Women in campus: Embracing feminism and facing the future | Business Mirror

Photo: Eilene Zimmerman

"ONE of the things Tina Campt, a professor and director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, has noticed about the young women in her classes is their radically open notion of sexuality and gender." says Eilene Zimmerman / New York Times News Service.

This March 23 photo shows Alexa Dantzler, who sees a dearth of minority women in the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and mathematics, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. 
Photo: Audra Melton/The New York Times

“These students want the freedom to express who they are without the constraints of choices, such as either a woman or man, heterosexual or homosexual,” Campt said. “Those categories no longer carry a definitional value.”

Women now account for the majority of college students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 11.3 million of them as compared with 8.7 million men. And 63 percent identify as feminist. Their concerns run the gamut, from sexual assault and poverty to affordable education, immigration and reproductive rights, said Alison Dahl Crossley, the associate director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

Both Campt and Crossley, who is also author of the book Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution, say women today are in a world that is profoundly different from what it was a generation ago, so they are having to create ways of coping with new challenges, the same as previous generations did.
 
“The structure of the economy, of family and of work is very, very different,” Campt said.

She said young women today were entering an economy with fewer work opportunities and much more debt. It is also an era in which feminist activism and education happen in both the physical world and the virtual one, often through blogs and social media.

One thing that surprised Crossley about the college women she studied was their wholehearted embrace of feminism. “They spoke about how feminism permeated their worldview and their interactions and the relationships they had in their everyday lives,” she said. We spoke to female undergraduates at colleges around the country to find out what issues they were most concerned about and what feminism meant to them. Their comments have been edited and condensed.
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Source: Business Mirror