War Stories (3)

Continuing in Julie Ingersoll’s book, Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles, the author relates the plight of female students at many evangelical seminaries and colleges (interviews conducted between 1993 and 1995 at seven schools in different parts of the U.S.). Gals outnumber guys at evangelical colleges. Some families prefer to send their sons to more prestigious secular universities to raise their career prospects, but send their daughters to a Christian school, which is thought of as more “safe.” Many of these schools have a pervasive hostility to feminism, and women students report “feeling steered away from careers and toward marriage…, sometimes blatant and intentional, sometimes more subtle.” Young men are supported and mentored when studying for the ministry; young women get little support from the larger community. They are also told that they ask too many questions.

Women students feel devalued when male students make relentless jokes about them, showing disrespect, but they are devastated when the criticism and disrespect comes from faculty. There’s an assumption that women will never be serious scholars, that “objectification of women’s bodies and devaluation of women’s minds was ‘natural’ and indeed partially desirable to women,” making them suspect when they dare to “venture out of the prescribed expectations.” All the women interviewed did share stories of support and affirmation, but they also all agreed that they “desperately needed more mentors.”

Despite many of the female students being sent to Christian schools to preserve their innocence, the interviews turned up stories of sexual violation and date rape at each of the institutions visited. They also feel pressure to not report the incidences; hushing up is rampant and little is done to perpetrators. Ingersoll tries to emphasize the especially damaging effects these incidences and the shoddy treatment of them have on these young women: “These are college-age women who have been raised with a tremendous emphais on modesty. They dress very conservatively and take their sexual purity extremely seriously. Many of them are virgins, and almost all of them would claim to be. Having their sexuality deprivatized in these ways is particularly humiliating for them. Because purity is so essential to being ‘Christian,’ unwanted sexual attention undermines not only their sense of self but also their sense of their relationship with God.”

By far the most problems, however, could be put into the category of gender harassment and intimidation, most of which are quite mild, but their power to “undermine the self-confience of the victims is magnified by the context.” Sexual harassment in these locations and these situations are clearly more about power than about sex.