University of Virginia Library

All The Young Chauvinists

Chauvinism - n vainglorious or exaggerated
patriotism.

It looks like "male chauvinist" is soon
going to rival "white racist" as the favorite
epithet around the Grounds this year, so we
thought we'd turn to our trusty Webster's
Intercollegiate and find out exactly what we
were being accused of. (See letter elsewhere
on this page.) Apparently a male chauvinist is
one who takes a vainglorious or exaggerated
pride in his masculinity; it seems as well that
the University is crawling with such characters.

Exactly what a man has to o to qualify as a
male chauvinist is not entirely clear. According
to the Virginia Weekly, you're a male
chauvinist if you can't answer a riddle where
the doctor is a woman. Some other sources
tell us you're a male chauvinist if you expect
your wife to cook and keep the house tidy.
Probably the clearest example was the fellow
at the SDS convention's appraisal of the place
of women in the revolution. And both men
and women have been conditioned by society
to hold such views.

Unfortunately, there is a basic conflict
between the attitude of a male chauvinist and
the ideal of a coeducational University. A
group of men who regard women as
housekeepers, love objects, or potential
secretaries and elementary school teachers are
probably never going to accept them as
serious scholars. Bunch of husband hunters,
right?

Perhaps in some cases, but what else can be
expected when the University's admissions
policy, or at least its old admissions policy,
formally relegates women to training for
positions as nurses and teachers? The
problem, of course, lies in societal values more
than University admissions structure. The
doctor or the engineer is always pictured as a
man, while the popular image of a woman
tells us her crowning achievement comes when
she fakes hubby into taking her out to dinner
because she found a great new way to keep
the toilet smelling fresh.

So, just as it is with racism, the University
is confronted with the task of combating a
prevalent societal system if it is to fulfill itself
as a community of open minded scholars.
And, just as it must with racism, the
community is going to have to make a
concerted effort to eliminate at least the overt
and structural vestiges of its days as a bastion
of Southern masculinity where women were
toys to be brought in on big weekends.

The University, moreover, is not going to
solve the problem simply by admitting women
to the College, especially if it does so on the
quota basis as is now planned. The whole idea
of not cutting down on male admissions reeks
of the belief that men really need the
education and women are simply here to look
nice and pass the time until marriage.

This concept of women as not really an
integral part of the University is a source of
disgust and concern to those women who do
not attend, and they made their dissatisfaction
clear at Mountain Lake. Women have
never played the role accorded to male
students here. The University's ideal coed goes
to all her classes, studies hard since she's not
too bright, gets mediocre grades since she
can't really compete with men outside of the
education school, and goes out when she's
asked to with whichever Cavalier favors her
with an invitation. And she does not
participate in extracurricular activities which
the men-folk jealously dominate, just like Wall
Street and Madison Avenue.

Changes in the pattern will come only if
the women here make a strong effort to break
out of the shells we have assigned them and if
the men are willing to discard, or at least
repress, their masculine prejudices. And the
time to start working on it is now.