Then and Now

It's countdown to the Smith reunion and I'm not the only one getting nostalgic.

Writing in the Modern Love column for Sunday's New York Times,
J. Courtney Sullivan, a Smith alum, talks about how to bridge what she learned at Smith (man, oppressor, bad) with her dating life (cute boy, good). It's true that in some ways at Smith, men were more theoretical constructs than actual flesh-and-blood realities. Only the fire drills in the very inconvenient hour of middle-of-the-night proved who was experiencing real life and who was stuck with the books.

For contact with men (and to get out of taking a required class on the Federalist Papers), I took political philosophy at Amherst. Coming from the small-class, verbose environment at Smith, I was surprised that, just like we had been warned, the men dominated class discussion while women tended to hang back. One parpticular time I remember, though, the professor pointed out that often democracy wasn't always as democratic as billed. "In America, women didn't get the vote till, when was it?" "1920," I called out. Heads turned. The Smithie had shown her colors. The guys looked at me like I was making a feminist statement, not stating historical fact. I'm sure that little incident didn't win me any dates. But just as Sullivan discovers, not every guy is worth dating.