“He turned to Miss Minerva. “I’m relying on you, at any rate. You’ve got a good mind. Anybody can see that.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“As good as a man’s,” he added.
“Oh, now you’ve spoiled it!”
-Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without A Key
In the 10th grade, I wanted my name to be on the whiteboard of my World History Class. Up there, my name would be with the greats; all those who came before me who made a 100 on one of the notoriously difficult WHAP exams of my high school. Each person who made a perfect score would get a nickname and would be forever referred to as Jimmy “The Rocket” John, Chase “Ace” Hernandez, or, as I imagined in my dreams, Lizzie “Stoke the Fire” Stokes. I was not in the top 10 percent of my grade and was relatively quiet in my class, but I wanted to be on the board. Then Chapter 13, the Roaring Twenties, arrived. I was inspired by the glamour of prohibition and flappers and big trusts and forwent my lunch to read about them. The chapter 13 test came, and I conquered. My name was called out the next day, I had my 100, but to everyone’s surprise and to my own, I had no nickname. A boy in front of me turned around, looked at my notes and said to me, “How did you cheat?”
When I reported a car accident in the parking lot of my high school, an accident I had been involved with myself, I went home and looked up the regulations of parking lots. I told the police officer of my high school the next day what I had observed and learned, but he already had his mind made up that the boy who hit my friend’s car had been in the right. “Sweetheart, go back to class.” He said, and I went back to my class, embarrassed.
The mistake we often make when telling women that they are smart is we do so by implying that our intelligence is not free-standing. “You’re just as smart as him, you can do everything he can.” These things are all true, but we make him the standard by which we compare ourselves. A man should never be considered smart just because he’s a man, but a woman will always be considered smart if she can compete with a man. I am not smart because I beat out the boy in history class and I’m not dumb because I was dismissed by a police officer, because they are not the highest common denominator. My real beauty lies within my intelligence because it’s purely my own. At UT, we women work for our grades, and we should be proud of our accomplishments because they are the results of a dedication that can only be attributed to us, and us alone.
Join Spirits in their UT Real Beauty Campaign during the month of October, and tell us what your definition is of Real Beauty is by tweeting the hashtag #UTRealBeauty!