Have You Noticed the Prevalence of Women at Campus Anti-Israel Protests?

Have You Noticed the Prevalence of Women at Campus Anti-Israel Protests?

Is it just because there are more girls in college these days or is it something else?

City Journal reports:

The New Girl Disorder

In late May, a strange post appeared on the X account of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Dear University Students in the United States of America,” it read, “you are standing on the right side of history. You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.” As it happens, the Supreme Leader’s government has struggled with its own resistance, ignited by the regime’s murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, accused of violating Iranian laws requiring head coverings—the most visible, but far from only, limitation on women’s basic freedoms in the Islamic country.

It’s hard to imagine that the cleric looked closely at images of the campus protesters denouncing Israel for its military response to Hamas’s monstrous terror attack last October. If he did, he would have noticed that they were predominantly female. It was women holding the microphones, addressing the press and crowds; women leading the chants of “From the river to the sea”; women giving interviews about the encampments; and women issuing demands to university administrators. In some images, so many women were involved that it seemed as if men had inexplicably vanished, like the missing in the sci-fi series The Leftovers.

The demographic makeup of the university demonstrations was something new for the United States. American women have led political protests before, but those generally concerned “women’s issues,” such as Prohibition, abortion, #MeToo, and the like. Granted, women marched with men in the 1960s civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests, but they usually played secondary roles, such as cooking food, typing speeches, and sometimes serving as playmates; “The only position of women in SNCC is prone,” in the memorable words of Stokely Carmichael. (Recognizing their second-class status among otherwise progressive male comrades motivated activist women of the era to start building the second-wave feminist movement.) Decades later, at Occupy Wall Street, a male protester produced a Tumblr video featuring photos of some of the comelier females sitting in at Zuccotti Park. He called it “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.” Those days are over. Imagine publicizing a “Hot Chicks of the Campus Encampments” video in 2024; the writer would have to go into a witness-protection program.

The vibe has shifted—and not for a reason that the Ayatollah would celebrate: women are all but conquering the twenty-first-century academy. They not only make up well over half of undergrads and graduate students on university campuses; they also hold half of all professor positions, as well as six out of eight Ivy League presidencies and more than a third of college presidencies overall. Younger women who came of age in the new millennium have been thoroughly prepped for leadership as valedictorians, debate-club and student-council presidents, and Rhodes, Marshall, and Truman Scholars. If the protests offer further evidence for the dimming of patriarchy, they also show how women’s growing dominance in social institutions introduces new and ambiguous power dynamics.

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