Late last year, Nancy Weiss Malkiel described how coeducation triumphed in the universities not out of a desire to include female students, but out of a desire to appeal to the changing tastes and expectations of male ones. Coming from such unpromising beginnings, she wrote, we should not be surprised that coeducation has done so little to address the systemic obstacles women face across the broader society. In its broad lineaments, Dr. Malkiel’s conclusion that “coeducation … has not succeeded … in accomplishing real equality for young women in colleges and universities,” can hardly be disputed
If I look only at the specifically academic issues that trouble Dr. Malkiel, however, I feel compelled to dispute what seems an implicit suggestion that male students’ choices are a standard which women should seek to emulate. She expresses concern that more women do not enter STEM fields, and sees this as an example of the way in which “Coeducation did not resolve the perplexingly gendered behaviours and aspirations of female students.” Thus, with one pernicious adverb, she manages to criticize women’s aspirations simply for being different from the aspirations of men, before lamenting that “Women also make gendered choices about extracurricular pursuits” in that “they typically undersell themselves, choosing to focus on the arts and community service, while declining to put themselves forward for major leadership positions in mainstream campus activities.” I certainly wish to see such positions open to women who want them, but I find it hard to be disappointed that Dorothy Day decided to focus on community service instead of putting herself forward for a “major leadership position,” or that Virginia Woolf “undersold” herself in the arts instead of participating in more “mainstream” activities. Continue reading “Coeducation and the Virtue Gap by Race MoChridhe”
Even though I encountered wisdom literature when specializing in Hinduism during my Religious Studies doctoral program, through reading the works of Christian female mystics and the liberation theologies of feminist spiritual guides, it took a book I never encountered in my academic studies to give me a spiritual foundation that feels complete after my departure from Christianity: Eckhart Tolle’s 
I live in Cleveland, and I am writing at the end of the World Series. I don’t know how it will conclude, but like most of the people in my city, I’m holding my breath. As I write, I literally just left the cardiac ward of one of the Cleveland Clinic hospitals, where patients’ lives actually seemed to hang in the balance of the game, according to one of the nurses who was monitoring heart rates from a central station in the hallway. 
In my other writing for Feminism and Religion, I’ve discussed how a key focus of my spiritual path involves 
Max Dashu’s 
Autumn of 1977. The faculty wives have come together in the modest University Heights home of a physics professor. Their Aquanet hair is sprayed to the heavens and at significant risk of igniting from lipstick-stained cigarettes that are resting precariously in the cradle a heavy crystal ashtray. Their business is serious. They are putting together a cookbook. The Faculty Wives Cookbook of 1977, to be precise. It is a noble task. They will cook from it for their young families, for their husbands, that is, the faculty. Even more, they will use each other’s recipes. Martha will cook Mary’s chili; Margaret will lose weight on Donna’s diet cabbage stew. It is an achievement that will be smugly displayed on bookshelves for decades. It will yellow, and the black plastic spiral binding will wear and crack. The Kinko’s heavy card stock cover will be ringed with coffee marks. And, one day, daughters-in-law will decide whether to keep it or to pitch it out.
The photo that accompanies this article, or others similar, have been posted, shared and commented through social networks as expression of the inherent misogyny of Islam, with descriptions such as 
Feminism and Religion 