Taking the First Step

Tomorrow morning, hundreds of male alums will make their way to Soldier’s Field, where they will be greeted by a fully stocked private tailgate and members of their Final Club. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Harvard’s female students and graduates will have no special tailgate to call their own. With female social clubs being such a recent development—and a very small development at that—Harvard women lack the social connections of their male peers and former classmates. As the newly chosen survivors of punch season and their socially elite predecessors mingle for the first time, perhaps they will all notice—as indeed many on campus have—that they are perpetuating a culture long since condemned by the general public. More importantly, we hope they will realize that the most direct path to change is one they must take themselves.

Women interested in participating in the Final Club scene continue to occupy an inferior position and can only enter the clubs as the invited guests of their male peers. Given the obvious skewing effect this imbalanced social dynamic has on male-female student relations, it’s not surprising that female undergraduates have been fighting for the right to integrate into the Final Clubs since the 1960s. Yet despite over 30 years of protests and campaigns, Harvard women find themselves no better off today than they were over a generation ago.

Even after all these years of controversy, the debate over allowing women to attain final club membership remains lively and contentious. The recent development of the Students Against Super Sexist Institutions-We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs (SASSI-WOOF) and last Friday night’s packed forum lead by Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes on the history of final clubs both attest to the large number of undergraduates who believe that the current all-male Final Club scene is both insulting and out-dated.

But while activist groups such as SASSI-WOOF might help to raise exposure to Harvard’s discriminatory social scene this year, their effort will likely be in vain. Like Stop Withholding Access Today in the 1980s and the Radcliffe Women’s Action Coalition in the 1990s, SASSI-WOOF will likely find that it is really impossible for an outside group to change the system—no matter how vehemently female undergraduates protest.

With club members and alums already gathered for the big weekend, we can’t think of a more opportune time for the supposedly smart, educated and enlightened Harvard men of these institutions to consider their history of discrimination and make a pledge to admit women into their clubs in the coming school year. If no Final Club is willing to take the initiative on this issue, it seems likely that 30 years from now, Harvard women will find themselves in the same substandard social position they were initially relegated to when the College went co-ed over 30 years ago.