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Old 12-31-2012, 11:40 PM
UofM-TKE UofM-TKE is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Willow Grove, PA
Posts: 92
My experience about this is from the view of a fraternity guy during the era when feminism was young: the '70s, but I think that it may be of interest to some. We need to know where we were to know where we are.

When I was a Pledge, our school still made all of the women sign in and out of the dorms in the evening (much like Emily Dickenson College in Animal House), and the sororities were not housed because they needed to be 'kept safe'. There were other restrictions and assumptions implied by the In Loco Parentis attitude as well.

But within a few years, this had all been swept aside and everyone was treated equally. I'm not saying that all was perfect, only that there was general equality between the genders on the part of the school.

This change was largely caused by the women themselves. The female campus leadership, the most active and visible women, and the women who were willing to help out whenever the school asked for a favor, were almost always sorority women, so they had influence. These 17 through 21 years olds changed a lot of ossified attitudes of self-important men.

Many of the sorority women that I knew, would not have considered themselves Feminists while others would, but in matters of equality like these, they were all together.

They would never put what happened back then as "They all stood together to ....". They would think that that would be making too much of it. They just knew what was right. They choose their sisterhood. They chose to live their lives according to their own principles. They choose to be treated as equals, so they were.
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