Dartmouth HERSTORY
An unexpurgated timeline of Dartmouth educatingwomen (and women educating Dartmouth).
1743
Sarah Occom, a Connecticut Mohegan, asks Eleazar Wheelock to educate her 20-year-old son Samson. He agrees, thus taking on his first Indian pupil.
1754
Eleazar Wheelock founds Moor's Charity School, a coeducational institution for Indians in Lebanon, Connecticut.
1761
Four men and two women enroll in Moor's Charity School.
1765
Samson Occom sails to England to raise money to expand the Charity School.
1769
Dartmouth College is chartered by King George III. The mission is to educate "Indian...and ...English youths, and any others. "Nothing in the charter mentions male exclusivity.
1770
Wheelock relocates Moor's Charity School to Hanover and opens Dartmouth College as well.
1773
Male laborers employed by Dartmouth earn three to four shillings a day. Servant girls earn three to four shillings a week.
1794
Enrollment at Moor's Charity School totals 70 students. Twenty are female.
1809
Sarah J. Hale gets the equivalent of a Dartmouth education by studying with her brother Horatio Buell 1809. In later years she becomes the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, the force behind Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and the lyricist of "Mary Had a Little Lamb.'
1837
Irene Burroughs Foster, sister of notorious rapscallion Stephen Burroughs 1786, sends the first of seven sons to Dartmouth. By the time the youngest graduates in 1851, Irene has read all 6,700 books in the College library.
1840
Susan Coolidge, a student at Hanover's Peabody Boarding School, writes a roman a clef titled What Katy Did atSchool. Her fiction includes a description of crossing the Hanover Green on the way to the bath house: "We are in plain sight from the college all the way, and of course those abominable boys sit there with spy glasses and stare as hard as ever they can."
1847
Dartmouth students serenade local women in Lebanon, Norwich, and White River Junction.
1849
Moor's Charity School closes.
1855
Milo Jewett 1828 counsels Poughkeepsie, New York, brewer Matthew Vassar: "If you will establish a real College for girls and endow it, you will build a monument for yourself more lasting than the Pyramids." Jewett eventually becomes Vassar College's founding president; he resigns in a dispute with Vassar shortly before the school opens.
1861
President Nathan Lord 1821H writes that "a College is a public institution designed and incorporated to qualify young men for leaders of the Church and State."
1866
Dartmouth seniors decide the school needs a color. They ask Sally Smith (daughter of President Asa Smith 1830) and Kate Sanborn (daughter of Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres Edwin David Sanborn 1832) to choose for them. The women pick green.
1872
The Trustees appoint the College's first coeducation study committee. It never reports back.
1879
Students stage an all-male production of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. Little Buttercup weighs in at 250 pounds.
1894
The legal committee of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees interprets the charter's reference to "English youths, and any others" as including women. The Dartmouth editorializes: "Coeducational colleges, which were once strong schools for men, are fast losing their prestige."
1895
President William Jewett Tucker 1861 admits Katharine Quint, a Wellesley graduate (and daughter of influential Trustee Alonzo Quint 1846) for graduate study in biology. Barred from taking classes, she is tutored by professors. The Dartmouth editorializes: "The admission of ladies to postgraduate courses in Dartmouth is a new move for Dartmouth, but it is safe to say, for the sake of quieting the uneasiness, that no harm will come of it."
1896
Katharine Quint receives an M.A. in biology, thus becoming the first woman to earn a Dartmouth degree.
1900
Dartmouth's summer school is open to women. The majority of the course offerings are education classes for schoolteachers.
1913
"Real Girl in College Show" proclaims a headline in the Boston American when the
Dartmouth Drama Club casts a female in a female role. The actress, Mary Gray, is a Barnard student on campus for the summer.
1915
The Drama Club presents What's Next?, a musical comedy. The play, set in a futuristic 1935, opens with a lament about a coeducational Dartmouth. The hero is the only man on campus in support of an allmale College. "A howling success, " reports The Dartmouth.
1918
Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood becomes the College's first female instructor. She founds the Russian department, attacting 86 students to her first Russian course. She leaves after one year and goes on to translate Stanislavskii's An Actor Prepares.
1923
The Outing Club tells candidates for Dartmouth's first Carnival Queen, "We want you pretty and warm, not expensive and cold." Women arriving on campus early are forbidden by the faculty to audit classes with their dates.
1930
Unchaperoned women are barred from College dormitories and fraternities at all times.
1930
Mrs. Frank Ford Hill of Milton, Massachusetts, mother of three Dartmouth sons (John '20, Frank '21, and Kenneth '25) founds the Dartmouth Women's Club of Greater Boston to "promote acquaintanceship among Dartmouth women, to show our loyalty to the College, and to establish a Scholarship Loan Fund for the benefit of Dartmouth students." By 1933 the club has 400 members.
1936
The senior class votes against coeducation.
1938
Steven Peters, chairman of the Mashpee, Massachusetts, selectmen and leader of the wampanoag Indians, announces to the press his intention to enroll his 15-year-old daughter Amelia at Dartmouth. When several influential newspapers carry the news, College officials dismiss the story as a publicity stunt. They note that Peters never requested admissions materials; besides, they say, female applicants are routinely rejected.
1941
As men leave for military' service, women take over administrative jobs and teach courses. The Dartmouth calls the women "damned good Dartmouth men."
1945
Veterans' wives are not permitted to attend classes. Groups of wives invite professors into their homes for informal sessions. "What chance will a poor bachelor have making an 'A' in a course when the married men can invite a professor over to the house for a real homecooked dinner?" complains a young undergraduate in The Dartmouth.
1946
Entertainment of female guests in dorms is prohibited except with permission of the Dormitory Committee.
1950
Biologist Hannah Croasdale becomes the first woman assistant professor at Dartmouth. She does research but no teaching.
1954
Hanover police seal off the country club after 69 students and their dates are discovered playing golf at four in the morning.
1955
Russian linguist Nadezhda Koroton becomes the first woman assistant professor to teach at Dartmouth.
1956
The College holds a contest to "Name the New Ski Area." Pauline Case, an assistant to the secretary of the College, coins the winning entry: The Dartmouth Skiway.
1959
The College hosts a panel discussion on coeducation. Tucker Foundation Dean Fred Berthold '45 asks: "What is there about a men's college that is worth protecting?"
1960
History professor Robert Riegel is awarded a Guggenheim to study the history of American feminism.
1962
"Dartmouth College should become coed," declares B.F. Skinner during a visit. "This is a lesson from human behavior. Dartmouth is so far away from a supply of girls that the sooner it is made coed the better."
1963
Hannah Croasdale becomes the first tenured woman professor. After 28 years at the College, she is finally allowed to teach.
1963
The first female undergraduates are enrolled for the summer term. The women's dormitories are equipped with one hairdryer per 50 women.
1965
The Planning Committee of the Board of Trustees investigates all coeducation options, including a proposed relocation of Skidmore College to Hanover.
1966
Visiting hours for women are increased; women are allowed upstairs in fraternities.
1967
The Dartmouth Experimental College, organized by Robert Reich '68, attracts 378 women from four colleges to participate in book discussions.
1967
Only 11 percent of 378 Dartmouth students responding to a poll favor admitting women.
1968
Two hundred Mount Holyoke women attend Coed Week at Dartmouth.
1968
The Summer Term Handbook requires women to wear skirts to dinner.
1968
The Drama Department accepts seven women as special students for the 1968-69 academic year. They are not allowed to live in the dormitories. One of the seven asks Dean Seymour if she can join Chi Phi; she wishes to produce the fraternity's plays and direct its Hums. The dean says no.
1968
Broadcasting over Dartmouth radio station WDCR, Gloria Steinem ridicules the "old-boy network" that sips coffee at Lou's and governs Hanover.
1969
Neglecting to ask the dean's permission in advance, two women Virginia "Ginny" Feingold and Barbara "Binky" Wood join Foley House.
1969
Five Skidmore women come to Dartmouth to study electronic music. They are forbidden from eating at Thayer Dining Hall or living in College housing. The ratio of 2,300 men to five women is unhealthy, explains Dean Seymour. "A ratio of 2,300 to nothing was sick," The Dartmouth retorts.
1969
The College allows women exchange students to apply to stay for senior year and earn a Dartmouth degree if their parent institutions approve. Half of the 150 women who apply are allowed to stay.
1969
Dartmouth's second Coed Week draws 1,000 women from 18 schools.
1969
One hundred fifty women enroll for the academic year and are housed in Cohen Hall. The Wall Street Journal reports that many Dartmouth men spent the first two weeks of fall term "either ignoring the coeds or harassing them." "I don't believe that coeducation here is inevitable," comments President John Sloan Dickey' 29. "Nor is it necessarily wrong."
1970
New President John Kemeny declares: "I believe that if we were refounding the institution today, we would not discriminate on the basis of sex." In surveys, 83 percent of students and 59 percent of alumni favor coeducation.
1970
None of the male Dartmouth students on exchange to Mount Holyoke ask to stay and earn their degree.
January 1971
The Trustees' Study Committee on Coeducation calls for 2,700 men and 900 women students by 1975.
April 1971
The faculty, by a vote of 111 to 18, passes a resolution calling for coeducation by September 1972. College lawyers urge the administration to delay a decision pending predicted legislation. on sex discrimination.
May 1971
Students circulate a petition demanding that the Trustees commit to coeducation by the next fall.
November 21, 1971
At 6:30 p.m., President Kemeny announces on College radio station WDCR that the Trustees have voted in favor of the Dartmouth Plan for Year Round Operation and the matriculation of women, effective September 1,1972. Target enrollments are 3,000 men and 1,000 women undergraduates
November 22, 1971
The Trustees' decision makes the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the Boston papers. Fifty television stations air the clip of Kemeny's announcement. Dartmouth's admissions office is flooded with calls from women requesting applications.
January 1972
This magazine prints its first letter, from a '44, suggesting that "Men of Dartmouth" is no longer an appropriate alma mater. Sixteen years go by before the lyrics are changed.
1972
Margee Russell of Colby Junior College becomes Dartmouth's last official Carnival Queen.
September 1972
One hundred seventy-seven women matriculate as freshmen, along with 74 female transfer students.
October 1972
The Dartmouth dubs the women's field-hockey team the College's first women's intercollegiate squad—the "Little Green." Drawing from a pool of just 350 women, the College also creates teams in basketball, squash, lacrosse, tennis, and skiing.
April 1973
The admissions office receives 7,000 applications, a one-third increase from 1971. Officials attribute the jump to coeducation.
June 1973
Steve Stetson '73 and Susan Burt '73 become the first undergraduate married couple.
June 1973
Mary Lynn Allen '73 becomes the first woman to get her diploma with a coeducational class. Of 846 seniors, 37 are women. Fifty-one percent of the women and 20 percent of the men graduate Phi Beta Kappa. President Kemeny ends his Commencement speech with an appeal to the women: "Since you are the first ones who can tell women candidates what it is truly like here, I hope you will tell it as it is, both the good and the bad."
September 1973
The ratio of male to female students is nine to one. Of the College's 281 faculty, 40 are women.
1974
Six fraternities accept women as members.
1974
The first coed Glee Club tours the Northeast.
1974
The Dartmouth faculty is 13 percent female. Three percent hold senior positions; none are department chairs.
1975
Eleven women stage You Laugh, a play about the tribulations of being among the first women at Dartmouth.
1977
"Our Cohogs," ademeaning song about Dartmouth women, makes its Green Key Weekend debut.
1978
Dartmouth's first sorority, Sigma Kappa, opens.
1978
Dartmouth becomes the first of the formerly all-male hies to add women's studies. A faculty committee estimates that more than 300 colleges in the country already offer the program.
1979
Priscilla Frechette Maynard '41W becomes the first woman Trustee of Dartmouth.
1986
Students found the Womyns Review, a feminist newspaper. On Dartmouth Night a group calling itself Womben to Overthrow Dartmyth throw reddyed tampons on the Green.
1988
The Women's Resource Center opens.
1990
Chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahn and Thayer School assistant dean Carol Muller '77 co-found the Women in Science Project to encourage women to major and pursue careers in science.
1990
The Hopkins Center increases the number of toilets in the women's restroom outside 950 seat Spaulding Auditorium from three to seven. Intermissions at Hop events are reduced from 45 minutes to 15 minutes.
1991
The Outing Club board of directors changes the name "Freshman Trips" to "DOC Trips."
1991
Emily Bakemeier '82 becomes the first woman elected president of the Alumni Council.
1992
College rules require that "students and their guests must use the bathroom facilities designed for their particular gender."
1993
Susan Dentzer '77 becomes the first woman to be nominated by alumni and alumnae to the Board of Trustees.
1995
Five hundred twenty-five women matriculate in the class of 1999, outn umbering men by three.
1996
As of July 1, the -arts & sciences faculty at Dartmouth totals 339, of whom 101 are women. The total number of tenured faculty is 237, of whom 65—or 27.4 percent—are women, the highest proportion in the Ivy League.
Samson Occom was #1, but Mom got him in.
The idea for a women's college was Milo Jewett's idea.
In 1896 Katharine Quint broke the sex barrier by getting a Dartmouth diploma.
Playing Buttercupused to be a drag.
Summer studentsbrought neoclassical flairto the Bema in 1914.
Mrs. Hillled Greenmoms.
World War II broughtwomen into Dartmouthclassrooms and offices.
Hannah Croasdalestuck with research
"Call it the Skiway,"said Pauline Case.
Koroton to teach? Da!
No more basementceiling: Women areallowed upstairs infraternities.
Steinem decried the old boys' daily grind at Lou's.
Skirting the issue: required dinnerwear in 1968.
Kemeny made the historic announcement on WDCR.
Retuning: Sixteen yearswent by before the Collegesong was amended.
Before the bannercoed decision,women weregaining a foothold.
Love is Green: 73's Steve Stetson and Susan Burt.
High voices joined the Glee Club in 1974.
Applications pouredin after womenwere invited.
Smile, guys: Priscilla Frechette Maynard '41W, first woman Trustee.
