I didn’t anticipate what attending a women’s college would be like after spending fourteen years in a co-educational cesspool for misogynistic tradition, more commonly known as a school, but I didn’t think it would be boring or frustrating like people had told me. I also didn’t imagine it would fundamentally change my ideas about freedom and friendship the way it has.
We are constantly surrounded by human suffering and active oppression, but it is only in college that I realized freedom can only be relative, and we can only ever hope to be freer than our past selves because there is no true ideal to aspire to. This sounds gloomy, but in effect, freedom no longer feels like a vague, distant goal but rather a practice in its own right, and my voice a tool to actualize it.
There is freedom in speaking up in class because nobody will snicker from the last bench. There is freedom in the mutual respect that my classmates have for each other as opposed to the bullying and slut-shaming of high school. There is freedom in vulnerability, and being able to talk about mental health with professors after being denied the right to be sick for years. There is the freedom that can be practised everywhere, and I feel more capable of choosing it every day when I see the women around me choose it too.
It is no secret that patriarchy exists because of its ability to divide women by pitting them against one another, but what is less talked about is how it affects women as individuals rather than as a group. What I believe has radically changed in my life in the last two years in college is my respect for my own gender, and as a consequence the value I am able to derive from female friendships. I have watched the women in my class compete against each other academically and yet go above and beyond their obligation to one another as fellow students to support each other in times of need.
The women who had taught me how to debate in my society had also taught me to trust my sense of right and wrong and to never feel alone or insignificant in my endeavour to express it. In the particularly toxic and masculine space of competitive debating, I have found a profound feeling of sisterhood amongst the women I share that space with. The endeavour to demand safety and recognition feels like a victory too because it brings us together in a way that social conditioning has never allowed us to, and that our male counterparts will never get to experience.
The daunting part about being a feminist is the reality of never being able to opt out of patriarchy in its entirety because we’re all products of it. However, the first step to knowing the world is attempting to know the self and Indraprastha College for Women has been where I’ve found joy in this process of self-discovery.