A meme Inspired by Smith College’s Graduation yesterday

So I went to the Smith College graduation yesterday. And, sap that I am, I started crying the moment I watched the young women’s procession into the quad. Graduations are a joyful celebration of accomplishment, and the worldwide fight to make sure women have access to education is a matter of life and death in many countries. Smith, like all US colleges, has a challenging history of elitism and is still heavily white, but the graduation was inspiring and powerful. In addition, there were many powerful women of color whose work was highlighted. The senior class president, Milanes Morejon, who spoke was an Afro-Latina from Roxbury, and they gave out honorary degrees to several activists, including Adelaide Cromwell, who was on the vanguard of black/African studies and feminism. The speaker, Juliet Garcia, was a bit more mainstream, but her story of being a first generation Xicana to go to college and becoming an educator in South Texas was still moving. And the young women I met were powerful, vibrant, and ornery, just as I would expect. I was pleased to be able to take my preschool daughter to watch young adult women celebrating their accomplishments, and to see a huge quad of men and women who had come to cheer for them.

So here’s my meme for Smith:

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