A woman’s education
Autopia is a place that does not and cannot exist. Based on impossibly high ideals, utopias are usually only mentioned in fiction. In my case, however, my utopia does exist, on and around the banks of a pond called Paradise. I’m not kidding. I lived there for the better part of four years, received an education there — a woman’s education — and the experience defined me.
The all-female college I attended is tucked away in Western Massachusetts. Mainly a collection of wood and brick houses and buildings, it takes up about half of a small town that is festooned, every time I visit, with rainbow flags. Barbara Bush dropped out of Smith College. Jacqueline Kennedy sneaked into its junior year abroad program. The poet Sylvia Plath (a literary light who burned very brightly, then burned out almost immediately) is Smith’s most famous alumnus, followed closely by the feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan. Less well known are the 50 or so Filipinas who have passed through its gates and who are now scattered around the globe, being everything from corporate warriors, politicians, development workers, journalists to mothers or any combination of these roles.
As the current alumnae coordinator for Smith in the Philippines, I get to sit, every year, with a new crop of applicants and discuss with them the merits and pitfalls of an all-female education. When Smith was founded, women were not allowed to attend elite educational institutions let alone work in offices. Now, well, the sky is the limit, isn’t it? But is it really?
After graduation I ran, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, right smack into the real world — a brown, heavy-set Bambi in the headlights. From a place which cultivated in me the firm belief that a woman could have it all, I found myself in a landscape where that was possible only if such woman had the patience of a pope, the energy of a Lance Armstrong on a performance-enhancing drug regimen, as well as the juggling ability and figure of an elite Bulgarian rhythmic gymnast. Women today face a dizzying array of choices and opportunities but because social norms, not to mention labor laws, haven’t kept up, the obverse of this panoply of choice is a life filled with sacrifice, compromise and ad-hoc measures, which is not to say that such lives do not have their moments of pure joy.
Out of Pandora’s Box, Steinem and Friedan handed women countless choices but also all the resulting problems and paradoxes. Does one focus on a career or a family? Why does one seem, despite all efforts, to come at the cost of the other? Does one give up self-sufficiency for dependence on a man? Does one raise a child oneself or hand over responsibilities to a nanny? What about her own children? Does one have a child on her own or wait fruitlessly for a white knight? Does one really have to preserve the body and skin of an adolescent at 50 to feel attractive and worthwhile? Does one resign oneself to the unexplainable emptiness of an otherwise great marriage? Or does one risk everything for freedom? How does one deal with long lonely years of old age if one has not had children or been abandoned by them?
These are the questions woven into the warp and woof of women’s lives — the frogs and snakes beneath the sugar, spice and everything nice. In the past the answers to these questions were simple, conventional. Now, the way forward is not so clear. So where do we look to for answers?
I am tempted to say that the answers will come out of places like Smith, a place where a young woman can, for a brief period of time, form herself in an almost completely feminine environment, which is to say, an unreal place unaffected by the pressures of a society constructed by and for men and, therefore, remarkably and sometimes alarmingly freeing. But if there is anything my utopic education gave me, it is a sense that women, women’s-college-educated or not, are remarkably intelligent, resilient and creative creatures. It is just as likely that the answers (call it the next wave of feminism) will simply come from the laboratory of life.
For all women, rich or poor, plain or beautiful, young or old, married or unmarried, brilliant or plodding, live out these questions every day, and one day, what they come up with will, I have faith, eventually add up to some kind of answer.
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