Word: clubs
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Therefore, as long as final club injustices exist, they can’t simply be written off as irrelevant to the larger Harvard social community...
This imbalance of control creates a perverse need for women to curry favor with the men who make the lists. "As a girl, you feel all this social anxiety," another female senior says. "You constantly need to manage your relationships with your male friends in clubs to make sure you don’t get left by the wayside." This dependence consistently and systematically puts women into situations they should never have to experience. A female student explains that the need to remain on final club lists "has sustained certain friendships with guys who are constantly hosting me, who otherwise...
Even the most sought-after girls, who never struggle to gain admission to exclusive parties, get, as Schuyler aptly put it, "second-class citizenship" in the final club nation. A world of male hosts and female guests creates a fundamental asymmetry in gender relations. Women can’t return the hospitality that is constantly bestowed upon them. Since they don’t have social space of their own to give or withhold, they’re simply expected to, as one female student put it, "smile and look pretty...
Schuyler told me about the moment when this inequality dawned on her. At a club with her friends, she realized: "It was very subtle, but the girls had this feeling that if I do this, these boys will think I’m fun, and they need to think I’m fun because I need to be invited to these parties, and this is where the parties...
...recent years, as the movement to integrate final clubs has sputtered out, efforts to remedy these problems have come to focus on creating all-female social space to serve as a counterweight to the male clubs. The trend began in 1991, when the Bee was founded with the help of Porcellian grads who wanted to grant their daughters something resembling the social experience they had enjoyed in college. By the late 1990s, the Seneca (not technically a final club, but founded with the express purpose of changing Harvard gender dynamics) had joined the mix. With the new millennium came...