Word: worldly
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While the rest of the world moves towards gender equality, Harvard’s eight all-male final clubs have stubbornly remained on the wrong side of history. Two decades ago, the last of Princeton’s eating clubs discontinued its practice of gender discrimination after a protracted legal battle that included two failed appeals to the Supreme Court. The next year, Skull and Bones, Yale’s famous secret society, voted to accept women following a contentious public fight that pitted renowned grads like John F. Kerry and William F. Buckley, Jr. against one another. But somehow...
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?...
...male final clubs carve out a corner of the social world that revolves around the preferences of men, and men alone. Men plan the parties. Men decide who gets in and who does not. Women are left to suffer the consequences...
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...
...strange and sad that in the 21st century, at a place like Harvard, this is how the most intelligent, successful, capable women in the world have to interact with their male classmates...