I Am A Feminist

This past week I have been attending the Leadership Institute at Brown University. Through this institute, I have taken a class on Women and Leadership. When I signed up for this class, I was expecting that these two weeks would be solely consisted of a professor lecturing at me about different women who are considered leaders in society and how they got there. To my pleasant surprise, the course is not like that at all.

On the first day of class the professor had everyone introduce themselves. She told us to give our first names, where we are from, and our preferred pronouns. The format of this introduction left me with two thoughts. The first, was how liberating it felt to be at a college where even the professors ask for preferred pronouns. The second, how on earth am I going to remember the names of all 22 of my classmates. After we finished introducing ourselves, the professor went over the syllabus, and I was very excited to find out that this class was discussion based.

Every night we are assigned readings that will help prepare us for the discussions that we have each class. These discussions have been about intersectionality, the glass ceiling, the general experiences of women, sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Through these discussion we've talked about how the different aspects of our personality can cause us to be privileged or oppressed. These aspects include: race, ethnicity, family, religion/ faith, biological sex, age, sexual orientation, hobbies/interests, political beliefs, abilities/ disabilities, educational experience, gender/ identity, social class, and ancestry.

During lunch we have activities called "Lunch and Learn." In one of the activities we had to break traditional gender roles and see how people respond to how we are acting. What me and a group of my friends decided to do was walk around campus without wearing a bra. We chose to do this because it is a societal expectation that women wear bras under their clothing. This experience wasn't at all weird for me because I am so used to not wearing a bra. Though I did become a little insecure when I was leaning over a table to talk to one of my friends because if someone were to look, they could see right down my shirt. We did not get any backlash about the fact that we weren't wearing a bra, but we were able to engage in a very interesting conversation.

One of the girls in our group decided to go up to a table that a group of boys were sitting at and start talking to them. Eventually the rest of us joined. We asked them if they were made uncomfortable by the fact that we weren't wearing a bra. They said that they hardly noticed we weren't wearing a bra and that they thought bras were supposed to be helpful to women. This conversation opened my eyes to just how little men know about women's experiences. We had a long conversation about how inconvenient bras were for women, like me, that have small boobs. We also explained that even though they are supposed to be for support they aren't necessarily for comfort.

This was one of the most fun lunches I've ever had because I got to meet new people and we had a very interesting conversation. I am so glad that I decided to participate in the Brown Pre-College Program and can't wait to see what I am going to learn as this next week goes by.

#feminism #BrownUniversity #PreCollege #Women #leadership #intersectionality