Word: von
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last Friday night Joan Baez and Eric von Schmidt sang folk songs in Agassiz Theatre, under the aegis of the Harvard Liberal Union. Young Liberals hoping to hear even one "song of social protest" were disappointed, for the program was arranged under the widely-held and peculiar assumption that everything sung by a folk singer (even essentially conservative songs like many of the ones that Miss Baez sings) partake in some way of the yeasty liberal mythos...
Some of the most delightful moments of the evening came in songs which Miss Baez and Mr. von Schmidt sang together. Mr. von Schmidt revealed himself as an adept at the harmonica and both singers played on a cylinder of paper which makes a sound doubtless rarely before heard in the civilized world...
...VON STADE'S final point is even more revealing. Hoping he is "not being anti-feminist," he concludes that "the relative transference of responsibility" for social welfare to women seems to him "utterly unrealistic." But it is not responsibility that von Stade means, it is power. This is sexual politics. Harvard's responsibility to society (or to the nation, as Pusey puts it) is expressed by denying equally qualified women admission to the University. "Responsibility" means the perpetuation of power, the perpetuation of a closed system denying freedom, or even equality, to women...
...member of the power structure at Harvard, von Stade has destroyed the illusions of women in Harvard-Radcliffe. We are encouraged to believe that we are among the select few who will be allowed to become active participants in our society only to meet with institutional discrimination in undergraduate and graduate admission, in faculty hiring and promotion. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as having the power to define our own lives-only to meet with Harvard's definition of us as excluded by our sex from fulfillment of our individual and social potential. Von Stade makes very clear...
...society of which it is a part. Women in the University are made schizophrenic by the conflicting demands placed upon us. We are supposed to be intellectuals, in search of productive lives, and to be women, in search of our identity through a man and his children. But von Stade offers us a false analysis of the causes of this phenomenon. We do not all become "bright, well-educated, relatively dull housewives" out of biological necessity, but because of a society-and a University-that forces us to conform to the traditional female role...