Moving from Rhetoric to Action

I recently attended a women's conference called "Heritage and Hope: Women's Education in a Global Context." This conference was hosted in celebration of Bryn Mawr College's 125th anniversary as an all-girl's university. As I'm sure you can deduce from the title, the conference theme was centered on girl's/women's education, both domestically and abroad, and at both the institutional and grassroots levels.

I went to this conference primarily for business networking purposes, although I'm also deeply passionate about and interested in economic development, of which women's education plays a vital role. The majority of the conference revolved around the specific issue of women's higher education at an institutional level, and what educational institutions here the the US and throughout the "developed" world can do to partner with educational institutions internationally to promote women's education. While I think this is an important topic to address, I was far more interested in what educational institutions (and individuals) here in the US can do to promote girl's education at the grassroots level, particularly in rural communities in so-called "underdeveloped" countries.

The line up of conference speakers was impressive, the most notable (in my mind) being Mr. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times editor, co-author of Half the Sky, advocate of women's human rights and proud feminist. All of the panel discussions and breakout sessions that I participated in were extremely interesting and touched on various aspects of the overall theme of women's education. Everyone seemed to have the same goal in mind: empowering women through education. And everyone had brilliant ideas about how to make that happen. We brainstormed, we challenged each other, we discussed different theories.

As the conference came to an end, I'd say the general feeling was one of satisfaction and accomplishment. We (or they, as in Bryn Mawr College) had done it. They had orchestrated and executed this conference to perfection. And we had successfully dialogued about a wide array of issues revolving around women's education and how to promote it internationally. Great. I mean, it really was great! This is such an important and relevant topic, and we had tackled it. But at the end of the day, what had we REALLY accomplished? So what if we debated different development theories? So what if we speculated as to which educational institution was capable of affecting the most positive change. At the end of the day, it was all rhetoric. Just rhetoric.

Certainly, the conference leaders stressed the importance of moving forward, taking the "progress" we had made and turning it into action. But once the conference was over and the feelings of camaraderie and collaboration had inevitably dissipated, I found it difficult to take that next step in a positive direction. So this is me admitting to my frustration, both in myself and in others, for failing to move beyond rhetoric and into action. Granted, it's not an easy process, but it is a necessary one.

I have much more to write on this topic, but I'll save it for part 2.