To be fair to Groton, neither of these events reflected the kind of place it usually was. The second incident was when boys in an adjacent dorm put human shit into a pan, brought it into the kitchen in our dorm, turned on the burner, then departed as the smell permeated the building. One, which had occurred in the middle of the night, involved a male student entering the room of a female student who’d previously been his girlfriend and staying after she told him to leave though none of us besides the two of them knew what had transpired, when the boy was subsequently expelled there was such widespread anger toward the girl that she ended up voluntarily leaving Groton.
Back in the dorm afterward, some other students and I chatted with a teacher about gender issues at our school.Īs it happened, our dorm had been the site of two unsettling incidents that year. I was a sophomore, but I went to the class’s graduation, which featured the girls fending off and beating up “attackers” in heavy padding and helmets. In the spring of 1991, the coed boarding school that I attended in Massachusetts, the Groton School, offered senior girls the chance to take a self-defense class. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that this encounter, with its misguided and supremely awkward assertiveness, perfectly encapsulates my entire foray into gender politics.īut I’ve got ahead of myself let me start at the beginning. It’s actually even worse than it sounds: first, I lurked outside the stall she was using, then I intercepted her when she emerged, before she could wash her hands. In what I think of as either the apotheosis or the nadir-maybe both-of my stint as a prep-school feminist, I once followed Gloria Steinem into a bathroom to get her autograph.
“ Confessions of a Prep-School Feminist,” by Curtis Sittenfeld.
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