It may be a while until you hear from me again… Brianne has left for Texas on a World Tour, and so she’ll be relating her adventures to you while I take a blogging vacation. However, for those of you who liked watching the Laurie and Essie segments of last week, we’re shooting a new interview today with Eun-hyey Park, Intern for Racial Justice and Advocacy. So I’ll post at least once or twice.

Lots of interesting topics today from my forwarding list… everything from Muslim women leading prayers in mixed company for the first time to the increase in student loan interest rates. That’s right, federal student loan interest rates are going up in July to just under 7%. Sure makes me glad I’ve already finished my undergraduate education—with rising tuition costs combined with rising interest rates, higher education appears on its way to becoming what it once was, the purview of the elite upper classes. Or it just means that you will have to defer middle class dreams, such as home ownership, children, etc, indefinitely.

Of course, if you’re a young woman, you might face a few other roadblocks in your college education. Last week, a New York Times article (yes, I know…) highlighted how many colleges are now giving preference to male applicants over females, simply because there are so many more women at today’s higher education institutions. Apparently, says the Business Roundtable, by 2009-2010 women will earn 142 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 given to men. Moreover, many men and women don’t want to attend a college that is disproportionately female. So colleges are passing over more qualified female applicants to increase the enrollment of male candidates.

Even at my own little Whitworth, such was the case—not only was my dating life rather lackluster due to a shortage of eligible men (a sad anecdote, although not detrimental to my overall educational experience), but I even heard once that the college had sent out special fliers targeting male applicants. I don’t know if it worked.

Yet the kicker is that despite all our wonderful young women who look to be taking over the world (or at least the classroom), the rate of women suffering from eating disorders has doubled since the 1960s. One in five teenage girls, according to a 2001 Harvard study, have reported being hit or forced into sex by their partners. Depression is another problem facing us as young women.

No one really seems equipped to answer why continued and even increased problems with self-esteem and body image have accompanied rising achievement and opportunities for girls and women. One article I read suggested that women were trying to dilute their own strength. And perhaps this is so, but not just because they’re Amazon women trying to keep their raging power in check.

I’m a self-confessed perfectionist, one for whom achievement has always been important. And in my life, I’ve noticed this strange meeting of two contrasting impulses—one to succeed, to be perfect, to make people proud of me, and the other to avoid drawing too much attention to myself. When I got straight "A"s on my report card in school, for instance, I tried not to tell anyone since I understood that this might make them feel bad. In the end, it is still more important for a girl to be nice than to be smart, to avoid stirring people up too much or threatening their own egos too directly.

And you know what? The problem hasn’t gone away for me. I got into Harvard Divinity School the other day, as well as Boston University’s School of Theology. I was one of the first in my family to graduate from college, and I’ll be the first in my family to get a graduate degree. But right now I am debating in my head whether to delete the above declaration, because I’m afraid that I'll come off as bragging about it (and I did, in fact, delete some of what I originally wrote).

Maybe we young women really are trying to dilute our own strength, in a culture that constantly calls us both to perfectly perform while staying in the background. And perhaps this is just the point where we can reclaim the countercultural messages of the Gospel—the Gospel that proclaims God’s love for us regardless of how imperfect or perfect we are, the Gospel that reminds us of our unconditional acceptance into the family of God, the Gospel that invites us to inclusivity rather than exclusivity. And it is in this Gospel that we can accept ourselves, both in the abundant talents God has blessed us with and in the frail brokenness that the Holy One redeems.

So today, know that your value lies not in what your parents and friends say about you, not in what your partner says about you, not in what the media or government or Jerry Falwell says about you. Your value lies in the fact that you were created in the image of a loving, mothering God, a God that still sees that image within you and loves you for it.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” --Romans 8:38-39

Kelsey

First of all, congrats on getting into both schools! That's really exciting. Second, I know exactly how you feel when you're torn between being a perfectionist yet not wanting to be the center of attention. It happened to me again just last week, as a matter of fact.

And lastly, as sort of an aside, there is a study that was published recently about the effects of childhood abuse on eating disorders. It's kind of interesting even though the methodology is pretty flawed. It found that physical abuse was associated with eating disorders but not sexual abuse, even though the sample size probably was too small. Interesting, yet depressing stuff.