Image above: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning Nigerian author.
By Elizabeth Jacob ’24
Staff Writer
In the midst of COVID-19 and its accompanying social distancing guidelines, I and other college students are dealing with the loss of a traditional college experience. Not only has this loss manifested in a suspension of in-person classes and physical socialization, but it has led to a decrease in our ability to interact with people in general, whether that be through clubs or on-campus activities.
When envisioning what Mount Holyoke would be like in the fall, I never imagined it full of online assignments and meeting friends and professors through Zoom. Actually, I pictured waking up in my dorm for Mountain Day, excitedly anticipating elfing, walking around campus with new friends and feeling a growing sense of belonging. In light of all we’re missing, students have been working to create and join their own clubs and activities in the hope of simulating this on-campus experience.
As a first-year and self-proclaimed bookworm, trying to socialize with other students and create a normal college experience has been a difficulty, one that has resided in me since the beginning of the pandemic. For casual readers and bibliophiles alike, finding a place to interact with other literature enthusiasts has proven to be particularly hard. Without the opportunity to congregate in the campus library or to meet others in English classes, I felt like there was a significant loss to my freshman experience. In order to fill that gap, I decided to start an informal book club through the class of 2024 Facebook group, very appropriately titled The Mount Holyoke Book Club.
What originally started out as a desire to meet a handful of students with a similar interest soon grew to be a club of around 30 members, all looking for a way to meaningfully connect with one another in the midst of the pandemic. Since we wanted to establish a routine of meeting at the end of every month, we only had about two weeks to pick and read a book. We all expressed interest in reading something that was short and discussed issues that we were interested in, such as women’s rights. Through different polls and opinions, we decided on the book “We Should All Be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an award-winning Nigerian author, to begin with. This book is a compressed essay adaptation of Adichie’s TEDx talk on what it means to be a feminist and how societal standards and masculine identity have influenced how women are treated.
While our Zoom book club discussion took place, we noticed a lot of parallels between Adichie’s experience as a woman and our collective experience. Both experiences are characterized by flagrant sexism and societal expectations that serve to pigeonhole women. In conversation, we expanded upon the rights — and the lack thereof — that women have in comparison to men, and how this has worked to actively prevent women from reaching for and achieving goals that men have historically had easier access to. As the meeting concluded, we touched upon our collective fear as women not only in the U.S. but internationally. In the midst of the current political climate, we noted that we fear that any rights we currently have could be taken away, especially as the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election may determine the fate of gender equality and women’s rights.
As everyone left the Zoom call, I walked away feeling happy and inspired. Not only did the connection with other people who were passionate about reading help me feel more involved in the Mount Holyoke community, but I felt I had learned something new about how feminism on a global scale is approached, thanks to our discussions that began with Adichie’s book.
Through our different backgrounds, experiences and characteristics, everyone in the club had their own unique definition of feminism and what it means to be a feminist — definitions that transcend dictionary verbatim and societal standards, that they all brought individually to our meeting. I noticed that, while we may have had different experiences with feminism, or a lack thereof, we all agreed on one thing: Being a feminist is important and advocacy for women’s rights needs to be centered on both domestic and global scales.
Through the creation of this informal book club, the novel-sized space in my mind that had been created by the pandemic began to heal itself. Meeting monthly, I finally feel like I am starting to become a part of MoHome while at home.