"Harvard Heard Women, Alright"

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Harvard administration’s recent decision to sanction unrecognized single-gender social organizations—including sororities and women’s final clubs—is not the result of Harvard somehow not listening to women.

It is the result of the Harvard administration after decades—after centuries—finally hearing feminist critique.

For generations, Harvard feminists and activists have advocated for the sanctioning or disbanding of final clubs. Now that we have it, new debates on gender and inclusiveness have come to the fore.

This debate recently took to the streets—or the Yard, where around 200 students, mostly women, protested the recent decision under the banner #hearherharvard. These women claim that sororities and female final clubs are spaces of female empowerment, and that pressuring them to go co-ed along with their male counterparts will exacerbate the problems of sexism the administration is trying to combat.

To many of us who have long been part of the struggle against clubs, these arguments are wrong-headed, to say the least, and at worst blatantly reactionary. Let’s walk through a couple of them to come to a deeper understanding of gender and of what it means to create inclusive spaces. I’m confident that when we do, we’ll find that this decision can only improve women’s and marginalized people’s experiences on campus.'