There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
—AUDRE LORDE
To let girls learn, schools must first protect them.
That is, they must ensure that girls are safe from violence, trauma and fear.
Then, they must teach them three skills: confidence, strategy, and transgression.
That is, they must teach them to become achievement oriented and thus develop a set of skills they can use to engage in a hostile world.
Finally, they must reimagine what it means to achieve.
That is, they must think about educational success as not limited to academic performance but rather as a holistic measure of costs and well-being, or rather net achievement.
All three require schools to become equitable institutions.
That is, they must protect girls against undue costs based on gender and provide them with the skills to traverse the world thereafter.
Taken together, schools must be feminist.
That is: how girls achieve.
Today, the prevalence of women’s rights movements, including #MeToo, #Time’sUP, #Bringbackourgirls, and #GirlRising, makes clear the continued relevance of the challenges faced by women and girls across multiple contexts—at work, at school, and at home. More specifically, these initiatives reveal the specific obstacles women and girls face: general safety, sexual harassment, lack of educational access, and barriers to achievement, even as countries move toward gender equality. Still, these initiatives are constrained by the dual messages they offer. Let’s look at a recent example from the United States.
On February 8, 2017, during the US confirmation hearing for Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama and soon to be attorney general, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked a rule that essentially allowed him to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts. When asked about his action, McConnell said the following: “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
The incident ended up backfiring on Senator McConnell. The phrase Nevertheless, she persisted became a new battle cry for women, many of whom could identify with the experience of being silenced by men in public and private settings. When media outlets praised Senator Warren for her persistence, the slogan took on a life of its own. Few at the time recognized that oversubscribing to such slogans can be as harmful to the mental and emotional health of women as movements built on phrases like “women can have it all” and “lean in.” These slogans feed unequal gender expectations, such as the belief that girls and women should be expected to simply persist in the face of gender biases because they always have.
It is also worth noting that daily predations and exclusions based on gender escape notice unless a key political figure or celebrity is involved. The media—and with it, the wider world—pays attention to President Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comments, to multiple accusations of rape or abuse by Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to Senator Mitch McConnell’s silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren. These atrocities happen every day to ordinary girls and women around the world—in classrooms, on subways, in cars, in bedrooms, and in bathrooms—without media attention or justice.
Indeed, as mentioned in Chapter 2, a 2018 US survey by Plan International revealed that 76 percent of girls aged fourteen to nineteen report feeling unsafe as a girl or woman and 69 percent says they feel judged as a sexual object.1 A 2017 National Women’s Law Center survey further reveals some of these everyday injustices that school-aged girls, especially girls of color, experience in the United States. The study revealed the following:
These findings highlight the multiple negative encounters that school-aged girls have with sexual harassment, poverty, and racism. Thus, while global messaging around “girl power” encourages girls to go to school, to report sexual abuse, and to become scientists, many schools remain unsafe spaces—sites of violence, trauma, and fear. In the face of this omnipresent suffering, we are offered narratives of resilience. Girls are told to have grit, “lean in,” and persist. In effect, girls are left to confront the violence, trauma, and fear on their own.
Of course, the United States is not alone in its shortcomings related to the treatment of girls. I have detailed several other examples throughout this book, and I’ll include an even more recent event from Ghana that is particularly relevant.
In March 2017, speaking at the 90th anniversary of “Speech and Prize Day,” Ghana’s Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Otiko Djaba, gave a speech at Krobo Girls Senior High School:
The teachers who impregnate girls, this is a serious warning to you. It is an abuse of their rights, and you are their role model. You must not be the one to abuse the rights of the young girls. We must also put an end to child marriage. In conclusion, if you wear a short dress, it’s fashionable, but know that it can attract somebody who would want to rape or defile you. You must be responsible for the choices you make.3
True, Minister Djaba acknowledged the very serious issue of teachers abusing young girls and expressed valid concerns related to teenage pregnancy, but her irresponsible conclusion exposed her as profoundly unaware of the ways in which sexism works. Data from the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (Gender Centre), for example, finds that one-fifth of girls in Ghana had their first experience with sex against their will, and nearly one-third have experienced sexual abuse over their lifetime (Gender Centre–Statistics on Sexual Violence in Ghana). The minister’s advice to these girls is to wear longer skirts. And when critiqued for her comments, she defended them with an over-used trope: with rights come responsibilities.
This type of paternalistic rhetoric from one at the helm of gender advocacy emphasizes the need for a shared definition of what is meant by gender equality. Instead of properly attributing the source of the problem to society’s unequal gender relations, Djaba put the responsibility on girls. Instead of considering what she, as the minister of Gender, Children and Special Protection, could do to stop girls’ experiences with systemic, gender-based violence, she shames any girl who experiences violence by attributing it to the girl’s choices. Instead of considering the fact that girls are disproportionately forced to confront burdens they had no hand in creating, she reinforces the idea that they are the ones who must change their behavior, not men.
This is not what feminism looks like.
In the United States and Ghana, well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of young women and girls are circumvented by the inability of those in charge of these initiatives to take seriously the kinds of equitable institutions that women and girls need. Efforts have by and large focused on persisting through gender discrimination or to wearing longer skirts to avoid rape, placing the burden on the individual girl. As these examples and this book show, approaches that focus on fixing the girl rather than fixing her environment are harmful to girls.
Too often, gender issues are described as global, but they are referring to the United States or to developing countries, but not both. To demonstrate why centering nonwestern countries in research on gender equity is important, I will use a recent and well-known example.
On January 21, 2017, women from around the world gathered to advocate for the protection of women’s rights and thus human rights. Soon after, it was recorded as “the largest coordinated protest in U.S. history and one of the largest in world history.”4 Before the march, the committee members put forth a list of unity principles guiding the movement. The principles were organized under various themes: ending violence, seeking environmental justice, and securing reproductive rights, LGBTQQIA rights, workers’ rights, civil rights, disability rights, and immigrant rights.
While these are principles that affect everyone, their justification for inclusion was supported by research on disparities in the United States. Women in America, for example, earn eighty-two cents for every dollar a man earns. Furthermore, nearly all the committee members were women from or based in the United States. Accordingly, although the women’s movement had global effects, it was not by representation or by stance a global movement. This is important to acknowledge, though the goal is not to be divisive. The Women’s March reflects the ways in which women’s rights and feminist movements continue to be perceived as based in the West and then generalized to the rest of the world.5
When the United States implemented policies to improve gender equality through landmark policies such as the Nineteenth Amendment and Title IX, many developing countries did not realize these earlier successes, despite having “parallel feminist movements.” In fact, it would be decades later before countries like Ghana and South Africa would adopt similar gender-based policies (for example, Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and Educate the Girl Child campaigns—United Nations International Children Emergency Fund, 2008). Nonetheless, this doesn’t explain why the hegemony of US exceptionalism continues to trickle down into global social justice movements. Both the development of a Women’s Manifesto in 1970 and the Women’s March Unity Principles in 2017 were created without soliciting the advice of women in the Global South.6 By continuing in this vein, the United States is inevitably privileging western issues, modes, and methods, instead of connecting and including women from around the world.
Accordingly, there is a need for western women’s and feminist movements to acknowledge how their policies affect women across the globe and recognize the lessons they can learn from other countries. For example, few US activists may be aware that Rwanda’s parliament is over 50 percent women, and South Africa’s constitution enshrines gender justice as part of its constitutional rights. Finally, there is a need to establish connections among global women’s struggles rather than treating them as separate and unfit for comparison.
In the end, women and girls face different levels of the same evil—patriarchy. It is incumbent on women everywhere to think about how recognizing our connections can help us move toward a more global and thus sustainable freedom for all.
The global community continues to emphasize access and achievement for girl students, but it has ignored schools’ inherited hostilities against girls’ bodies and minds. To be sure, fewer schools explicitly restrict opportunities for girls. In fact, some of them even boast a higher enrollment and achievement rate for girls compared to boys and others. Still, nearly all schools carry forward oppressive legacies of sexism that distort girls’ self-perceptions, violate girls’ bodies, and place clear limits on girls’ futures.7 And so, even as girls gain access to schools on paper, they remain shut out of them.
If we think back to the story of Ezra and Jude, it is easy to recognize that many of us have met these girls before. Maybe we went to school with them. Maybe we taught them in a class. Maybe we passed them on the street. Maybe we are them.
Regardless of how or where, we’ve met them before. And we do them a gross injustice if we simply infer from their good grades and their stoic silence that they are doing just fine.
I can assure you that they are not.
What if I told you that they, like Jude, struggled to afford sanitary pads and thus missed school several times a month? What if I told you they were being sexually harassed in school or on their way to school every morning? What if I told you they were being overlooked and undermined in math and science class? What then would you demand that schools do?
Feminist schools ask two questions: First, how do our policies and practices levy disparate effects on a pupil’s academic, civic, and social development? Next, how can we develop strategies to respond to these imbalances and thus ensure that students attaining the same education are not subjected to different costs based on gender, race, or sex?
To address these questions, feminist schools develop systemwide policies and procedures to hold themselves accountable to a simple formula: each citizen has equivalent inherent worth and should be treated as such. They re-orient the foundation of education in a way that prepares students to engage in a more equitable society while also preparing them to transgress and transform it because it is likely that an equitable society has not been achieved. They ensure that teacher and student interactions in schools not only build self-efficacy and strategic thinking through achievement-oriented identities but also enable girls to expect, promote, and create social change.8
Feminist schools, therefore, are important for providing the space and conditions for girls to feel safe and protected by disrupting power relations. But the feminist school is in service of the girl student’s ability to have an equitable educational experience so that she can thrive in school and life. While the feminist school can control her educational experience, what happens when she leaves? The feminist school recognizes this dilemma and thus provides her with the tools—AOIs—that she can use to thrive in society as well.
This book conceives of schools as sites of social change and thus as institutions that can dismantle educational and societal inequities. By reforming dominant gender relations at the school level and imbuing students with the tools to be confident, strategic, and transgressive, feminist schools ensure that all students can attain net achievement and contribute to broader societal transformation.
I am fully aware that schools are already overwhelmed with responsibilities and excessively blamed for a plethora of social ills they have no control over. In many contexts, schools, especially public ones, are contending with issues for which the state should have provided alternative social services, whether that be day care, health care, or other supports. Schools may be managing multiple responsibilities that should not primarily rest with them.
Even worse, across many contexts, public will and belief in the utility of schools continue to decline, contributing to further disinvestment in terms of resources and faith. Schools, then, are increasingly operating in a context where they are being asked to perform ambitious and noble functions without the financial support necessary to execute these tasks.
First and foremost, governments should prioritize schools by providing them with the resources and tools they need to thrive. Second, a school by itself is simply a building. It becomes an engine of education based on activities executed by those who work within and outside of it. To execute its activities, schools rely heavily on multiple stakeholders—volunteers, parents, community members, and local organizations. Thus, they are not simply the domain of the government, the teacher, the principal, or the student, but of the community as well. Bluntly put: you must get involved.
Involvement includes mentorship, volunteering, philanthropy, local school board participation, and organizing and attending community meetings. However, I also believe in a much more intimate involvement based on a fundamental belief that our fates are interconnected. We depend on each other, even if our starting points are different. Our investment in lifting up others is part of our civic obligation as citizens of the world. We must each absorb the potential individual costs associated with that investment for the sake of the collective good.
Many of those who are most disadvantaged wear that title largely because they lack the traditional supports, such as parental wealth and education, that correlate with individual achievement and success. By meeting our civic obligations, we can find alternative ways to provide these disadvantaged persons with similar support systems and with the tools they need to compete and flourish.
I call these alternative support systems achievement networks or achievement nets, defined as groups of teachers, peers, and community members who play a role in supporting disadvantaged students through their educational journeys. An achievement net is not to be confused with a safety net, however. A safety net is meant to catch people after they fall. Such services, such as foster care or child protective services, are extremely important and necessary, but they are reactive solutions. Achievement nets are proactive solutions that anticipate potential shortfalls by building an apparatus in advance. To be more specific, achievement nets are committed to supporting vulnerable students through the provision of social and material resources. In this way, even if girls lack individual resources at home, they can still get the support necessary to be academically successful through the collective resources of their broader school and neighborhood community. Achievement networks are made of individuals and organizations who see students struggling and take unconditional responsibility for them, providing them with the external support critical to academic and life success. With these tools students learn to draw the distinction between how they are being viewed in society and how they want to see themselves. Thereafter, education becomes the mechanism by which they can move from where they came from to where they want to be.9 In other words, an achievement network acts as a necessary community-based supplement to the creation of feminist schools and thus achievement-oriented identities.
I offer a final story:
A few years after my initial research visit to Ghana in 2009, I returned to see how the girls I met were doing. It was then I discovered that Lydia, introduced in Chapter 3, had been admitted to one of Ghana’s top institutions but would not be able to attend because she could not afford it. The total cost at the time was equivalent to 500 USD per year. Lydia applied for scholarships and waited, but heard nothing back. Finally, she decided to meet with the headmistress at her high school to tell her about the situation.
By the time Lydia left the meeting, Headmistress Mary had decided to take out of her personal savings the equivalent of three months of her salary to pay for Lydia to start her first year of college. She told me she just couldn’t see Lydia’s brilliance go to waste. Headmistress Mary acted as a member of Lydia’s achievement network. Mary was far from rich and had no familial tie to Lydia. Yet, she decided to make sure that Lydia could be the first girl in her family to go to college. She believed it was the right thing to do.
Lydia went on to become the first girl in her family to graduate college. As I write this book, she has just completed a competitive summer leadership program run by the Harvard Business School. If Headmistress Mary had not acted as part of Lydia’s achievement network, and if Lydia hadn’t left school with an achievement-oriented identity firmly in place, her outcome would have likely been different. Fortunately for her, she will never know.
Shortly after learning that Lydia, despite being clearly qualified, had been almost unable to attend college, I started the TWII Foundation and began raising money to support Lydia and girls like her who were striving to be the first in their families to go to college. Since beginning in 2012, we have helped over thirty girls make their college dreams a reality. My goal is simple: I wish to be part of their achievement network.
Undoubtedly, many of us have benefited from people who acted as part of our achievement network—even if we did not call them that—of people, communities, institutions, and organizations who went out of their way to lift us up at critical junctures in our lives. When we serve others whom we barely know, unconditionally, we do our part to contribute to the long line of lifting. We do our part for those who need us the most. And by doing so, we ensure that disadvantaged students who were not supposed to be successful because of their address, their gender, or the circumstances of their birth can stand as examples of everyday young people working toward the better future that they deserve.
Lydia’s story is a good one, but the goal is not for the Lydias across the globe to end up only at Harvard. The goal must be for girls everywhere to have the power to end up wherever it is that they want to be without bearing significantly different costs than their peers for doing so. As was true for Lydia, once provided with a safe space, any girl can achieve academically and personally, on her own terms, despite being born into this world at a disadvantage. With the tools offered by her feminist school, she can more strategically navigate the world and transgress the various spaces she enters.
To do this work, girls do not need to change or engage in additional labor. In fact, the opposite is true. It is the work of the school to create the conditions for the girl to thrive. Thriving involves having not only an equitable school to attend, but also the tools to navigate an inequitable society. In other words, given the unequal standing of women and girls in the world, the tools provided by feminist schools are to be used by girls to free themselves. And if these schools and the tools they produce are in fact equitable, they should be freeing for boys as well. Achievement networks support this goal.
In the end, whether it is developing gender-neutral hair and uniform policies, encouraging girls to transgress the boundaries of their femininity, or eliminating traditions that are, by default, only for males, feminist schools which develop achievement-oriented identities engage in the type of actions necessary to dismantle inequality and enable success.
These actions require feminist schools to take seriously the ways in which race, class, and gender constrain the achievement of all students, but especially some of its most marginalized populations: girls of color. By prioritizing its most marginalized populations, feminist schools engage in tactics that are based in fairness first and then expand outward. Thereafter, we must work as collective partners of an achievement network to provide feminist schools and their students with the specific resources they may need and support the specific tactics they may initiate, to be proactive in protecting girls from negative, gender-biased experiences.
When we don’t protect girls from negative, gender-biased experiences, we deny those girls the ability to fully participate in a prosperous social, economic, and political life. Not only do we fail to acknowledge how policies affect boy, girl, and gender-fluid or nonbinary students differently, but we also fail to allow all students to be free in their femininity and masculinity, without fear. We fail to acknowledge society’s role in keeping girls out of school through lack of resources, fear of teachers, and contrived suspensions over dress code or talking out. We compound the problem by demanding students solve such problems through “grit” or “resilience.” We fail to acknowledge that the world is unfair, and thus allow the miasma of prejudice to dampen the potential of students to realize the full expression of their personhood.
A feminist school takes into account these threats to its pupils. It protects them, but it also teaches them to protect themselves and even to protect others. A feminist school inculcates self-belief and strategic action among its students, enabling them to transgress social norms and engage in social change. A feminist school allows its pupils, all of them, the safety to dream of a world in which they are no longer preyed upon for features over which they have no control. It provides its students with the skills to press this world closer to an ideal that uses each person’s greatest potential.
In doing all this work, feminist schools ensure that all students learn. But unless they are built and supported, feminist schools are nothing but an idea.
The only remaining question, then, is not why we should build feminist schools, but when. The answer is, now.