The Orbis

Issue date: 11/7/07 Section: Opinion

On Oct. 29 Naomi Tutu, the daughter of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, delivered the keynote speech at Take Back the Night on Olin Lawn. The event brought together hundreds of members of the Vanderbilt community to demonstrate solidarity against both domestic and sexual violence against women, and it emphasized the results of living in a culture where rape is a prominent problem that takes a toll on gender equity.

Tutu told of her experience as a professor at the University of Capetown where female students were participating in tutoring and study group opportunities which much less frequency than their male peers. After some surveying, the university realized that female students were not attending because they were afraid to travel on campus after dark, when most of the meetings took place. This was perhaps the most striking example given throughout the night of the way in which women's fear of violence and assault has real consequences on the way they live their lives, even when they aren't victims of physical violence.

As Stacy Nunnally, president of Gender Matters, a part of the Margaret Cunninggim Women's Center at Vanderbilt declared in her speech at the "speak-out" after the march (a venue for women to tell about their own experiences with violence), true gender equality will never be possible while we face the threat of violence.

In a case that, at first glance, might seem completely unrelated to the discourse at Take Back the Night but actually reaffirms this same issue of making public spaces accessible and safe for women, last month a Harvard medical student was told she would not be given an extra break during her nine-hour exams to pump breast milk, despite the fact that taking the test without any extra breaks would be both uncomfortable and unhealthy.

An appeals court judge later overruled the National Board of Medical Examiners' decision, writing, "In order to put the petitioner on equal footing as the male and nonlactating female examinees, she must be provided with sufficient time to pump breast milk and to address the same physiological and other functions to which those examinees are able to attend."

In September a woman threatened to sue when an Applebee's restaurant manager requested that she cover herself with a blanket in Kentucky, a state in which it is illegal to interfere with a woman's right to nurse in public places. The incident led to a series of "lactivist" protests around the country and prompted comedian Bill Maher to decree on the Sept. 14 episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher": "New rule: And I never thought I'd say this, but don't show me your tits!" He went on to joke, "Breastfeeding a baby is an intimate act, and I don't want to watch strangers performing intimate acts, at least not for free ..." before claiming breastfeeding in public is the result, not of nature, but of being "too lazy to plan ahead or cover up."

Continued...

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