Spotted: Feminists at Princeton

Back in middle school, I was a pretty theatrical kid. I used to dream about my school bus bursting into flames and my latest crush magically digging me out of the ashes just in time to perform life-saving CPR. No tongues, of course; that would be gross. Despite the fact that I played the victim in every version of this fantasy, I was no Fay Wray. I considered myself much more mature and enlightened than the boys who snapped girls’ training bras and pretended to barf when the subject of “dating” came up. Naturally when I learned about feminism, I instantly signed on; finally a theory that explained why boys are so weird! There were even sweet T-shirts — “THIS is what a FEMINIST looks like!” “Keep your laws OFF my body,” “Girls kick butt!” — which proclaimed my admittance to this club of higher understanding and obvious superiority. It would be a long time before I actually understood what the slogans meant and for whom they held significance. But for the time being, I could comfortably divide the world into two kinds of people: those who “got it” and those who didn’t. Then I came to Princeton.

If you’ve read the recent (and many past) ‘Prince’ articles on the “state of feminism” at Princeton, you would be forgiven for believing that self-identified feminists are few and far between in the Orange Bubble, that we stick to defined and stereotypical spaces, and that we’re constantly struggling to bring the rest of the unenlightened campus up to speed. After all, this isn’t Smith College. You might believe that women here fight constantly to be taken seriously by our hypersexual, patronizing male counterparts, or that women are too afraid of being mocked to put their feminism on display. Finally, you might believe that students at Princeton divide feminists into two major camps: those who calmly pursue a traditional Second Wave feminist agenda (fighting against civic and legal inequalities), and those who just complain.

You might believe this, but thankfully, you’d be wrong.

As Allen Paltrow-Krulwich pointed out in his thoughtful column, there have always been and will always be a group (or many groups) of feminists that is more vocal and seemingly more radical than the rest. There is no one right way to be a feminist or to express feminist views, and I take issue with the idea that Princeton feminists are any less diverse then our forebears. To reduce feminism to “two camps” or insist that real feminists are loud about feminism is to ignore the majority of students — especially male students — on campus who advance women’s rights without shoving the F-word in your face.

Over the past three years, I’ve come to understand that feminism at Princeton is as complex and diverse as the students who study it, live it and express its central tenets. My understanding of what defines a feminist has been revolutionized since freshman year, when I first participated in the feminist-of-all-feminist productions, “The Vagina Monologues.” Our cast was as diverse sexually as it was racially, and I realized very quickly that until college, my conception of feminism barely moved beyond my own experiences as a white, blonde, middle-class, straight American. It wasn’t until I began to actively study and engage in other people’s feminisms that I understood the limits of my own views. I had to step back before I could see the true breadth and reach of feminism on Princeton’s campus.

The ‘Prince’ columns over the past several weeks say there’s a dearth of feminist activity, but that’s because they’re looking for feminism in the wrong places. I fear that the more we generalize and reduce feminism to white, middle-class efforts for legal and civic equality, the more we ignore the vast majority of feminists who do not identify with this history or choose to advance women’s rights through other channels. Over the past 30 years, there has been a revolution in feminist theory as women who were left out because of their socioeconomic class or race have challenged the notion that there is One Feminism or one way to make women’s lives better. For students today to ignore all of the changes that have occurred in feminist thought during our lifetime and focus solely on one aspect of feminism is to commit the same errors all over again. That’s what I learned doing “The Vagina Monologues” from the women in that cast whose ethnicities and class backgrounds and mothers’ experiences have always been left out of our simplified understanding of “feminism.”

I discovered that school is awash in feminist activity, from the dozens of yearly panels and speakers on women and gender issues to the range of classes investigating the intersections of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. Our president is a single working mother who implemented an automatic tenure extension policy for both female and male professors who have babies. We have more than 25 student clubs and associations devoted to the promotion of dialogue and awareness about women and gender issues. We have a strong presence of males who support women and feminist issues, even if they prefer not to adopt the feminist label. There are feminists of every color, creed, gender identity, sexual orientation and economic background on this campus who work in their own ways toward issues that are important to their community, and that’s inherently feminist.

So despite what the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership says, women are leaders — on sports teams, on club boards, in the Student Volunteers Council and Fields Center, in residential colleges, and in the classroom. The lack of a female USG president does not mean Princeton is bereft of female leaders. Female leaders, like feminists, are simply less visible on campus because they don’t lead the way we expect them to lead. Feminists on this campus might not wear the T-shirts. And that’s OK.