Women's History, or White Women's History?

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 This week, our group completed the final presentation on women's activism at Kenyon. Our group's timeline spans from 1969, when Kenyon welcomed its first female students and its first tenured female professor, to around 2000. During this period, we continuously observed female students and organizations, and, later, non-gender-specific people promoting a female-friendly environment at the school through club activities, posters, and other forms of expression. Even though we did not selectively fabricate any materials to create the illusion of continuous and active feminist activism at Kenyon, we did discover another issue: while the history of women at Kenyon is something we can be proud of, it seems to only include white women. We did not find records of activism by women of color, which is especially obvious from looking at the visual materials, it was only white women who were represented.

This week, we learned three concepts of reckoning, restoration, and reconciliation, which represent critical steps in uniting different groups of people by addressing the past and moving toward the future. Reckoning involves confronting and acknowledging the wrongs of the past, understanding the harm done to others, and accepting the need for change. Restoration is about bringing back values, systems, or rights that may have been lost or denied, seeking to restore balance and justice. Reconciliation is the process of healing and repairing relationships between groups, creating a shared understanding and unity moving forward. Together, these concepts form a pathway from understanding and addressing historical wrongs to creating a more harmonious future. In The Struggle for The People's King, the attempt to reckon with a past rooted in racial tensions is crucial in helping Black women and white women, who now share common interests, achieve gender victories. This is primarily because the intersectionality of complex racial and gender oppression means that Black women are often unable to gain the same benefits within a gender movement still largely dominated by white women. Therefore, as long as racial discrimination persists, Black women will remain the disadvantaged group within the gender movement. Additionally, the appropriation of some ideas from Black women’s activism by white women makes reckoning with the past even more crucial. This process is necessary to ensure that the struggles and contributions of Black women are fully acknowledged and valued, and that their voices are not marginalized or co-opted in the pursuit of gender equality.

In our presentation, we did not specifically go through the reckoning process and we automatically assumed we would reach a Reconciliation. This may be due to the fact that the intersectionality between racial and gender oppression is not as salient today on campus as in society. However, it is still crucial to recognize that Kenyon’s history of women’s activism primarily reflects the history and experiences of white women's activism. This historical gap underscores the need to broaden our research approach to include the perspectives of women of color, whose voices have often been overshadowed. If we aim to conduct a more comprehensive study of Kenyon’s feminist history that go through the three stages, we should also consider materials that address the college's racial inclusion history, allowing us to better understand how race and gender intersected in shaping the experiences of all women at Kenyon, not just those from dominant racial groups.



References

Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

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