September 24, 2007
Jane Jimenez
This year at Smith College, in the Connecticut River valley of western Massachusetts, according to their website, a “world-class faculty of scholars are fully engaged with their students’ intellectual development, and an open curriculum encourages each student to explore many fields of knowledge.”
At this nation’s largest college for women, 24 course offerings explore what it means to be a woman. The “Seminar on Gender and Social Change” sums it all up: students explore “the intersection of race, class and sexual orientation” as they are revealed in “case studies [to] include feminist, lesbian and gay, right-wing, self help, anti-abortion, and pro-choice movements.” In short, being a Smith kind of woman requires a motherly embrace of abortion.
Whether it is Smith College or Harvard or Columbia or any American university, young women…and men…are being taught that abortion is the ultimate feminist right that guarantees the ability of women to succeed in life. If you are pro-woman, you are required to be pro-abortion.
Woe to any student who might enter college holding a reverence for life. This is the kind of “mistaken notion” that will cause the ire and ridicule of professors to fall upon on her, doom her to Cs and lower on papers and deny her access to fellowships and faculty positions. In most cases, these women will survive. They will be converted.
Battered from every side, our college daughters will eventually come to believe that no self-respecting woman could ever claim to be pro-life. In a curriculum closed to real academic inquiry, they will never hear the truth about Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wrote feminist papers opposing abortion and infanticide in The Revolution, a newspaper she published with Susan B. Anthony.
Neither are college professors likely to disclose Stanton’s letter to Julia Ward Howe, the creator of Mother’s Day, where she wrote, “When we consider that woman are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to dispose of as we see fit.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton is not the only woman college professors choose to neglect. Not surprisingly, their slate of “undesirables” includes all women who embrace the life-giving capacity inherent in the very nature of being a woman…Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Dorothy Day…and many others. The curriculum at Smith College may be advertised as “open”, but not that open.
Luckily, college is not the only place where one can get an education. Thanks to modern feminists who are reclaiming the definition of what it means to be a woman., it is possible to join the company of real feminists, both past and present, who affirm the value of every human life, no matter how small or humble it may be.
Like those who paved the way before them, Feminists for Life has refused to be controlled by the politics of abortion. Believing in the strength of women and the potential of every human life, FFL President Serrin Foster has built a strong force of women reaching out to women with information and support. We deserve better than abortion…we deserve better choices.
This year Feminists for Life has gathered a group of eloquent women speakers who tell it like it is…what it means to be a woman. Traveling to university campuses around the country, they are truly engaging the students’ intellectual development, presenting case studies which illustrate the feminist case against abortion.
Finally, our daughters entering college do not have to accept the status quo dished out by college professors who want to indoctrinate with a pro-abortion bias. Feminists for Life has paved a way to truth. We can help.
Think of the young women in your life who are in college. Tell them about Feminists for Life and the full range of resources they offer to college students: helping with abortion research projects, providing pregnancy resources and leading campus workshops and lectures.
Taking heart from women who have paved the way, it’s time for freshmen entering Smith College…and any other college…to teach their professors a thing or two. Considering what it means to be a woman…when you are talking about abortion…we deserve better.
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When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society – so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.
Mattie Brinkerhoff, The Revolution, 1869