds of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) senate is male. Still, campus politics generally echo national politics, and efforts have long been underway to bridge gaps between the genders and sexes.
Founded in 1972, the Tufts Women's Center grew out of the second?wave feminist movement. Along with other women's centers across the country, it developed with the goal of promoting gender equality and providing a safe space for all genders to gather, learn and examine their identities at a time when women were greatly underrepresented on college campuses.
"Definitely, the Women's Center pays attention to issues that have historically impacted women, but we also pay attention more broadly to how issues related to gender play out," Director of the Women's Center Steph Gauchel said. "For example, sexual assault, sexual harassment and discrimination have always been serious issues faced by women, but it's not an issue exclusively faced by women, and it is not just women's responsibility to address these issues."
Gauchel said she has been pleased with the center's popularity and influence on campus since she became its director four years ago.
"I personally have experienced and had the opportunity in my professional roles to see the impact that understanding the ways that our identities can inform our lives," she said. "There's a lot of empowerment in understanding the ways that we can set and figure out for ourselves who we want to be."
The center stresses the importance of gender acceptance, but it also focuses strongly on identifying and examining the intersections of gender, class and race in a person's identity. Gauchel believes that food is a good illustration of this: While food can be associated with traditional gender roles for women, it also is tied to questions of body image and eating disorders and can help illuminate inequality in the lives of food industry workers.
Even in her short time at Tufts, Gauchel has witnessed a number of positive steps for gender equality. The campus has crafted a broader sexual assault policy, for example, and has gained a new director in the office of equal opportunity and a new Title IX director. She is also excited by Students Acting for Gender Equality's (SAGE) recent victory in implementing a gender?neutral housing program on campus.
Sophomore Zoe Munoz, the outreach and marketing intern at the Women's Center and a member of TCU's Culture, Ethnicity and Community Affairs (CECA) Committee, believes that the Center is primarily a safe place to learn about gender issues that is open to all members of the community.
"We're a space in which gender is not binary - which it shouldn't be - and that's what we very much strive to encapsulate," she said.
Munoz cautions that although the Center does emphasize feminist ideals, one should avoid indiscriminately lumping the Center and feminism together. In her opinion, despite common misconceptions, there are many different types of feminism and discussing them in a valuable, intelligent way requires some education.
"If you haven't taken a class about feminism, then you really don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. You don't know what it is," she said. "Before we can get into a discussion about feminism, both sides need to have at least an introduction to basic theory and practice."
Education, she believes, is also an important step toward ending gender inequality in the long run.
"A class like Sex and Gender in Society is crucial in opening up your eyes to the ways in which different genders are treated very differently and how that treatment has different consequences in day?to?day life," she said.
VOX: Voices for Choice is one of the organizations that use the space provided by the Women's Center. Its goals include increasing campus dialogue about sex, de?stigmatizing female sexuality and spreading information about reproductive health. Though VOX receives funding from the TCU Senate, it is first and foremost one of the campus branches of Planned Parenthood. VOX has likely gained nationwide success because of its widespread appeal.
"What's interesting about VOX is that people are coming to it from such different places," junior Lexi Sasanow, a member of VOX, said. "Just because people care about gender justice in general doesn't mean that feminism is a monolith."
Current VOX president Liza Gordon, a sophomore, became interested in feminism while in college and was quickly struck by the perspective it added to her upbringing.
"I grew up in a very conservative neighborhood," she said. "I went to ballroom dancing, etiquette school and a very strict private school. Never, ever, ever in my hometown does a boy not open a door for a girl."
Learning about feminism has helped her understand the impact of the gender roles she grew up with, though it often leaves her feeling conflicted. In particular, it has caused her to question the gender relations at her parents' shared jewelry business. Though most of the salespeople in the store are female, the managers are all men, and customers often assume that her mother does not own a share in the company.
Gordon acknowledges that feminism and acceptance of female sexuality still have a fair amount of progress left to make, but she feels that VOX has already had a significant, positive impact on campus with widely attended events like Oh Megan! and the March Sex Fair.
"People are like, 'Of course the events are well?attended. You're talking about sex and giving out condoms.' But that's what the goal is - sex positivity," she said.
Even if the events do nothing more than help people become more comfortable with sexuality as a topic, Gordon will be satisfied.
"You're not going to be able to talk about sexual health if you can't say the word vagina. You just have to start somewhere," she said.
SAGE also gathers at the Women's Center to discuss pertinent gender?related issues with the goal of understanding and analyzing gender discrimination.
Senior Garrett Gilmore joined SAGE in his freshman year after taking a class with a teaching assistant who was a graduate assistant at the Women's Center. Though the primarily female group initially daunted him, he soon settled in, especially after a smattering of fellow male students began to come more regularly. When asked why he is interested in gender equality despite being a member of a well?represented, dominant gender, Gilmore had a ready reply.
"It feels right for me politically," he said. "I care a lot about politics, but I don't like party politics and the governing side of it. I'm much more interested in activist politics."
He also noted that being a student at Tufts presents him with an opportunity to engage directly with both community and large?scale political issues.
In terms of gender politics, Gilmore argued that most inequality results from the fact that people are rarely made to question the way they were raised. His sensitivity to the subject, he believes, is a result of his growing up in an unusual family. After his biological parents divorced when he was a child, his mother moved in with another woman, which quickly became a new "normal" for him.
"For me, I think having my world shaken like that was a good thing. If you're not going to have that at college, then you're wasting an opportunity," he said. "We're in an opportunity where you're supported for your four years to do something. I think that part of that should be thinking critically about how you got here and why you're interested in what you're interested in."
Sophomore Grainne Griffiths, another SAGE member and a member of the TCU's CECA Committee, echoed Garrett's thoughts with the assertion that modern men are mostly by?products of a pre?established, patriarchal society.
"It's not individual men [that cause gender discrimination], by any means. That's a common misconception," she said. "Every opportunity [that puts women at a disadvantage] was created by a system that has long privileged men. Men went to universities when women couldn't, so men had high positions, and they got to create this structure that privileged them."
It is because of these conflicts between genders that Griffiths believes representation by both genders at SAGE meetings is so valuable in promoting equality.
"It's gender equality, it's not just girl talk at all. It's academic and activist?focused. Guys bring a lot to that," she said.
Though SAGE is arguably not as well known on campus as VOX or the Women's Center, the group has succeeded in implementing changes felt across the Tufts campus. Gender?neutral housing, for example, was virtually all SAGE's doing. This housing option has been offered in apartment?style suites but will now be available in a variety of rooms in Bush Hall and Latin Way dormitory starting next year. SAGE also helps ensure that the Tufts University Police Department receives student feedback, especially for its escort service, according to Gilmore.
"We do things that I think a lot of people take for granted, and we're fine doing that," he said.
The question still remains why gender inequality is so prevalent to begin with. Feminist philosophy professor Nancy Bauer believes that gender roles probably arose as a result of basic physiological differences between males and females.
"When surviving and technology depend on physical strength, then men may have an advantage," she said. "Also, the biological ability to bear children is something that can sideline women from other activities. Right before and right after you have a baby, it's very difficult to do a whole lot of physical, manual labor."
A belief that men are dominant over females probably developed out of these initial conditions and was passed down over generations, even though technology has ensured that humans' survival is not dependent on a division between the sexes. Still, Bauer is sympathetic to the large percentage of the population that aligns itself with "traditional" gender roles.
"We grow up with [these roles], and they strike us as normal and natural," she said. "It's hard to separate them from our own identities, so we just keep replicating them over and over again."
According to Bauer, as soon as we are born, we are "gendered" by society and through smaller factors like our parents' choice in our name, our toys and our clothes. For better or worse, we grow up with an intimate understanding of society's gender divisions.
Bauer believes it would theoretically be possible to maintain some gender distinctions while treating people as perfect equals, but she acknowledges that our society is far from that point. Women - as well as those who do not conform to traditional gender roles - are marginalized in the process. College campuses and the professional world remain relatively hostile environments for women, she said, even if they do not outwardly appear that way.
"You're always around these ideas of what a woman is supposed to do, or what it means to be a woman," Sasanow said. "There are all these social ideas about what it means to be a woman instead of it being, 'You're a person, let me get to know you.' It gets very complicated."
Junior Eliza Ziegler, the treasurer of VOX, recounted a specific incident in which she stepped outside of her traditional gender role, to interesting results. While she was riding on the subway, she noticed two men looking at her, but not in a flattering way.
"They looked terrified, and I realized that they had just been staring at my hairy legs the whole time," she said. "I felt empowered, because they looked pretty freaked out by it."
Young, college?age women often believe they have the right, the talent and the ability to succeed as professionals, which gives them a tremendous sense of power and autonomy, Bauer said. She explained that once these women enter the workforce, they experience a rude awakening. Women run only around five percent of Fortune 500 companies and are greatly outnumbered by men in a variety of fields.
"I hear from my students, 'We got a raw deal. We were promised something better, and it's much, much harder than we thought it would be,'" Bauer said.
Bauer added that the balance women must strike between their personal and professional lives is especially difficult. While men's role as breadwinners is embraced by society, women are still expected to be the emotional hearts of their families. They also face pressure not to work too many hours in any given week for fear that their families will be neglected.
Still, Bauer is not pessimistic about the situation. Her feminist philosophy classes are increasing in popularity among a wide variety of men and women, and she feels that there is plenty of untapped interest among students.
Associate Professor Sonia Hofkosh, director ad interim of Women's Studies, agrees that the fight for gender equality has gained a societal foothold, but that it still has a long way to go.
"I don't feel that as an academic discipline at Tufts, that we've made all that much progress," she said. "But we certainly have in academics more broadly, through both the county and the world. Now, there are Ph.D. programs in women and gender studies."
Women also earned an important victory when they gained wider access to contraception. Students might take for granted the huge bowls of condoms and dental dams that await them at Health Services, but this availability is still a relatively new concept.
"You just need to read the paper to learn that there is a huge movement to limit access to contraception [of] poor women, and that there's a whole problem being debated and voted on in Nebraska about whether those some call 'illegal aliens' should have access to prenatal care funded by the state," Hofkosh said.
She also pointed out that women's studies does not get the same recognition as other fields such as the natural sciences, partly because women's studies and feminism have historically been grounded in a fight against the status quo.
"It's by no means a done deal," Hofkosh said.
