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Student Commencement Speaker Jay Vanasco '94
May 27, 1994
Good morning, my own class of 1994. We made it! And
welcome to all of you who have come here today to support us
and celebrate with us. On behalf of the seniors, I thank
you.
The first time I was identified as a "Wellesley woman," I
was a senior in high school. It was May, and my English
teacher brought up the Barbara Bush controversy.
Immediately, a member of the class swerved around to face
me. "Aren't you going to Wellesley?" he asked. I nodded and
wished my teacher would hurry and turn the discussion back
to Dickens. I wondered what I was getting into.
What I should have said was simply, "Yes." Yes, I'm going
to Wellesley. There are books out there which teach us to
say "No." The books say that as women, we try to do too
much, that to make space for ourselves we need to let "no"
be our watchword. We must guard against those who will
demand things of us. I disagree. Maybe sometimes, in some
circumstances, we should say "no." But we need to learn to
shout out "yes."
How many times have we been in our rooms with the door
shut when someone has knocked and asked us to do something
we would love to do? To walk to White Mountain for a fresh
waffle cone of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. To
take a rainy spring walk around the lake. To go traying
exuberantly down Severance Hill. To go tunneling at one in
the morning. How many times has someone asked us to do
something like that, and we turn to look at the pile of
books piled up on our desks and say mournfully ,
regretfully, "no. I really can't." We need to make room for
"Yes" in our lives. We need to say, Yes! I will go to that
march to help protest. Yes! I will take that male role in
community theater even though I have always been taught to
walk, talk and move like a woman. Yes, yes, yes.
Wellesley was founded on "yes." Henry Fowle Durant
believed that yes, girls could learn as much and as well as
boys- and they could row crew and play tennis, as well.
Wellesley is the only college in the country to have a
female president from the start- because Durant believed,
yes, a woman could do the job as well as a man-or better.
Wellesley women have always been encouraged in the sciences-
astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics- because
from the beginning the trustees have had a vision, and that
vision was yes, Wellesley women can do it.
"Yes" requires courage. But we have courage. We have
learned it from fighting battles on scales large and small.
We have fought against the meal plan (we lost that one) and
for extra credit for labs- that we got. We have held a "Take
back the night" march, a march in anger over the Rodney King
verdict, and a march to support the lesbian victim of a hate
crime. We have argued in Senate, we have argued over public
bulletin, we have argued in the Wellesley News, we have
argued in our dorm rooms and in our classes. That
intellectual, critical fighting that Wellesley women are so
good at, that takes courage. A philosophy professor who
taught here in the thirties said, "I want our students to be
fearlessly critical, to know facts and respect them, and to
know possibilities that allure them to adventurous living."
To have the courage to say "yes" is to embrace a rainbow of
opportunities, to have faith that the individual direction
we have chosen, though different from the choices of our
classmates, is the right one for us.
To say "yes" also needs confidence. That's not a problem,
because we have that, too. Mostly, it comes from practical
experience. We have thought out proposals. We have hammered
out details. We have gone on an alternative spring break and
helped build a house for a poor family. We have done office
work for local and national political campaigns. We have
taught English as a second language in Chinatown. We have
written for feminist newspapers. From figuring out a new
technique in lab, to starting an organization, from pulling
a team together, to debating with trustees, at Wellesley we
have learned to assimilate everything we know and have done
in order to see our ideas fly. And each time, we have begun
by saying what we think. Shakespeare's Rosalind says, in As
You Like It, "Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I
must speak." We have taken on this world of ours and helped
to shape it to mirror our diversity by speaking our
thoughts. And each time we do, we are saying, yes, I want
this community to reflect what I look like and think about
and believe in. Yes, I will be courageous and confident and
stand out here alone- or enlist the help of others. Yes, I
will do this, because it is important to me.
Which leads me to what is unique about the Wellesley
women of the class of 1994. Maya Angelou describes it best
in her poem "Phenomenal Woman." She writes,
"They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
they say they can't see.
I say,
It's the arch in my back,
the sun of my smile,
the ride of my breasts,
the grace of my style.
I'm a woman,
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
that's me."
A phenomenal woman is a woman who can gaze at the world
and all that's in it and say "yes."
I stand before you today looking at women I feel I have
known all my life. We have stayed up all night discussing
dreams and wishes and desires. I have seen you evolve from
first years to seniors, and today when I look at you I know
you are phenomenal women.
I used to fight with upperclasswomen over the word,
"woman." I am not a woman, I would say. I am a girl. Happy,
fun-loving, free-spirited. I will never be a woman. A woman
is someone with her stockings bunched around her ankles and
orange lipstick smeared on her mouth.
Today I know better, because I have spent my time with
the women of the class of 1994. I do not know if we were
women when we came here, but we are certainly women as we
leave. We walk proudly, like women. When there is a job to
do, we do it, as a woman would. When there is a dream to
take hold of, a battle to fight, a mountain to climb, we do
it as women. When there is a song to sing, a mystery to
uncover, a problem to solve, a hand to hold, we do it as
women. Phenomenal women.
The first day of Orientation, I walked around campus with
a new friend. We looked at the majesty of Tower Court, and
the beauty of Lake Waban. At one point, she turned to me and
said, "I can't believe that I do not have to leave when my
parents go home today. I can't believe that I get to stay
here." I couldn't believe it, either. But now, when our
parents leave today or tomorrow, we have to leave too. We
need to drag all the boxes of things we have collected to
the car. All the pictures and baseball caps, and books, and
candles- which we, of course, have never, ever lit in our
dorm rooms- all these will need to be hauled away from this
place that has been home for four years.
But then, in ten years or twenty years or fifty years,
most of us will be back again. The women you are sitting
among now will be the ones who lead the world, in both large
and small ways. Among you may be a future Editor-in-Chief of
the New York Times, an educator, an entrepreneur, the
President of the Federal Reserve Bank, or the physicist who
discovers the true origins of the universe. But even if they
do not make the headlines, the women sitting next to you
will leave here and make a difference. Whether they will
hold a family or a country together, these women will take
all they have learned at Wellesley, and all they will learn
in their lives, and find a cause and speak for it. And when
someone approaches you with an idea or a cause that you
believe in, and when they ask you, "Will you work with us?
Will you fight with us?" you will accept the challenge. You
will say "yes." Because you are a Wellesley woman from the
class of 1994.
Honored guests, I present to you the phenomenal women of
the Class of 1994.
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