Safe Space, by Elayne Riggs
I first came across the concept of "safe spaces" for women when I was in high school. I went to an all-girls religious school (yeshiva) in 9th and 10th grades. The idea didn’t make sense to me at the time, separating boys and girls just when they were beginning to find out about each other, to really relate to one another as fully-realized people. I was convinced then that the segregation could only come to no good, that we’d grow up completely lacking in social skills regarding how to communicate with the opposite sex, and that it was all doomed to end in tears.
And while I think I was partially correct, at least in my case, Bruriah was the first place I remember feeling this inexplicable sense of female safety (at least when the male instructors weren’t around), of proto-feminist solidarity. It even (temporarily) helped me break some bad personal habits, I’m pretty sure that was the first time I stopped biting my nails for an appreciable period. There was just something amazing about having all that support around me that made it seem anything was possible.
At Rutgers University in New Brunswick, I minored in feminism, which at the time was called Women’s Studies. So naturally, everyone assumed, and still does, that I attended not Rutgers College, but the University’s "female auxiliary" affiliate, Douglass. I didn’t go to Douglass, which by that time was trending from all-female to co-ed anyway. But it was still considered a relative safe space for women, and there were a number of Douglass students in my feminism classes. There, we learned that "safety" didn’t just mean shelter from potential violence (rape awareness was a big part of my curriculum, and I never did figure out why more of it wasn’t aimed at the gender that committed the most rapes — i.e., the guilty party — rather than the gender that was raped most often) but from male aggression in general, even when that aggression took the form of vigorous debate. We analyzed how women in co-ed classes and curricula tended to be more withdrawn and reticent than the men, who interrupted far more and were paid more academic (rather than prurient) attention by the instructors. Without so many men around to hog the limelight and make us feel scholastically intimidated, we were able to blossom more into our own diverse personalities. (more…)
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