-motivational speech on careers day
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I'm glad to be here today, but I have to admit I'm also intimidated by the challenge of trying to say something to you that actually makes sense. I want to--and I will--say something to you about the value of same-sex education in comparison with traditional co-educational learning environments. Yet I feel it would be wrong for me to limit myself to simply talking about the benefits of same-sex education.
The truth of the matter is that on Career Day it would be completely irresponsible of me not to also mention some of the challenges that you as young women will face when you enter the work world. In the final analysis, the question of how you confront those challenges will say something about the quality of the education you received here at Padua.
I know that this was true for me. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated that I was able, at a time when I felt swamped and defeated by the world, to draw on my Padua experience as a source of strength. There I was in my early thirties, my marriage hadn't worked out, and I was raising my daughter in spite of the fact that I was a single mother with limited skills. In order to get by during those days, I worked a variety of low-paying jobs, including salesperson, waitress, race-track ticket-taker and barmaid. Eventually, in spite of working full-time, I went back to school and earned a Bachelor of Arts and then a law degree. The law school student body was less than 10% female and, with one exception, the teachers were all white males. For 12 years now I have been a lawyer and business woman in a basically male-dominated occupation. Over the years I have also become an active feminist and a relatively successful campaign manager for local grassroots political campaigns.
I mention my few accomplishments not because I think they're so important, but because I believe that attending an all-girls high school provided me with something that a low-income girl from Browntown wouldn't have found in a co-ed school in the late 1950s. That "something" was this: an educational environment which allowed teenaged girls to discover a large number of same-sex role models both among their peers and among their teachers.
Although at the time I didn't appreciate the psychological value of such a "women's environment," I later learned just how important that environment was in giving me the courage to battle, in my own small way, against the restrictions that many of our society's institutions place upon women. Much more now than I did then, I appreciate teachers like Sister Carmellia who taught here in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a language teacher whose powerful intellect and strength as a woman were a source of inspiration that I drew on, a few years after I graduated, as I tried to overcome my own insecurities as a woman and to make something of myself.
Unfortunately, many of the difficulties that women of my generation had to face in terms of our being treated less equally than men are still faced by women today. And those difficulties don't begin after you graduate from high school; it is sad but true that those difficulties are often fostered by the very educational system that is supposed to treat young women and young men equally.