Word: finaling
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Schuyler H. Daum ’12 is the kind of girl that female final clubs fight over during punch season. But this fall it dawned on her that something wasn’t quite right with the world that accepted her so readily. "My best friends have been boys since the time I was born," she notes. In a social scene divided by gender, however, she went from companion to guest. "I’d get invited over for Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights," Daum found, but her male hosts would never accept her?...
Schuyler is notable because she is willing to speak openly about the interplay of gender and power at Harvard final clubs. But her experience is not uncommon. The dominance of single-sex social institutions creates a variety of unsavory consequences for many women across this campus...
...course, these consequences don’t necessarily apply to everyone. Final clubs are just one side of a multifaceted social scene. Only 15 percent of students belong, and while many more are loosely affiliated, a decent number of undergrads make it through their entire four years at Harvard without ever stepping through one of the clubs’ heavy wooden doors. But the existence of alternatives does not eliminate the problem. Many women may not participate in final club culture, but many others do—as long as some suffer from gender discrimination, the issue is not resolved...
...legendary criminal Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. "Because that’s where the money is," the gangster replied. A similar answer could be given to anyone who questions why women continue to frequent the clubs that exclude them: that’s where the parties are. Final clubs have unfettered access to social space that simply doesn’t exist outside their walls. Telling women (or men) who are sick of segregation to just go somwhere else doesn’t cut it because there really isn’t anywhere else at Harvard quite like...
Therefore, as long as final club injustices exist, they can’t simply be written off as irrelevant to the larger Harvard social community...