Feminists

As a grad student, I teach undergrads and many of the most talkative are women. There are others, however, I call on just because I don't hear from them enough. Among the grad students, women students have much to say, all of it is worthwhile and some of it is quite brilliant. Many of our faculty, including some of its brightest stars, are women. All that is true of the men as well, but in this culture, that is assumed.

Granted, I'm talking about academia where people are unusually well informed. I realize this is not how things are in "the world." Hopefully, advances made in niche areas like academia will eventually spread to the wider society.

Speaking of brilliant things female graduate students say, we were talking about this very issue in one class. Specifically, we were discussing how nuns in colonial Latin America used the space of the convent to exercise agency in the patriarchy and that the power structure in the convent was a female version of the patriarchy in miniature. We quibbled over whether it was not actually a matriarchy. I asked if it were, would it not be based on consensus-building rather than top-down management. One of the other students pointed out that the idea that consensus-building is a feminine characteristic is itself a patriarchal construct that our society has internalized. In an actual matriarchal society, there is no reason to think that the women would not be as authoritarian as male leaders now are.