What’s the real difference between men and women, anyway?
Before it could get slapped with punitive fellowship and leadership sanctions by Harvard’s administration, the Sablière Society junked its women-only rule and its namesake, the 17th century female scholar Marguerite de la Sablière, The Harvard Crimson reports.
It also ditched its logo, a swan on a light-blue background, and rebranded as the gender-neutral “Sab Club” as it inducted its first 14 men over the weekend.
The society was the first women-only “final club” to vote to become gender-neutral. Its then-president told The Crimson last fall that though it was going gender-neutral “the same semester as the [administration] sanctions take effect,” the society had already had “a year of discussions” about a potential change.
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The new president also played down the influence of administrators breathing down the necks of the single-sex clubs:
“Our club made this vote before the sanctions came out, because it was something that we thought was important,” she said. “The original reasoning was that in so many times throughout Harvard’s history, it’s been the men who have been opening up their spaces to women—even in the case of Harvard and Radcliffe.”
“We think it’s really empowering to be a women’s space opening up our organization to non-women,” she added.
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Sablière Society members had a different tune a year ago when the administration plan to trample their freedom of association was first put forth.
Three leaders scolded the administration for making women “collateral damage” in the forced transition to gender-neutral clubs, claiming there was a “distinct possibility female clubs will die out” under the administration’s approach. They wrote in The Crimson that Harvard was forcing change “primarily as a form of damage control” in response to bad headlines.
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The newly inducted men are thrilled to be taking away a “safe space” for women, as the society leaders once called it:
“We are kind of getting out of this gendered idea and breaking out of this idea, because when the male-female barrier breaks down we kind of get into who you are as a person, as opposed to your gender and how you’re expected to perform as a male-identifying person or female-identifying person,” new Sab Club member Tynan Jackson ’19 said.
Matthew Moore ’19, another new Sab Club member, said he saw membership as “a great opportunity for redefining the social scene in a way that isn’t dominated by just males.”
“This hopefully sends a message that there can be situations where men and women and even those who don’t identify as men or women can have an equal share in Harvard’s social scene,” Moore said.
MORE: National LGBT group rips Harvard ‘blacklist’ of single-sex clubs
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