Response: The Price of Higher Education for Women

If these two essays by Maria Cristina Rangel and Aisha Hakim-Dyce demonstrate nothing else, they show the all-too-normalized ways that women are impeded from experiencing the civil rights that men enjoy frequently and often without such significant barriers. Both Rangel and Hakim-Dyce's stories are of the different ways that the patriarchy we live in obstructs women's economic success. Possibly two of the more resourceful women of color searching in today's day and age for work, Hakim-Dyce and Rangel still experienced considerable setbacks in their quests for economic freedom.
It is preposterous to me that everything from cultural stigmas to public policies to the evolution of raunch culture have developed in continuing to impede women from the economic opportunities readily available to men. I find myself seriously questioning what Hakim-Dyce must have debated to the point of illness -- how is it that a woman's most lucrative economic endeavor is sex work? Hakim-Dyce says, "I had never thought that my underemployed status would lead me to seriously consider a stint that would require me to shake my breasts and gyrate my hips to the catcalls, whistles and sexually explicit suggestion of men" (p.119). What a difficult realization to have! Her narrative of her personal transformation upon seriously considering becoming a go-go dancer is both touching and telling. Why is the necessity of womens' desensitization in order to exploit themselves accepted by our brothers, our fathers, our mothers, and our sisters?
We all contribute to the patriarchy that sets up impenetrable barriers to womens' success. I wish I knew the ways that women might traverse these obstacles, transform these barriers, abolish them. But more than that, I wish that women like Rangel and Hakim-Dyce do not have to experience the patronizing and blaming of a sexist culture in addition to the economic burdens imposed upon them.