Free Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer

young woman student at Rollins College in Florida what my real idea of feminism was, really from the very beginning.
    Lizz Jacobson, a thoughtful young woman, asked me: "There are two types of women that can be very successful in this 'man's world': the woman who becomes like a man, and the woman who retains her femininity. What do you think about this?"
    I answered: "I think a lot of women, and I don't want to be critical of them -- the ones who sort of become male by taking on male qualities in any profession in order to get to the top -- are denying their female qualities just as much as men have denied the value of female qualities. Even from the beginning I didn't want to change things so that women would become like men; I wanted to change things so that what was female would be respected by both men and women. I think the women who in effect have become men in their working habits and in only prizing work in the professional workplace have done exactly what men have done throughout the centuries, which is to degrade whatever women do."
    There was only one thing I really wanted to be: I wanted to be free intellectually. I wanted to be able to investigate and see and know the world and everything in it. But every one of my experiences with men--and with the idea of marriage -- showed me with desperate clarity that I could never have that freedom tied to a man. It was a terrible choice to have to make -- and I never quite gave up my anger at a world, which would tell a human being, of either sex, that you could not have love and "knowing" too. And so I made the only choice that, in my heart and soul, I could make. I made my way by myself.
    I hated the journalism nuts-and-bolts courses: reporting, copy reading, in particular typesetting. What I loved was the humanities, and I drowned myself in history, in political science, and in literature. But even this education, which most people would think of as pretty good, left a great deal to be desired. I am still suffering from the fact that I never had a single course in philosophy, physics, anthropology, sociology .... If anything allowed me to know cultures in a special way later on -- and if anything helped me to form the judgment necessary for making quick and right judgments on events, it was this much-maligned "liberal arts" education. There is no shortcut, and why, with all the joys of learning history with all its passions, should there be? You've simply got to know everything if you are to be a good journalist, and in particular you have got to know how this race of man made its way to those of us today who are suffering over the same dramas and joys and tragedies that men and women have always known.
    Our third year Miki and I decided to do something daring; we would go to Mexico for the winter quarter to a hedonistic school in the mountains outside Mexico City called Mexico City College. Medill allowed us to transfer credits but not grades, so we had the best of all possible worlds.
    If Northwestern had been paradise, Mexico was the next higher level of paradise. Almost all of the students at the college -- and three quarters of them were men, most of them GIs on the GI Bill from the Korean War -- lived in upper-class homes with Mexican families. This was nice and very proper, but it also meant that you had to keep very strict hours and take part in family life. At first Miki and the two other girls who came with us were horrified when we saw where we had been put. It was a big, gray, penitentiary-style building on the Avenida Melchor Ocampo, and the apartment could at best be called lower-class functional. Our "housemother" was a handsome, fortyish divorcée who had a big "friend" who came every afternoon at four o'clock to "visit." Clearly, if the college knew about the "unhealthy" aspects of our housing, it would have changed us to one of those dull rich houses, but I soon instinctively made one of those mutually convenient trade-offs. We would not tell on her