3 Comments
Nov 25, 2021Liked by Noah Carl

As a woman who is extremely in favor of civil liberties, the free exchange of ideas, and dispassionate inquiry, may I just say...ugh? Not to your article, just to the situation. I feel ashamed of my gender at the moment. Censoriousness is short-sighted, and it will bite us right in the ass. Anyone who actually cares about safety shouldn't favor hampering the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to criticize bad ideas. That's a very dangerous path indeed.

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Nov 24, 2021Liked by Noah Carl

Maybe I missed it....but social class seems a very important reason why college women may behave that way.

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I'm currently reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's a whodunnit set in a women's college at Oxford, published in 1935.

At one point, during a discussion in the Senior Common Room, the (male) detective describes a lecturer's assertion that one must always publish the truth, regardless of any potentially harmful consequences, as "unfeminine", and asks if no-one present will stand up for the opposite view.

' "You've got us in a cleft stick," said the Dean. " If we say it, you can point out that womanliness unfits us for learning; and if we don't, you can point out that learning makes us unwomanly" '

No-one does take the opposite view, and in fact some of the women of the Senior Common Room flatly refuse to believe that any academic would deliberately conceal the truth, on a matter of scientific or historical fact.

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