Op-Ed: Response to "Women's History Month"

Conversations about women’s and gender issues are alive and well at Middlebury. Throughout the school year, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Chellis House, the Women’s Resource Center, organize roughly 60 events. Each February, we look at the intersections of race and gender, as exemplified in the WAGS and Chellis-supported “What is Color” series, organized by the student group Women of Color. March is dedicated to women’s history. During Gaypril, we look at issues of gender and sexuality. While the different “theme months” provide us with a red thread, we by no means restrict ourselves to covering merely one theme during a particular time period. If a speaker happens to be in the area or is only available on a certain date, we still make events happen.

This brings me to my next point: the work involved in organizing events. Any student who has ever tried to bring an event to campus can attest to the fact that it takes hours upon hours to have a successful outcome. In your article Feb. 25 “Women’s History Month celebrates 127 years of coeducation,” your writers criticize Chellis House, stating that the events for women’s history were badly advertised. They probably overlooked the fact that the programming for the women’s history month event series was emailed to the whole campus on Feb. 9 as well as subsequent reminders for single events. In addition, the College’s Web calendar lists events on a daily basis. For our big-name speaker Helen Benedict, we sent out an all-campus e-mail and hung up 70 posters all around campus.

I have often heard that students don’t read e-mails, yet, if you send them too many, they get upset. At an environmentally conscious campus as ours, paper posters are also frowned upon. I would therefore like to invite suggestions on how to best advertise events. It seems to me that organizers are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Helen Benedict’s lecture was organized in cooperation with St. Michael’s College, one of our “neighboring counterparts,” as your writers call them in their article. To my knowledge, Ms. Benedict’s lecture was the ONLY event at St. Michael’s for women’s history month. The women’s center at UVM organized six special events on their campus of 15,000. By comparison, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Chellis House organized eight events for a student population of 2,500. When your writers claim that Women’s History Month is celebrated “with less vigor” at Middlebury than at “neighboring counterparts,” they do not seem to be basing this claim on any research.

Your interviewee Lark Nierenberg wondered “how much conversation [and inspiration] comes from [celebrating women’s history month].” Judging from animated discussions at Chellis House and at other events, I cannot help but think that participants are stimulated intellectually and spiritually. Ms. Nierenberg herself is scheduled to give a talk for Gaypril at Chellis House on April 1. Your interviewee Ariel Smith remarked that nobody gave a “s**t about Black History Month [or Women’s History Month].” Many of our events, like Julia Alvarez’s lecture on March 10 (article “Alvarez ‘colors’ gender discussion”) are filled to the last seat. Some people do seem to care, after all.

And since this paper also serves as a promotional forum, I would like to invite the campus to our annual Gensler Endowment/CCSRE Symposium “Interrogating Citizenship: Sex, Class, Race, and Regimes of Power” on April 2 and 3. This symposium looks at how sexuality, class and race have affected the concept of citizenship in projects of nation building, war, empire and labor mobilization. The conversation continues ...