THE POWER OF COMMUNITY
When I was in grade school, I came home one day, burst out crying, and told my mother, "I don't want to be smart any more! I don't want to get A-pluses!" Of course, what I wanted was to be one of the crowd. In the rural schools I was steeped in, there was pressure to be beautiful, athletic, and popular, and those were races I wasn't as comfortable entering then. So I felt alone, out of the mainstream. That experience of feeling awkward and alone—of being a bright girl and, later, a bright woman I came to terms with at Dartmouth.
My two roommates, Ruth Bedell '84 and Leslie Maibach '84, were an important part of that process. The three of us were remarkably different a woman from rural New Hampshire, a woman from urban Chicago, and a woman from suburban Long Island. We had three sets of friends and three different majors. We found one another at the end of freshman year, and spent the next three years rooming together in various combinations. For the first time in my life I had two immediate role models, women who took their academic lives seriously, Here were two women I saw every day—one who was premed, the other a government major—who were unashamedly intelligent and devoted to doing well in their classes. They didn't try to mold me into anything. They made me feel it was'okay to be who I was. It felt like family.
With this support I reached out to other communities of women. I worked on my biology honor's thesis with Professor Carol Folt, sharing her lab space and learning from this remarkable woman how to be a scientist and a humanist at the same time. During senior year I was invited to join an all-women's society. I was discovering the true depth and power of community.
When I think of what it was like to be a woman at Dartmouth, I think of those communities and of my roommates. Though I was at Dartmouth for just four years, I am in Dartmouth still, and will be, I presume, for the rest of my conscious life, because of the web of wonderful women I carry with me. I carry it with me in my Rolodex. I carry it with me in my heart.
REBECCA Todd is an assistant attorney general for the state of Washington.
