Fifty Years of Co-education: the Promise of FemX and the Future of Girlhood at MX

Female students still face judgement and internalized misogyny, but spaces like FemMX bring the key to true empowerment of girls.

There's a certain shift that happens when a group of girls laughs too loudly in public: the moment when the laughter softens, glances are exchanged, and everyone becomes aware of the eyes on them. It’s a quiet kind of surveillance that changes how we act, how we talk, and even how we relate to each other. Being a girl among other girls can be joyful—until someone decides to comment. 

Here at Middlesex, despite the strong female presence, we are not immune to the pull of internalized misogyny. It shapes how we see ourselves and each other, surfacing in comparisons we make, the competition we feel, and the ways we diminish ourselves under a gaze that insists we are always being perceived. Even in spaces designed to empower us, this gaze persists as a constant reminder that sisterhood in fact doesn’t come easy, as we have to keep actively choosing it or else we risk losing it. 

This becomes painfully clear in how it warps our friendships. When we are together, there is always a third presence: the male perspective we have internalized so deeply. It changes what we talk about and how we talk about it. 

But lately, the rise of FemX brought a change. In FemX, we practice a different way of being together. For instance, recently, FemX organized an all-girls pajama party, a simple idea that created something unexpectedly powerful. For one night, girls across all grades gathered together without the weight of external male judgment. The difference to me was immediate, but striking. Freshman and seniors sprawled across the same floor, swapping funny stories. Girls stayed until the very end not because we were trying to prove we could, but because we did not want the conversation to end. There was loud, unrestrained laughter, and no one softened it. Just the pure joy of being among other girls.

Furthermore, FemX’s mentorship program has further accelerated the sense of community within the female population. The program pairs upperclassmen with underclassmen, a structure that has transformed the daily campus experience. Now, when a nervous freshman walks into the dining hall, a senior’s familiar face waves at her, making sure that she feels seen. These are not formal scheduled check-ins, but rather organic connections. The mentorship program has woven a safety net across grades, creating care that makes Middlesex feel less like a place where you have to prove yourself to others, but more like a place where you are accepted for who you already are. It is harder to see other girls as competition when you have sat with them in your vulnerability, when you know their fears and dreams and the specific ways they are trying to assert their space in a world that keeps telling them to shrink.

As I write this on the fiftieth anniversary of co-education at Middlesex, I reflect on how far we have come as a community to empower girls within this space. However, empowerment on paper does not translate to empowerment in practice. We have girls in leadership positions and girls excelling academically, but there are still many who feel like they do not belong in certain spaces, who measure their worth to impossible standards, and who carry the load of navigating a world that views them differently. Fifty years should mean we are past the point of proving we belong here. And yet, this constant fight to prove ourselves, prove that we belong here. The anniversary asks us all to consider: what does true empowerment look like? So yes, MX has had co-education for fifty years; however, it seems like we haven’t quite learned to co-exist. The structures may have changed, but the culture is still catching up.

Marina Sabater ‘26

image by: Kat Stephens '27

image by: Middlesex Instagram