A Kick in the Pants

Is it a coincidence that the head of Penn and the head of Harvard, one ousted the other threatened with ouster (but seeming now to have received Harvard’s full support), are both women? I don’t think so.

At least in terms of Harvard, antisemitism there has a long history and since Penn is part of the brotherhood I would guess it has always raged there too. I remember as an undergraduate at Radcliffe, long since devoured by Harvard, we heard a Nazi marching song played loudly from an undergraduate’s window; no one seemed particularly horrified and as I recall, nothing was done. The quota system for admitting Jews to the freshman class was long an accepted reality and for all I know may still be.

So why are the two women heads thrown to the dogs?

I’m not excusing what they did, but it seems likely to me that since they were both appointed to appease public opinion, their support at both colleges was thin, especially since we women are still failing to speak out for our gender. These two women may have believed they were immune to ouster, also because of public opinion, but in this ravaged country of ours, no one is going to question punishment for antisemitism—real or assumed. As our government bows cravenly to what Israel is doing to eliminate Gaza and continues to further the war with vast quantities of money and military equipment, even the smallest question is met with outrage. Freedom of expression stops at that door.

At the moment we are only hearing the voices of male politicians on both sides of the aisle, having lost last year our two leading women, Justice Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor. I am not aware of any worthy and outspoken women coming forward to take their places and it might be difficult to elect one now as we backpedal on women’s rights, distracted by what seems to be greater political support for righting the historic wrongs suffered by marginalized groups that learned their effective activism from earlier generations of fighting feminists. Their wrongs are grievous and need to be corrected, although changing the prejudices of generations is almost impossible to do and often continues to exist underground when expunged from public expression.

And I note in the case of Harvard’s threatened head, the kind of voice that used to be called “shrill.” I’m reminded of the elimination of a woman from an arts organization—a woman I had supported—because she was outspoken and even defiant in protecting her right to lead. We have only moved an inch away from our historical distrust and fear of outspoken women, and one of the effects of the now nearly-hidden women’s movement may be that we thought (or at least some of us did) that our loud voices were accepted.

I often hear women’s voices supporting dubious political positions; we seem to take jobs to speak for the men who make the decisions, often harmful ones, but before judging the rightness of this behavior, I must remember that we have never been able to achieve Equal Pay for Equal Work, and until we do, women will go where they can find a paycheck, preferably a large one, and make marriages of convenience to older men who seemed likely to support them generously—until years later the older husband dies and leaves his estate to his children for an earlier marriage.

We need a Gogol to write about all this distortion; I don’t aim to follow in his footsteps but I am working on a story where a man says openly and without shame that what he values in a woman lover or partner is her money.

In Politics Radcliffe Harvard Favorites of 2023