Brotherhood.

The foundation of institutions.

The walls are made of solid wood. High above, a bronze chandelier hangs unmoving. In the center of regally carved antique couches is an equally ancient fireplace. Dark wood. Mahogany, if I had to guess. Secured to the walls are a long line of photographs of each graduating class that stretch from this grand foyer down winding hallways and up spiral staircases that creek with every step, a forever dust hanging in the air that gets shown off by the sun.

This is the place where the boys studied when they weren’t loitering by the front gates of their sister school down the hill from them. I sometimes wondered if they felt the weight of the tradition that quite literally encased them. I wondered if it emboldened them or gave them a sense of pride or purpose or belonging. My father seemed to think so. But when he attended that place, he had something to prove. In the early 1970s, he was among the school’s first black students.

“I looked at those pictures and I knew that’s who I wanted to become,” he told me once in many long speeches I’d hear about ambition. Then, after some contemplation, he amended that to say, “It’s who I needed to become to get to where I wanted to go.”

For a boy who spent his early childhood in a segregated society in rural Georgia and one noteworthy winter up north when the Black Panther Party threatened to shoot out the windows of any black family’s home that had a Christmas tree visible from the street, I can guess the strength of the singular sense of focus that seemed to overcome him stepping foot into a building that had hardly changed its appearance in over two hundred years. Of his peers, whether it be there or at the Ivy League college he eventually attended or the oil company he eventually worked for, he spoke primarily of a goal-oriented ecosystem that provided good company of consistent character along the journey.

For many, the term “brotherhood” evokes something positive or enticing. The bravery of soldiers, the camaraderie of a sports team, the power of a secret society, or the grit of those on the frontier. And while exactly none of those things are specific to men, the celebratory images that likely come to mind are male-centric. My casual TV watching habits always have me tuning into old westerns from the 60s and 70s, the ones my father watched as a boy. The upstanding cowboy or sheriff who speaks with purpose and is the measure of morality for a small town, gunning down bad men in the middle of the road because he simply had no other choice.

In one sense, he is a loner. In another sense, he is part of something larger than himself. A goal-oriented man who had the company of gunslingers, shopkeepers, and farmers of the town who were all of a consistent noble character. Most often, save for a barmaid or school teacher entering the frame with the soft glow reserved for women on film in that era, this circle of people around him are all men. Men with a code. It remains a fantasy as enticing as any tale of medieval knights, samurai, or all of Star Wars which is just a combination of these three things. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be able to save the day and protect those I cared about.

Recently, I encountered a pair of feminist commentators who stated that they desired a brotherhood of women and ran in the opposite direction of anyone advertising sisterhood. They wanted to have a real impact on the world around them instead of sitting in a room pretending that they enjoyed the company of the women with them who had arbitrarily been assigned their sisters. While my life experience doesn’t exactly put me in a position to, I feel, adequately analyze male social dynamics, I did want to write a little bit about my musings on this. That is, my musings on brotherhood. I have already outlined the ways it is advertised as something meaningful and captivating from a distance even for women like myself. But just like most other things, it gained this status - or even mythos - because it was assigned such extreme value by the underlying male culture within which it exists.

While brotherhood might be considered the foundation of humanity’s great institutions, dominion over women is and always has been the foundation of brotherhood. It matters not their race, their class, or their origin, men will bond with, bow down to, and kill based on the resources they divide (willingly or unwillingly) between themselves. When my father was in school, the thin veneer of civility maintained between black students and white students couldn’t be disturbed more swiftly or severely than if any given boy approached the wrong type of girl at the school down the hill. The mere existence of a girl's school so nearby was like a resource management practice run as it remained by the time I attended, boys peering at us through the gates like zoo animals until they worked up the guts to approach one of us for real.

Put women by the sides of men as accessories and you see the creation of the most fantastical tales ever told. In reality, take the women away and due to this violation of nature you have headline after headline about males in crisis, spiraling until they meet their ultimate demise in a blaze of glory. You get the tortured and misunderstood soul who is nonetheless a genius, either scientifically, artistically, or spiritually. Women can neither be the greatest of the great nor the worst of the worst because those are male traits. To be able to reach the heights or depths of your potential is thought to be reserved only for those who are fully realized individuals under male rule. Male culture is unconcerned with female advancement or fulfillment, but they frame female domestication as the will and destiny of nature. In this way, women are the key to brotherhood but cannot be inducted into the brotherhood themselves.

So do I desire a brotherhood of women? I understand the sentiment but, after some thought, do not agree. I’ve come under the impression that my positive experiences in a community of girls could be considered rare. Sisterhood as a concept to many is nothing more than a joke, the bonds between women bred to be frail, unable to withstand the weight of male destiny. The catalyst for its flourishing is often in reaction to male dominion over them, either welcoming it or attempting to survive it. Because of the place of women within the male power structure, the warfront of sisterhood is to simply exist at all in the first place, like grass fighting its way through sidewalk cracks.

But in my experience as a child, sisterhood is built on cooperation, curiosity, and creativity. It is an acceptance of differences, a celebration of strengths, and a companion to aid weaknesses. It hinges not on dominion over others, but of a genuine desire to conquer yourself and come out on the other side confident and ready to face the world and to play a meaningful part in it. The propaganda of brotherhood has diminished the value of sisterhood down to ash. It is my desire to see it restored for a purpose other than being the foundation of an institution that despises it. And it is entirely within our power to do so.