Empowerment High

One of my friends informed me this weekend that she, like me, is a member of a dying breed, that rare tribe of women who went to all-girls high schools. Naturally, I did what I always do when I meet one of my sisters-in-arms: I screamed a little and spent the next 10 minutes gushing about how great it is to spend your formative years surrounded by the fairer sex. I think I might have freaked her out a little bit.

I never really had to defend the merits of same-sex education until I ended up at Penn State, where, upon mentioning my high school experience, people looked at me like I'd just escaped from a nunnery. I've heard everything from "Didn't you go crazy without any boys around?" to "So, did you all, like, turn into lesbians?" In 2011, being a graduate of an all-girls school marks you as something very curious and archaic, a relic of a bygone age.

Some of that's valid. Wearing penny loafers every day and memorizing your school's Latin motto and getting your knee socks in a knot over the annual Mass that accompanies the anniversary of your school's founding is, admittedly, kind of weird. But if I ever have a daughter, I'm dressing her in plaid and shipping her to the nearest same-sex educational facility, because going to an all-girls school is the reason I am the woman I am today.

I went to an all-girls prep school not because I wanted to forgo male companionship for four years, but because I was the kind of insufferable teenager who got real joy out of Learning Valuable Things, and my particular high school had a stellar academic reputation. It made sense: When everyone wears the same outfit to school every day and there are no boys to fight over, the only thing you can do is engage in fiendish competition over your grade-point average.

What I did learn in high school, though, went beyond the causes of the First World War and the boiling point of ethanol (both of which I have since forgotten). No, the most valuable lessons I took from high school were things you can't learn in a classroom - like sisterhood and loyalty and taking care of one another and sticking it to the man (or, in our case, the adolescent).

As legions of Lifetime movies have taught us, teenage girls can be vicious. They are, by definition, cruel and vindictive and judgmental and, like everyone everywhere, very, very insecure. Going to an all-girls high school doesn't eliminate that insecurity, but it eliminates distractions. You don't worry about your hair or your makeup or how short your uniform skirt is because Hot Boy isn't around to be impressed by it. And in the meantime, you form what I can only describe as a sisterly bond with your classmates - you realize that, in the immortal words of High School Musical, you're all in this together.

That's not to say I spent my lunch hours discussing feminist theory. None of us really acknowledged how valuable it was to grow up in a place where young women were running the newspaper and the student government and beating the boys at robotics competitions. But when you're pushed and pulled in a million different directions by a world that urges you to be skinny and sexy and vapid - and where undergraduate college guys refer to women as "frat-mattresses" - spending your school days surrounded by a couple of hundred brilliant and complicated and uncompromising girls makes all the difference in the world.

In the end, moving from a school of 500 girls to a campus of 40,000 undergraduates was much easier than I expected it to be. Going to an all-girls school isn't about hiding from a male-dominated world, but about recognizing that you can claim a place in it. And being in class with boys for the first time in four years was, frankly, kind of fun - after all, it's not like high school turned me into a man-eating she-wolf. What it did turn me into was a young woman who knows that the only person I ever really need to impress is myself. I can thank the girls for that.