The Educated Woman’s Paradox

1 Credit · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The world is not fair to educated women. Sometimes injustice works against them; other times they are beneficiaries of inequity. As you prepare to leave the Hilltop with your Georgetown degree, you on one hand face a world where no amount of education safeguards women against the apparent ability of powerful and privileged men to harass them with impunity, while Serena Williams (not to mention the entire U.S. women’s soccer team) can wildly outperform all rivals and still be underpaid and demeaned for behavior widely lauded in men. But on the other hand, you also face a world where a Georgetown degree sets female graduates apart from the increasing number of girls worldwide who cannot attend school of any kind and insulates them from the problems facing the billions worldwide who do not have access to basic necessities like clean water. Facing this odd juxtaposition ranks as one of the greatest challenges facing young women college graduates, and it catches most of them completely unaware. The point is not to nurture a sense of grievance or to tell today’s graduates they should be grateful for how good they have it. The point is that a paradox rests squarely at the center of the 21 st century female graduate’s existence. So let’s take some time this semester to recognize this paradox, think honestly about it, and imagine ways of navigating it. We will use the practice of close reading to explore the drive to use one’s intellectual passions to serve human need in a world that often tries to mock or blunt such desires, especially in young, educated people whose energy and brains just might upset the status quo in some way. In sum, this course provides a place for students to have necessary and sustaining conversations as they prepare to leave a place that has fostered the life of the mind in young women and encouraged the view that such a life should be lived in service to humanity, to enter a world ambivalent about the notion of educated women and cynical about the desire to serve. This course will help students to cultivate inner resources that tell them that both “intellectual” and “passion” matter, and that they can and will find ways to live lives true to both.