Candice is a rising junior interning with Legal Momentum this summer.
“So, I think your brother is finally starting to understand feminism and women’s rights.”
After my dad said this during our Sunday breakfast, my immediate reaction was to laugh. I have been the Nelson household’s resident Angry Feminist™ since my junior year of high school at an all girls Catholic school. While my family has been fairly receptive whenever I start talking about feminism, I was surprised that my brother had started to actually listen. As much as I love and admire my big brother, him being an athletic trainer for football teams for the past 6 years has made him incredibly sexist. But I think the combination of him no longer viewing me as an irritating younger sibling but as a person with actual thoughts, as well as him listening to how his football players talk about women (he told me that he’ll never even introduce me to any of them), has allowed him to reevaluate his initial beliefs and look at the importance of feminism.
Thinking about my brother’s realization brought me to thinking about this summer and what I hope to learn while working at Legal Momentum. This lead me to thinking about education, or more specifically, Title IX. One of my greatest passions is education policy in America and last summer I started looking into Title IX because I realized how little I knew about it. Given that 55 colleges and universities are under review for violating the Title IX rights of their female students, I have a suspicion that I am not the only one. While Title IX has done great work in making sure that female athletic teams are actually given funds to operate, it seems that before the list of 55 was released, sports is the only thing anyone, including myself, knew Title IX was good for. Who knew that high schools have to adjust their absence policies for pregnant and parenting students so that they aren’t unfairly penalized when they have to take their kid to the doctor? Or that there needs to be someone who is well versed in Title IX policies at every university so that students can ask when their rights have been violated? Who knew that schools shouldn’t grossly mishandle sexual assault cases and treat the few women that report their assaults like children who are speaking out of line? Who knew that rapists can graduate without so much as a slap on the wrist?
Given how little I knew, and how much I still have to learn, I’m excited to do more research on Title IX and the presence of gender inequality in American education systems. I also plan to look at legislation regarding gender inequality in other areas, like the workforce, immigration, and poverty. It’ll be interesting to see if this summer will impact what I plan to do after graduation. Hopefully I can take a page from my brother’s playbook and by the end of the Moxie Project, I will emerge much more conscious.
