By Margaret Ernst

The first sight on English Professor Ann Dalke’s Serendip page for English 293, Introduction to Critical Feminist Studies, is a sculpture: in anonymous, curvilinear aluminum, three women dance individually while perpetually holding each other up. The title, “Generous Feminism” expresses what Gail Chavenelle BMC ‘67 feels she has experienced in the conversations invoked by Professor Dalke’s class. By virtue of Serendip, an ever-growing online colloquium, over twenty Bryn Mawr alumnae have been taking English 293 from their computers throughout the world.

Ann Dixon ‘83, webmistress and cofounder of Serendip smiled when she said that “Serendip is for the curious.” Yet this is the first time its tendrils have reached out to alums specifically.

“As an alum myself, I have a lot in common with others like me. Even if we’re not directly involved with academia, we stay intellectually curious,” said Dixon.

“The air lit up when I read about it, so I registered,” said Mary Belle Frey ‘57, who has been participating from her home in Chimeltenango, Guatemala. “Consciously I thought I might find out how women were thinking today.”

Over fifty women initially responded to the email Dalke sent out to the alumnae listserve, and she heard back from alums in almost every stage of life. Twenty eventually registered, and currently a handful remain regularly active on the course forum area on Serendip. Dalke has been pleasantly baffled that the alums are still very much the same eager students they were in college: “Even though some of them are seventy and eighty years old, and they still call her ‘Professor’!”

If Serendip is a place for “thoughts-in-progress,” as described on its “about” page, then it is an apropos locale for a discussion of feminism. When Professor Dalke was in college, there was no such thing as gender studies or women’s studies, at Bryn Mawr or anywhere, and even today it is an “ism” undergoing profound changes; currently the feminist arena contends issues of gender and sexuality that have much more to do with class, race, sexual orientation, and disability than they do with being a woman.

What has happened in class and on the web mirrors these intricate and often sensitive questions. “There are tensions in class over things that are more personal, and I do think that people hold back. We censor ourselves to some degree,” said Abby Sayre ‘08.

Involving older women in the conversation, Dalke said, has highlighted tensions already present in the undergraduate class. What is becoming increasingly known as “third wave feminism”, class member Jessica Rizzo ‘11 said, breaks down traditional ideas of what is male and what is female. “It has been difficult even for me to jump into the conversation,” she said, “and I’m of this generation.” One of the alums, Rizzo remembered, dropped out of the course because such an inclusive feminism was too difficult for her to negotiate.

While some of the alums are entering this kind of conversation for the first time, many have considered themselves feminist activists their whole lives. Chavenelle, who currently works out of her studio in Dubuque, Iowa, vigorously advocated the Equal Rights Amendment throughout the sixties and seventies.

“One of the first things my kids learned to do was put up yard signs,” she said. Listening in on English 293, however, has drastically broadened her sense of what she thought she was pushing for forty years ago. “I didn’t understand how much that [idea of feminism] was a white, middle-class feminism,” she said.

Such cross-generational revelations are conversations that both alums and undergrads seem to crave. “Too often we study these ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and we don’t always think about age,” said Alexander Tisman ‘09. One alum, Mary Clurman, has proposed a buddy system that might foster more personal connections. “The women have a lot to learn from one another,” she said, “undergraduates are looking for answers that they can’t possibly get because they haven’t lived long enough, where the alums are looking for summations of what they have been trying to put together for years,” she said.

Although Dalke admitted that Serendip will never replace the spontaneity of live discussion - “It’s not a chat-room,” - her and Dixon’s experiment has been an evolving effort to allow alums to feel more a part of the dialogues that happen in class. From the beginning readings have been accessible through Serendip and alums welcomed to post on the forum, but soon class members began typing up notes on in-class discussions. “We’re making it up as we go along,” said Dalke. Now Dixon has been regularly recording discussions and posting them online as podcasts.

Like Serendip itself, which after ten years has reached the size of Encyclopedia Brittanica, feminism is constantly widening its scope and becoming increasingly hazier in definition. “For me it’s been unendingly complicated,” said Sayre. “If there is a consensus in the class it’s that no one can define it except for themselves.”

What if Mary Wollstonecraft could have rolled out of bed, posted on a blog, and quickly seen a response from Virginia Woolf? Whatever feminism may be, voracious discourse has always been one of its identifying features, and Serendip is providing an even more dynamic forum for that conversation in the Bryn Mawr community.

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