Career Day Speech at Padua Academy

I'm glad to be here today, but I have to admit I'm also intimidated by the challenge of trying to say something to you that actually makes sense. I want to--and I will--say something to you about the value of same-sex education in comparison with traditional co-educational learning environments. Yet I feel it would be wrong for me to limit myself to simply talking about the benefits of same-sex education.

The truth of the matter is that on Career Day it would be completely irresponsible of me not to also mention some of the challenges that you as young women will face when you enter the work world. In the final analysis, the question of how you confront those challenges will say something about the quality of the education you received here at Padua.

I know that this was true for me. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated that I was able, at a time when I felt swamped and defeated by the world, to draw on my Padua experience as a source of strength. There I was in my early thirties, my marriage hadn't worked out, and I was raising my daughter in spite of the fact that I was a single mother with limited skills. In order to get by during those days, I worked a variety of low-paying jobs, including salesperson, waitress, race-track ticket-taker and barmaid. Eventually, in spite of working full-time, I went back to school and earned a Bachelor of Arts and then a law degree. The law school student body was less than 10% female and, with one exception, the teachers were all white males. For 12 years now I have been a lawyer and business woman in a basically male-dominated occupation. Over the years I have also become an active feminist and a relatively successful campaign manager for local grassroots political campaigns.

I mention my few accomplishments not because I think they're so important, but because I believe that attending an all-girls high school provided me with something that a low-income girl from Browntown wouldn't have found in a co-ed school in the late 1950s. That "something" was this: an educational environment which allowed teenaged girls to discover a large number of same-sex role models both among their peers and among their teachers.

Although at the time I didn't appreciate the psychological value of such a "women's environment," I later learned just how important that environment was in giving me the courage to battle, in my own small way, against the restrictions that many of our society's institutions place upon women. Much more now than I did then, I appreciate teachers like Sister Carmellia who taught here in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a language teacher whose powerful intellect and strength as a woman were a source of inspiration that I drew on, a few years after I graduated, as I tried to overcome my own insecurities as a woman and to make something of myself.

Unfortunately, many of the difficulties that women of my generation had to face in terms of our being treated less equally than men are still faced by women today. And those difficulties don't begin after you graduate from high school; it is sad but true that those difficulties are often fostered by the very educational system that is supposed to treat young women and young men equally.

Let me refer to a recent study by the American Association of University Women in order to give you a quick idea of how traditional co-educational settings promote inequity between the sexes. That study which is called "How Schools Shortchange Girls" was published just this year. According to the study, co-ed schools encourage girls, in a variety of ways, to see themselves as less able than boys. A few of the ways that the study documents are--

ONEne. Girls receive less attention from classroom teachers than do boys.

TWO. Textbooks are deficient in terms of including female role models and also in terms of adequately exploring women's role in history.

THREE. Boys receive more scholarships to college, even when girls have the same grades.

FOUR. The sexual harassment of females by males in traditional educational settings has been increasing during the last two decades.

The psychological consequences of such biased behavior within the American educational system are not surprising. The young women who emerge from that system feel less self-esteem, less adventurous about their futures, less inclined to take risks, and less convinced of their individual worth than do their male counterparts. As the "How Schools Shortchange Girls" study shows, during the transition from childhood to adolescence twice as many girls as boys suffer a loss of self-assurance. This is because the girls internalize the "women are less than men" message that contaminates most American education. How sad it is that education, which should be an empowering process, is so often a killer of the female spirit, rather than a liberator of that spirit.

Although you may not realize it now, the all-girls educational environment which you are a part of is providing you with a solid psychological and emotional foundation for your life-choices. You will need this foundation to pursue your goals in the world without caving in to some of the anti-female bias you will have to face. As a number of nation-wide investigations have shown: in comparison with their counterparts in co-ed environments, girls in all-girls schools have higher test scores, greater self-esteem, are more ambitious in their career and academic goals, and are more self-disciplined. These psychological or emotional traits, whether you realize it or not, are traceable to what I would call the culture of the all-girls-school environment. In schools like Padua girls are more exposed, than they would be in a traditional co-ed setting, to strong female role models; and they are also more likely to take on leadership roles. This kind of educational atmosphere strengthens young women like yourselves for the social-economic battles you will surely face in the real world after finishing your education.

And if you don't believe that the battles I'm talking about are real, listen to some of the following facts--

ONE. Study after study shows that women are paid less than men, even when the women perform the same jobs. More than 85% of America's working females believe they are the victims of job discrimination and unequal pay.

TWO. Across the country, women make up an ever-growing majority of the nation's poverty population.

THREE. Less than one-third of U. S. working women with children can afford daycare for their off-spring.

FOUR. Among the industrialized nations, the U. S. government stands out as providing no family-leave and child-care programs. This is in keeping with the fact that, unlike in the other industrialized nations, in the U. S. more than 98% of the nation's private businesses provide no child-care to their employees.

FIVE. In Delaware 7 out of 10 working women earn less than $13,000 a year.

SIX. Our government's inability to provide serious leadership with regard to combating violence against women continues to undermine U. S. life. The spectacle, about a year ago, of Anita Hill being humiliated before millions of TV viewers by an insensitive, boys-club Senate revealed the useless mindset that many politicians bring to the question of sexual harassment, which is one of the most prevalent types of sexual violence against women.

I mention such realities not to scare you, but in order to make the following point: that although Padua's all-girls environment may sometimes bore you and seem to you less appealing than a co-ed setting, there is a culture here of female strength that can--and will if you let it--serve you well in the long run. For your own well-being as human beings, you must tap into that culture of strength and empower yourselves with it so you can freely pursue your destinies and fight for your rights when necessary. There is no reason in the world why a girl or a woman should be denied her dreams just because of her gender.

Yet having said this, I must also point out that it is not enough for us to think of ourselves only in terms of our gender. Although it is true that women are economically and culturally discriminated against in our society, we have to ask ourselves the question, "What's the best way for us to use our knowledge of this discrimination?"

I believe we must use our knowledge of this discrimination not to cut ourselves off from the rest of society, but to connect ourselves to others in our society. After all, since we ourselves must battle educational, economic and cultural bigotries, we should be able to use our experience as a way for reaching out to others who've had similar experiences. Our experience of struggling against the odds in order to discover our full potential as human beings--this experience should be our link with others who also must struggle.

Take the problems of African-Americans as an example.

Over the last decade, the African-American community, while having to fight as usual against all the social-economic varieties of racism that exist in America, also had to fight against the devastation caused by a worsening economy. During the last decade the African-American unemployment rate averaged approximately twice that of whites and one of the consequences of this economic downturn in the black community was that the percentage of black high school graduates who attended college went down. Meanwhile, acts of violent racism have been on the rise in the country at large. From Bensonhurst, New York, to Los Angeles, California, to Claymont, Delaware, incidents of white vs. people of color violence rose over the last decade. The reality of such violence was made clear to us by the Rodney King situation in LA, which highlighted both the problem of racism and the problem of the despair caused by urban decay. The video image of King on his hands and knees being beaten and kicked by so-called law enforcement officers touched a nerve in a majority of Americans, as if most of us could identify with King's powerlessness. After the trial of King's attackers, we were equally shocked by the urban rebellion that followed the acquittal of those attackers: LA in flames seemed to symbolize the fact that our nation was spiraling out of control racially, economically, politically.

As young women thinking about your futures, you have the chance to confront and change such problems. You will have the opportunity to say yes to what's best in our communities and to say no to what's worst in our communities. You will have a chance to say, through your career choices as well as through you decisions concerning the kinds of lives you want to lead, that just as you want for yourselves the same freedom that men have, so you want for all people the right not to be oppressed by social-economic bigotries and biases.

I hope with all my heart that when your time comes, you proclaim such things to the society you live in. I hope you use your female and human potential to achieve useful, satisfying lives and to transform the world.

In conclusion, let me say this--

As you know, just the day before yesterday we had a presidential election. Although the voter turnout was higher than during the last two presidential elections, the turnout was still exceptionally low by international standards: almost half of the U. S. population didn't vote.

For the most part people don't refuse to vote because they are lazy; rather they don't vote because they sense that something is wrong with our nation's political and economic health and they feel powerless to do anything about it. This sense of powerlessness is what we as a people must overcome. The way to do this is for those without power to reach out to each other. The woman who suffers from job discrimination, the gay person who is harassed on the street, the auto worker afraid of losing her or his job, and everyone else who feels abandoned--all must work together in a new kind of coalition.

I hope that many of you, as you pursue your careers and your lives, will help to lead the nation in such a direction. I know that your education at Padua Academy will prove invaluable as you struggle--with God's help--to achieve your goals.

Thank you.

PEOPLE FIRST IN THE FIRST STATE: IT'S ABOUT TIME