To shame her and sunder her relationship with her community, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne was ordered to wear an embroidered scarlet A for the sin of adultery. Prynne’s judges intended that burning symbol to show other women and girls the humiliation awaiting them if they followed Hester’s example. But to Hester, the symbol came to represent her commitment to her principles.

Perhaps today’s young women should follow Hester’s lead and wear an embroidered letter A on their breasts. Their A would not be scarlet, but gold, the color of the nineteenth-century American women’s suffrage movement. It would stand not for adultery, but for advocacy, an act far more dangerous and transformational. Much like Hester Prynne, who refused to apologize for behavior that challenged the norms of her community, today’s women could wear their As with pride.

Finding a Political Voice for Justice

Being an advocate literally means to speak or argue for a cause, and finding voice has been a hallmark of feminist theory and action. Feminist education has aimed not simply to help a woman find her voice, but to challenge her to use her voice to make the world more equitable. Women have assumed with some comfort the appropriateness of their leadership as activists. But they often seem more at ease if their activism is out of the limelight, behind the scenes, and away from the microphone. For example, women take on a myriad of leadership roles in campus service learning and volunteer activities on behalf of local and global communities. But although research has linked such activities to many positive capabilities, political efficacy is not one of them (Spiezio 2002).

Of course, the existing political structures hardly encourage women to make these connections. Women head only 8 percent of United Nations delegations, and only twenty-two countries in the entire world have more than 25 percent of elected legislators who are female. As the world prepares for the Olympics in Beijing next year, we would be wise to remember an earlier United Nations meeting there in 1995. It has now been thirteen years since the UN adopted the women’s Platform for Action, calling on governments to ensure “women’s equal access to and full participation in power structures and decision making” (Seager 2006). But only a few countries, including the resurrected Rwanda, have taken that call seriously.

Even in the United States, reputedly the oldest democracy on the globe, only 16 percent of congressional representatives are women (Seager 2006). For all the historic breakthroughs of Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency, her experience made it clear how difficult it is to run as the woman you really are, or in Barack Obama’s case, as the multiracial man you really are. We learned this primary season that a woman running for president needs to chug beer with the best of the men, be verbally aggressive in keeping with the code, and threaten to bomb other countries to obliteration as much as any commander in chief has ever done. Until women can alter the terms on which they run for public office, and the means they will use once in office to secure their aims, the number of women in the political circuit is likely to remain quite low.

A Different Kind of Politics and A Different Kind of Education

The United States could learn a lesson from Liberia, where women organized politically, publicly, and at great risk to demand a different kind of public politics. As recounted in Gini Reticker’s film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, at the height of the civil war--when the killing, maiming, displacement, and corruption seemed the only reality--some women decided they had had enough. In public defiance and at enormous personal risk, Leymah Ghowee and her compatriots organized their peace movement. They donned distinctive white garb, helped force the warring sides to the negotiating table, and barricaded the men in the building until they crafted a peace agreement. When the women had accomplished that goal, they registered women to vote in unprecedented numbers and elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia’s president, the first and only woman head of state in all of Africa.

It should be possible to educate women for political engagement under other circumstances too. AAC&U’s College Learning for the New Global Century insists on this possibility as it “calls for a far-reaching shift in the focus of schooling from accumulating course credits to building real world capabilities” (2007). It articulates those capabilities in its Principles of Excellence, one of which is students’ ability to connect knowledge with choice and action. The curriculum needs to challenge students to apply their knowledge to address complex problems that have no easy solutions. The authors of Educating for Democracy give specific examples of the kinds of courses that hone students’ intellectual and practical skills in these areas (2007). Students also need opportunities to practice their leadership through cocurricular activities. The fifteen students from Rollins College who attended the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in May under the mentorship of the assistant director of the Multicultural Center serve as a good example of this kind of engagement.

The academy could be a petri dish of public leadership by modeling “women’s equal access to and full participation in power structures and decision making” on campus. As articles in this issue of OCWW attest, while there has been progress, there is much work still to be done. 

Daring to Go for the Gold

It is more important than ever that young women in colleges and universities be challenged to wear embroidered golden As. They are part of the solution. They are, as the saying goes, the very leaders they--and the rest of us—are waiting for. But they will need their voices, and they will need to step up to the microphone. If they waver, they might turn for inspiration to Paula Giddings’s biography of Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008). In Wells’s singular life, they will find an investigative journalist, a political activist, a suffragist, and an organizer. Wells defied the white supremacist hierarchy in Memphis and barely escaped with her life. She organized the Anti-Lynching Campaign, helping to end a period of state-sanctioned terrorism in the black community. She mobilized women’s power by establishing the Negro Women’s Club Movement. She reminded white suffragists that if they wanted to usher in a new democratic era in American life, they needed to include women of color in the struggle. And she defied the imposition of segregation while marching in public with a golden suffragist sash.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2007. College Learning for the New Global Century. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Colby, A., E. Beaumont, T. Ehrlich, and J. Corngold. 2007. Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Giddings, P. 2008. Ida: A Sword Among Lions. New York: HarperCollins.

Reticker, G. 2008. Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Seager, J. 2006. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. New York: Penguin Books.

Spiezio, K. E. 2002. Pedagogy and political (dis)engagement. Liberal Education 88 (4).