2006-2007 Fall/Winter Directions - Friends' Central School

CAMPUS LOG – UPPER SCHOOL
Roles, Rules, and Revolutions: Thinking About Gender
Anna Rosenblatt ’08 and Rachel Erulkar ’08, Terry Guerin
Do you remember Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From
Venus? Even if you never read the
book, the phrase probably has the familiarity
of an echo. After all, it’s no secret
that men aren’t comfortable with tears
and women hate to channel surf, or that
men don’t ask for directions and women
take forever to get dressed. But just a
minute: are the differences between the
genders really that simple?
This fall, Friends’ Central Upper
School students spent an entire day probing
the role and validity of common
assumptions about gender differences.
The program, entitled “Roles, Rules, and
Revolution: An Examination of Gender at
Friends’ Central and in the World” was
designed by Upper School English
teacher, Al Vernacchio, and featured a
school-wide survey, student-led discussion
groups, faculty-organized workshops (on
topics such as the legacy of Title IX, biochemical
differences between male and
female brains, and the effect of gender on
friendship), two ten-minute plays, and a
talk by Friends’ Central alumna, Maggie
Schmitt ’94, on her work with international
social movements. There were arguments,
reflection, laughter, and a chance
for everyone to ask him or herself: “What
is it I think about gender and my own
place in the world?”
30 DIRECTIONS Fall 2006 / Winter 2007
Schmitt, who is living in
Madrid and pursuing a
PhD, encapsulated the
impulse behind the program
when she stated, “We all
have and live in gender. It
makes us who we are. But
adolescence is all about
wrestling and negotiating
with the way rules and roles
are imposed, the need to
find your way between
them, to rebel against them
even as you are being shaped
by them.”
Schmitt has made a
career out of such wrestlings
and negotiations, both
studying and supporting social movements
because, as she explains, they represent
individuals reaching bravely beyond
themselves to imagine change of all sorts
both personal and social. Her message to
Maggie Schmitt ’94
the students was to use “gender day” as a
chance to think about their bodies as a
place where politics happen. “Take your
own experiences seriously,” she urged her
audience. “Dare to ask what works for
me? What do I wish was different? And
have the courage to hear what your peers
have to say about their own, perhaps very
different, experiences.”
Vernacchio, who teaches a course on
sexuality and society, has been thinking
about gender and Friends’ Central for
several years. When he learned that Terry
Guerin had chosen The Women as the fall
Al Vernacchio
play and he heard the early grumblings
about the cross-gender casting, he knew
he had found a great starting point for the
discussion.
Together with some of his students, he
developed a survey that explored prevalent
attitudes about gender differences. The
survey was sent to all Upper School students
and faculty, and while the 250
responses did not reveal any startling
results, they became the basis for honest,
unthreatening discussions in the small,
student-led groups. In one discussion, the
students bantered about the amount of
time they each spent getting dressed in
the morning. In another, a statement on
the survey that boys take up more physical
space than girls prompted a lively
exchange. One boy quickly disagreed with
the pejorative tone of the statement, but a
girl laughingly pointed out that he himself
was sprawled out in his chair with his
legs spread wide on either side of the
desk.
When Terry Guerin introduced the
two ten-minute skits, “Babe” and
“Beauty,” she emphasized the importance
of a sense of humor. “You can and will
laugh,” she said. “But I want you to ask
yourselves—what assumptions and
impulses make us laugh? What is the kernel
of truth buried in our laughter?” This
is not an easy question for anyone, let
alone teenagers, to ask. But “Roles, Rules,
and Revolutions” provided Friends’
Central students with a safe place to talk
about gender-based differences (and similarities),
self and public image, and the
way so much of our lives are determined
by socially ingrained assumptions.