Winter Cold Moon
Women in combat. The Israeli’s have had women in combat for a long time. Though it’s sad, I’m glad to see this extension of the women’s rights movement. It means that barriers from an age of chivalry are still falling, recognizing women as able in yet another formerly all male realm.
When I started college in 1965, men had to leave women at the dormitory door at 10:00 pm. No men in the building after hours. This was the university acting in loco parentis. An almost invisible part of the Sixties, far overshadowed by civil rights and the anti-war movement, the student’s rights movement had as one of its first targets in loco parentis. It fell before I graduated in 1969 and I helped it go. This struggle had many other aspects, among them student evaluation of professors, but in loco parentis was the most visible issue.
When I entered seminary in 1970, there were three women on campus, two in my class and one a year or two ahead of us. When I graduated in 1976, the seminary student body was half women. There came a time at some point in the 1980’s when there were no men in the entering class. Similar movement has come in medicine and law, the other two traditional professions and therefore the most rigid relative to gender inclusion.
The women’s movement has been a powerful engine for change in our culture, a change that is not over yet. Many barriers remain, especially those in the upper reaches of business management and to a lesser extent in many realms of science. Nonetheless women have made extraordinary strides since my high school days, 1961-1965.
