Bigger reasons to consider women’s colleges for our daughters

By Jennifer Zobair

They approach me at parties and holiday celebrations: Muslim parents with college-bound daughters. “I hear you went to Smith,” they say, referencing my graduation from one of the Seven Sisters colleges, some of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious women’s schools. “I’d like my daughter to go there, too,” they tell me.

I nod enthusiastically. Yes! my bobbing head says. Your daughter should definitely go to Smith!

I launch into a discussion of things I adore about Smith: the way it attracts smart, ambitious women and treats its students like adults, including the administration of final exams which are self-scheduled and unproctored. I gush about Friday tea, a throwback to a time when the Seven Sisters were more like finishing schools, where professors come and speak to students like equals. I extol Smith’s unique housing system, recalling how my housemates and I ranted about the “math class is tough” Barbie in our pajamas over homemade pancakes and piled onto couches in our living room to watch Anita Hill speak truth to power in the televised Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Occasionally as I talk, I notice some of the parents’ eyes glaze over. They frown slightly. They look impatient for me to finish.

“But it is all girls, right?” they interject. And as they speak, it becomes clear: In those parents’ minds, the value of a Smith education is reduced to the expectation there will be no “mixing.”

It’s true, of course, that women’s colleges are single-sex, and it’s true that this can be a very good thing for women who have historically, as a group, been marginalized. We have been and still are forced to navigate rape culture, unequal pay, sexual harassment, and mostly male politicians making decisions about our bodies. Muslim women have the added pressure of enduring religious bigotry and the ubiquitous assumption that we are oppressed.

There is value in attending an institution dedicated to the empowerment of women. There is value in living in an environment where every leadership role will be filled by a woman and every classroom discussion will be dominated by women. But Smith is not some utopian, permanent retreat from the world. It is clear that our time at Smith is, in large part, to prepare us to enter a male-dominated world and succeed. Women graduate from Smith prepared to leave their mark on that world, not to retreat from it.

It’s also important to note that men are not entirely absent from Smith. Smith, like many women’s colleges, is part of a consortium. Male students from Amherst, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire colleges can take classes at Smith, and Smith students can take classes at those colleges. There are social events on campus that are well-attended by men. There is a graduate school that admits men. And of course there are male professors.

At the risk of further disillusioning some parents, not only will your daughter not be automatically protected from mixing with men at Smith, but she will not be protected from mixing with people whose background, values, religion (or lack thereof), politics, or sexual orientation might be quite different than her own. And as hard as it might be for some parents to imagine, this is a very good thing.

For our daughters to be strong and confident and comfortable in their own skin they need to question their own assumptions. They need to learn what they will tolerate and what they will fight against with all they’ve got. They need to discover where their center is and how to hold it.

Smith is perhaps uniquely poised to impart these lessons with its commitment to diversity, and the confidence and caliber of its students. At Smith, your daughter will be challenged. She will have to find her voice. She will have to own her beliefs. She will either hold them closer by graduation, or discard them for ones that constitute a better fit. She will do this in the company of some of the most amazing women she will ever meet.

In short, she will become the person she was meant to be.

In the kind of coincidence I have come to believe is not really so coincidental, as I write this column my own daughter, now fourteen, brings me the mail. It includes a fundraising letter from Smith, penned by a current international student who has a Muslim-sounding name and happens to be from Pakistan. She speaks of the ways Smith has made her more confident, of how it led to opportunities for an internship at a large investment bank and a year abroad at the London School of Economics. She invokes the gorgeous Sylvia Path quote about Smith being a place where “the world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon.”

She says Smith changed her life.

It changed mine, too. At my graduation, then-president Mary Maples Dunn addressed a sea of hopeful faces, ready and eager to conquer the world. She finished by saying she hoped we’d take part of Smith with us as we went out into that world. I cried as she said it, thinking of all the ways Smith had already shaped me, and of all the yet-unknowable ways it would in the future.

As I pull out my checkbook, I think about the parents who want their daughters to go to Smith only because they see it as a bulwark against mixing. I want to tell them how much bigger Smith is than this. I want to tell them they should send their daughters to Smith, but not to protect them.

They should send their daughters to Smith so they learn to protect themselves, so they take part of Smith with them after graduation, too, so the world splits before them and they learn to soar.

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Zobair is a biological and adoptive mother, an attorney, and a writer. She is the author of the debut novel, Painted Hands (St.Martin’s Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (forthcoming from I Speak For Myself/White Cloud Press, 2015). She lives with her husband and three children in the DC area. Connect with Jennifer on twitter @jazobair or through her website at www.jennferzobair.com. The views expressed here are her own.