One hundred girls for every boy

Women's college was empowering -- and deeply alienating.

By Theresa Rusho

Aug 20, 2001 | Vietnam defined my college experience. Not the war, but the history class I wandered into at Harvard during the second semester of my junior year. As a visiting undergraduate from Wellesley who opted to cross the Charles River rather than the Atlantic for a year abroad, I attended the first session of every available course in search of the ultimate source of inspiration -- the One True Thing.

Shortly after wedging myself into the last remaining airspace of History of Vietnam that February morning, I realized not only that the joint professors of the class could start a war of their own by the end of the hour but that $100 in textbooks -- as well as an eighth of my tuition -- could be saved by renting "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon" at the local Blockbuster. The One True Thing? Nowhere to be seen.

But there were still 200 men in the room, a good 3-1 ratio in my favor. I grabbed my registration card from my backpack and signed up on the spot.

Oh sure, it crossed my mind that choosing a class solely on the basis of the male-to-female ratio smacked of all those dangerous "sub-" words that had come to fill my vocabulary during two years of an all-women education: subservient, submissive, subliminal. But I never questioned my decision. After two years as an empowered Wellesley woman, I wanted to be nothing more than a dizzy junior high school girl.

Not that I hadn't been dizzy the first time around. Although I may have been a bit on the bookish side, the wonder of academics -- those safety-goggle moments when I had a hypothesis and the feeling that I was about to see something really, really cool -- made my adolescent days as magical and carefree as those of classmates who did not spend their prom night with Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs. When it came time to choose a college, I could relate to the bold-type statement on Wellesley's Web site: You go to college to get a solid education and have experiences that will prepare you for success.

Yes, there was that glaring 0-100 (or, more appropriately, 100-0) statistic printed in the next sentence, but didn't the viewbook also state that Wellesley's proximity to Boston provided countless opportunities to meet "students" from countless other colleges? Weren't two of those rugged "students" playing Frisbee on the lush, rolling green during our campus tour? Didn't we have a perfect view of them lounging by the lake from the cathedral windows of the Gothic dorm we stayed in during our overnight visit? And hadn't Clarence Thomas denied Anita Hill's claim that he had repeatedly used the term "Long Dong Silver" on the very morning of our admissions interview?

So when I unpacked my bags as Wellesley's newest sister, I loved it. Oh, how I loved it. True, I couldn't see sunlight, let alone Frisbee players, from the concrete box I had been housed in, but I didn't care. As an 18-year-old woman whose lifetime experience with the opposite sex involved little more than unrequited crushes and incoming prank phone calls, I didn't miss men much. Wellesley was exactly as promised: a supportive environment that inspired women to excel and grow.

The charm soon wore as thin as the public service announcements about eating disorders that greeted me outside of nearly every bathroom door. (Never in my life had I been forced to give so much thought to body image.) By my sophomore year, I realized that Wellesley was all women: female viewpoints, female commentary, female opinions.

Next Page: I began to take immense comfort in theorizing about the needs and experiences of men

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