27
If I Were a Woman
I’d come to BYU to study music, so that one day I could direct a church
choir. But that semester—the fall of my junior year—I didn’t enroll in a
single music course. I couldn’t have explained why I dropped advanced
music theory in favor of geography and comparative politics, or gave up
sight-singing to take History of the Jews. But when I’d seen those courses in
the catalog, and read their titles aloud, I had felt something infinite, and I
wanted a taste of that infinity.
For four months I attended lectures on geography and history and politics.
I learned about Margaret Thatcher and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and the
Cultural Revolution; I learned about parliamentary politics and electoral
systems around the world. I learned about the Jewish diaspora and the strange
history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By the end of the semester the
world felt big, and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a
kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen.
This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to
study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of
history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me.
A few days before finals, I sat for an hour with my friend Josh in an empty
classroom. He was reviewing his applications for law school. I was choosing
my courses for the next semester.
“If you were a woman,” I asked, “would you still study law?”
Josh didn’t look up. “If I were a woman,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to
study it.”
“But you’ve talked about nothing except law school for as long as I’ve
known you,” I said. “It’s your dream, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he admitted. “But it wouldn’t be if I were a woman. Women are
made differently. They don’t have this ambition. Their ambition is for