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From: karen@randvax.UUCP (Karen E. Isaacson)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Single Sex Colleges
Message-ID: <2412@randvax.UUCP>
Date: 19 Feb 90 19:31:48 GMT
Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Reply-To: twinsun!usc.edu!karen%rand-unix.UUCP (Karen E. Isaacson)
Organization: RAND Corp., Santa Monica, Ca.
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Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Status: R


There has been quite a discussion raging in soc.women and soc.men
about women only colleges.  Some of the points raised in that
discussion include:
     Pro -
	o Women learn to be more assertive in such colleges.
	  After graduation, they tend to perform better in graduate
	  school and on the job.
     Con -
	o Non-assertive men need assertiveness training, too.
	  (Tangent: would these men benefit from attending a
	  college where the majority of the students were women?)
	o Tit for tat: if we allow women only colleges, then we
	  should allow men only colleges.

For me, the issues raised are both logical and pragmatism.  Logic
dictates that _any_ form of discrimination is wrong.  So either
there should be no single sex colleges at all, or we should have
no problems with men only colleges.  Pragmatism says that women
only colleges have good results (as several posters have testified),
and closing them down for "logical" reasons just seems silly.

If a women only college converted to co-ed, how much less effective
would it be for the women students that found it so rewarding?
Wouldn't that depend on how many men attended?  I suspect that there
are relatively few men who would attend.  (Aren't several of the
traditional women's colleges co-ed these days, and isn't the number
of men attending these institutions fairly small?)  Does a college
or class have to be 100% female in order to empower the participants,
or would a smaller majority do?  And would the average male student
at a women's college interact in the same way as the average male
student at a co-ed college?  (I'd guess that there would be some
self selection, and that the male students at a women's college
might be less assertive than those at a co-ed college.  Does anyone
have any experience or information about this?)

The other thing that has been troubling me about the discussion
is how quickly we all dismiss the potential benefits to men of
men only colleges.  There's a tendency to assume we are talking
about schools like Harvard and Yale that were traditionally for
men.  And yes, I'd be very disturbed about a "top" school (however
we define it) being single sex.  But I don't think either Harvard
or Yale would revert, even if they had the opportunity.  Times _have_
changed.  So suppose we aren't talking about Ivy League colleges.
Suppose we are talking about small regional liberal arts schools
with good but hardly earthshaking reputations.  What would be the
benefits to the students of a school like this if the students were
either entirely or mostly male?  Would there be parallel effects:
women at women's colleges learn to be more assertive, would the men
at a men's college learn to be more sensitive or be in better touch
with their emotions or...?  (I can't even pose this question sensibly --
I really don't understand what it is like to be a man in today's
society...)
-- 
	Karen E. Isaacson
	karen@rand.org  or uunet!randvax!karen