Back to the present, when women have 50 percent of the hardware necessary to live (for Ride it was a toilet, for us, a professional education) and then some. The advance in education means we can live comfortably, but it also puts the pressure on us to spot the places advances have not been made and to bring the deadbeats up to speed.

We need to start asking why the boss isn't a woman and forgetting about the established models that seem carved in stone until women like Sally Ride brush them aside. We need to become the Sally Rides of our own generation, renovating health care and workplace systems tailored to men's life-patterns, not to mention the workplaces themselves. Sally set me wondering, and the process never quite stopped. After all, somebody had to have designed that shuttle bathroom. The why's abound.

Why design it so that women are still doing 75 percent of the housework, scrubbing and buffing away the hours? Why do female role models all seem to be deputy-bosses? What's with getting so excited about mayoral and gubernatorial races that have never included female candidates? And above all, if we've got more than half of the undergraduate degrees under our belts and will soon claim an overwhelming majority of the professional ones, what's the ladies room in that little domed building on Capitol Hill doing so empty?

In the age of diversity, with women gaining on the majority, sex-based elitism is about as out as acid-wash, as dingy as Ride's old hairdo. Yet it still manages to get by, scrubbing up for battle and then sneaking out the back door under the guise of "good fun" or "tradition." I would not be true to my promise as a reporter who has covered the life and times of this school if I did not end this piece by answering why this situation has persisted. Congress is and has been a big fat boys club, but we've got the prototypes right here with doors only too ready to slam in the faces of ladies with some of the swankiest Ivy degrees around.

Here's where that "how" I promised comes in. The only way women will ever get rid of the door-slamming is to break down the doors, and not just as a quicker way to get inside. There is no excuse for having no other outlet, for resorting to the old system because it's all you can find. Anybody walking out of that hallowed door, male or female, should not be revered as privileged but ashamed for taking advantage, for ruling over what has become a majority with a power they are not entitled to. It's up to us as graduates to remember to work outside to change these things, and to return here to change with a vengeance. This is, after all, a fluid and changing democracy, and if Sally can find a way to even things up, then damn it, so can we.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske '99, a social studies concentrator in Eliot House, was executive editor of The Crimson in 1998.