The Women of ’76

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Thirty years after graduating, the alumnae of Dartmouth's first four-year coeducational class look back on their pioneering days.

"..Most people ofsense appear to be well satisfied thatthere is a propriety in not herding young men and womentogether in our great public institutions of learning." The Dartmouth, 1879

"Dartmouth to Admit Women, Trustees... Vote bySubstantial Majority to Admit Women" The Dartmouth, November 22,1971

When Dartmouth Colleges board of trustees voted to admit women, the decision followed "three years of subcommittees, surveys, opinion polls, referendums and polemical letters-to-editors," according to a June 1973 article in /M/W. While the decision ruffled the feathers of countless alumni and undergraduates who wanted Dartmouth to remain the last all-male institution in the Ivy League, it led to a 27 percent rise in applications, the biggest increase in the Ivies.

In September of 1972,177 women matriculated at Dartmouth. They joined 205 women who were enrolled as transfer or exchange students and 3,030 men, making for an 8-to-1 ratio of men to women. The Dartmouth women quickly made their presence felt on campus, as five fraternities voted to go coed, the athletic department formed five women's sports teams and the Winter Carnival beauty queen contest was abolished after being declared an "anachronism." However, the coeds voted to let stand the lyrics to the alma mater, "Men of Dartmouth" (which wasn't updated to include "daughters of Dartmouth until 1988). "We were happy to let the men sing about having granite in their brains," says Sara Hoagland Hunter '76.

Members of that pioneering class were responsible for many Dartmouth firsts: Elise Erler was the first woman elected to the Dartmouth Outing Club directorate; Melanie Fisher Matte was the first female publisher of The Dartmouth; Martha Johnson Beattie was the first woman on ski patrol; and Sandy Helve was the first woman to earn 11 varsity letters, three of which she garnered while a first-year Tuck student. Later, Judy Burrows Csatari and her husband, Tom Csatari '74, produced the first double legacy to attend Dartmouth, daughter Emily Csatari Poulin '99.

It wasn't easy being a pioneer though, as the women endured dorm raids and bricks through windows, regular evening serenades of the offensive "Our Cohogs" (sung to the tune of "This Old Man") and events such as the April 1973 "sink night," when obscene letters demanding "the upper part of your body must remain naked before our eyes when you eat in Thayer" were slipped under the doors of the all-female Woodward Hall.

"The irony about Dartmouth to me in those early years is that it was simultaneously tight-knit and fractured," says Ann Fritz Hackett '76, who, along with Nancy Kepes Jeton '76, is one of two women from the class to serve as Dartmouth trustees and who, like many of her female classmates, now has children at Dartmouth. "It was a community that was undergoing enormous change. Because it was so small, everything reverberated very quickly. But there were so many wonderful experiences. Although I was acutely aware that I was in a minority, I never felt that Dartmouth was any less mine."

Prior to their 30th reunion in June, Hackett and other women talked about their experiences as members of Dartmouth's first four-year coeducational class.

THE NEWS HITS

"Dartmouth's decision to admit women wasn't announced until late November of our senior year in high school. Those, like me, in search of excitement, sped to Hanover to see what all the hoopla and headlines were about. My tour guide did not agree with the trustees' decision. My admissions interviewer announced he had never interviewed a woman before and was nervous as heck. But that December night, eating dinner with my parents at the Hanover Inn and watching snow fall on the Green in front of Baker Tower, I was hooked. I couldn't imagine a more beautiful place to go to school." —Sara Hoagland Hunter '76

"Back then alumni admissions interviews were done by older alums, all male, and one of the questions that my interviewer asked me was, 'Why do you want to apply to Dartmouth? It must be to get a husband.' I was furious. And I ended up marrying Ken Marable '74. That was not the plan!" —Joan Tyler Marable '76

"The trustees' decision was announced at halftime of the Princeton football game. I was there with my father [the late Ben Doran '37] and his college roommate Bill Heroy '37. Bill was dead-set against coeducation. But he came down the next morning and gave me a stamp to mail in my application. Then his daughter [Barbara Heroy John] was accepted early decision in the class of 1977. My father couldn't have been happier about coeducation. My sisters were 14, 13 and 10 1/2 when I was born. My mother, having had this very expensive accident, asked my father, Are you sad that its another girl?' And he said, 'No, I love girls. I'll just never have a son to go to Dartmouth.' So when it became possible for me to go and I got in, he was thrilled." —K. Brewer Doran '76

THE FIRST DAYS OF COLLEGE

"in my scrapbook I have the letter from the class of 1926 that was left on my bed with a carnation when I arrived at Dartmouth. The letter was on Dartmouth cream stationery with green type. It was such a nice gesture, especially since there had been so much discussion about how nobody wanted us there. To see that kind of outreach was both reassuring—and indicative of the type of experience I had throughout Dartmouth, where people were devoted to Dartmouth first, last and always." -Doran

"People were incredibly excited. There was really a pioneering kind of spirit among us. One of the most amazing moments was convocation in 1972, when President Kemeny opened it up and said, 'Men and women of Dartmouth.' The place just went wild! I really had a feeling that we were all so privileged to be part of history in the making." —Ann Fritz Hackett '76

"I got to matriculation early and realized that I didn't have what I needed to get my ID made. So I ran back across campus to my dorm and by the time I got back the only seats left were in the front row. I was actually the third person to matriculate, but the first woman. It was completely random, but it's cool to be a part of Dartmouth history." —Susan Corderman-Clifford '76

EARLY HOSTILITY

"Even though I grew up in Claremont, New Hampshire, I had no clue about all the controversy. I was so naive. When I got there I was shocked by the vulgar resistance from a very vocal minority that made it uncomfortable and made it clear they didn't want coeds on campus. In today s politically correct environment that type of hostility would never be accepted or condoned." —Cindy Wolcott '76

"The first few days were surreal. Most of the men weren't real excited about women being at the College in any capacity except as dates. My freshman trip was a disaster. I think there were two women on my hike, and the guys loaded us up with the heaviest food items, the jars of pasta sauce. I think each of us had about 60 pounds. I forget which mountain we hiked, but it had just rained so it was real treacherous going uphill. And the guys hiked on ahead and just left us. We had no maps, we had no anything. They were making their point, and I figured my role was to survive. So that's what I focused on. We just kept following the path and eventually we got to the top and followed it down the other side. By dark we finally managed to find the little hut we were supposed to spend the night in. We survived." —F.Marian Chambers '76

"Going into Thayer Dining Hall was very weird. There were catcalls, and I remember being called all kinds of things, including cohog. And there were very graphic and highly descriptive opinions called out about what I looked like or what they thought I could do." —Marable

"When we walked into Thayer, fraternities would be sitting there with rating placards, giving us 'scores.' Hackett

"Running the gauntlet in a huge dining hall is a classic rite of passage for any new college student. But during the early days of coeducation at Dartmouth the Thayer dining rooms put a young woman's self-esteem to the test well beyond freshman week. I got out of the meal plan as soon as possible."" —Nancy Kepes Jeton '76

"The first semester was the toughest, of course, because it was all new. But the thing I found the most egregious was when someone hired an airplane to fly over football games trailing a banner that said, 'Coeds go home.' I thought, Gee, haven't you done a good enough job already in making me feel unwelcome that you now have to hire an airplane with a banner? Isn't this wretched excess?" —Chambers

IN THE CLASSROOM

"I felt discouraged to have faculty members express their disappointment in coeducation in class. I had a class freshman year where I was one of two females, and whenever I spoke this professor wanted me to be representative of all the females or all the black females. I had to make it plain to him that I was not a spokesperson for all the women on campus or for all the black women on campus; that I was speaking as an individual student." —Viola Allen '76

"I had a government professor who relentlessly asked me to present the 'women's point of view,' even after male students in the class pointed out to him that such a framework was inappropriate. I finally realized that this guy had been teaching only men for over 20 years and that he was struggling to understand how to act and teach in the real world." —Jeton

"Neal Oxenhandler was the first of the professors I found who were totally open and interested in having women students on campus. I became friends with John Rassias as well, and he didn't make the female students at all unwelcome." —Tish Bums O'Connor '76

DORM LIFE

"There was a big football team presence in our dorm. On our half of the floor, at 2 or 3 in the morning after some drinking, these guys would go down the hall with an empty metal wastebasket banging it against the walls and the doors, trying every door to see if one of the girls had left her door unlocked. Which I did, only once. That time, seven or eight guys took my mattress with me on it and turned it upside down. So now I'm on the floor thinking, 'Am I wearing clothes?' and trying to put my bed together. These guys wouldn't leave until they had a discussion with me about how women shouldn't be at the school and how we were wrecking the institution. It was terrible and it took a long time to get those guys out." —Men Miller Lowry '76

"I spent all four years in North Mass. We went through the rough times together and had a great bonding experience. We had weekly if not every-other-night raids from South Mass for the first year that were pretty brutal on North Mass. There was lots of dorm damage. I happened to have a room that was the first door on the left as you came in, and you certainly didn't want to have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the ladies' room." —Hackett

"We were on Butterfield's middle floor, and the rest of Butterfield was all men. We were the only women anywhere from North Mass over. We backed up onto frat row. So it was the 20 of us, and we were all very close and very supportive of one another." —Doran

"I was a bit of a hermit at Dartmouth. I think many women may have felt kind of on display. You can multiply that for me. Guys would point when I went out. So I felt like I was in a fishbowl because I was known on sight as the 'presidents daughter.' " —Jenny Kemeny '76

"I always felt relatively safe in my [Butterfield] room until my face was slashed by a snowball thrown through my window by one of the guys in the frat behind us." —Chambers

"That incident is one of my worst memories of coeducation. She got hit in the forehead with an iceball—a snowball with a rock in the middle—and was really badly hurt. And that was considered normal, reasonable, aggressive behavior for these guys. I can't tell you what it felt like to be trapped inside and not able to get out because they were out there." —Kemeny

THE SOCIAL SCENE

"I remember Homecoming the first year and most of the women were home with no dates. Part of the reason was, I think, that all the guys expected, with the ratio being what it was, all the women would already have 18 guys standing at the door, so why bother? There were so many weird dating rituals going on. One of the problems with a lot of Dartmouth men early on was they had this warped idea of what women were like based on part-time exposure." —Doran

"The Daily D worked hard to surface the issue of Dartmouth women being dateless during the 1973 Winter Carnival as Dartmouth men continued their tradition of importing dates. Eventually I came to understand that some guys simply felt the pressure to have a date. And the reality was there weren't enough women on campus to fill the dance card. It was a whole lot easier to grab a date from another school who was probably thrilled to have the opportunity to par take in the legendary Carnival than risk rejection by a Dartmouth woman who saw the whole event as a bizarre holdover from all-guy days." Jeton

"I was friends with a gang of guys in my dorm and entered into a romantic relationship with one of them. Then I got a visit from the group, except for my boyfriend, and they said, 'You know, we really don't want you here. Our girlfriends aren't here, and we don't like you here. This is a boy time.' Looking back, it's not surprising they felt that way. But one of them wanted to be very clear with me that he still wanted to play tennis with me." —Lowry

"The guys gave my eventual husband, Tom Csatari 74,a of for dating a coed. Of course, they didn't call us coeds, they called us cohogs. If he hadn't moved to a senior society his senior year I don't know that we would've been able to survive some of the nasty stuff that was going on at his fraternity. They definitely did not like me. In fact, one of his fraternity brothers chased me out of the fraternity with a broken broomstick one day." —Judy Burrows Csatari '76

"On a one-to-one basis, there was never a Dartmouth classmate who was offensive or rude. The one thing that did upset me was when the buses from the women's colleges would arrive for the big weekends, and it was as if our male classmates became different people. There was a way they acted with us, their classmates and friends, and then a totally different way they treated these women from other schools who had arrived as guests. I was ashamed by their behavior and attitude toward those women because it reflected badly on my school." —Martha Johnson Beattie 76

"I remember being appalled one fall afternoon freshman year when a bus pulled up in front of Hinman post office and a bunch of nicely dressed girls disembarked for a weekend with Dartmouth men. My roommate and I were standing there in our worn jeans with our mouths open. Talk about a custom degrading to women. And it continued quite regularly during my freshman year." —Noreen Quinn Fisher '76

THE HUMS.

"Every year during Green Key Weekend they had a contest called Hums, where the fraternities competed with each other to see who had the best singers. The fraternity, Theta Delta, that won the contest in 1975 was the one that sang the famous song, Our cohogs, they play one. They're all here to spoil our fun. With a knick-knack paddywhack send the bitches home. Our cohogs go to bed alone. I've never forgotten the whole stinkin thing. It s been what now, 30 years, and I still remember that song." —Wolcott

"Hums was held on the steps of Dartmouth Hall and was meant to be a fun event. But when the dean of the College awarded the top prize for 'Our Cohogs,' it was frustrating that somebody from the administration could actually do that and so not get it. If anything, that made me dig deeper and say, 'This is enough. We're going to make this place ours.'" —Hackett

"There was a women's studies course that was offered in the sociology department and we were required to do a group project. We were trying to think of a way to express our experience being in the first class of women, so we wrote these skits that became YouLaugh, a production that we performed at the fraternity play competition and then on the Green and at Rollins Chapel in the fall of 1975.I immediately earned the reputation of 'angry young woman' on campus because I was the narrator of the opening skit, in which the women in my group came onstage, one by one, and recited deadpan the words to 'Our Cohogs,' the song that had won Hums." —Lowry

THE PRESIDENT

"President Kemeny was rock solid in his support of coeducation. At those times when I felt beleaguered by the words or actions of the vocal minority who didn't support coeducation, I tried to step back to see the big picture. Kemeny was a model of transcendence— I trusted that his vision of a coeducational Dartmouth would prevail. I found comfort and courage in his unshakeable position. By example, he encouraged me to be a proud pioneer among Dartmouth women. I wanted to succeed, in part, to prove him right!" —Jeton

"To say Kemeny was inspiring is an understatement. I sat in his classroom with the greatest sense of gratitude, knowing that his intellect was combined with great courage in his push for women to be able to share in all that Dartmouth had to offer. I was absolutely thrilled to be there, and I knew he was the one man that deserved the greatest credit for that." —Beattie

"Growing up I thought I would never get to take a math class from my father, though he swore that somehow he would figure out a way to teach me a class. When I got to take his signature course, 'Probability Statistics in Computers,' it was the fulfillment of that promise he'd made to me when I was 10.1 fell in love with the course. My father treated me just as he would any other student. But I happened to be upstairs at home after the final exam when my father dashed into the house yelling out to my mother in the most delighted tone of voice, 'Guess who got a 100 on the final?' He was so tickled pink, and he never would have expressed that degree of being thrilled in the same way in front of me. It was just too wonderful." —Kemeny

REUNIONS AND HINDSIGHT

My experience at Dartmouth was nothing but positive. I made a tremendous amount of friends, both men and women, and I enjoyed the issue of coeducation because I ran into a lot of guys who said, 'I voted against it.' I just liked saying to them, 'I respect your opinion.' And a lot of those guys became best friends." —Sandy Helve 76

"It is hard—no, impossible—to imagine a better undergraduate experience than I had at Dartmouth. I think that the College admissions office did an almost magical job of choosing those first women students. We were self-confident enough to go where no woman had gone before but rarely crossed over into in-your-face feminism. We embraced Dartmouth for its strengths, for the same reasons that men embraced Dartmouth. We were proud, certainly, to be groundbreakers, but understood that our individual goals and purpose had to be more than just the integration of a bastion of male superiority. We loved singing 'Men of Dartmouth' long and loud, because we knew that 'men' was a generic term that included us fully, without having to be politically correct." —Melanie Fisher Matte '76

"When I went back for the 25 th anniversary of coeducation I actually heard more pain from the women who were from the classes of 1980 and 1985 who came expecting it to be a normal coed school. We never expected that. We viewed ourselves as pioneers and expected to have some rough times along the way and expected to be figuring things out as we went." Doran

"Now that Dartmouth is truly coeduca- tional, it's amazing to see. Especially when all of us can still remember what it felt like to be here in those early years. The transformation is extraordinary." —Hackett

"People and other alums always say 'Oh my God, you were in the first class of women? I heard it was so awful.' They've got this sort of myth thing of Trojan women dodging bullets on campus. And it really wasn't that bad, as long as you were sort of self-pos- sessed." —O Connor

"Dartmouth prepared me for a life in fields previously dominated by men: First, investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then a public life as a village trustee in Scarsdale, New York. I am more assertive, resilient and confident because of my years at Dartmouth." —Fisher

"I spent 21 years working for the United States Congress, and I used to joke that going to Dartmouth in the first wave of freshman women was good training for the political world. Not pleasant, but practical. You had to learn to be tough, be rough and tumble, have a thick skin and play in a mans world." —Chambers

"I thrived at Dartmouth—l was not just surviving. It truly changed my life and I am proud that I could take advantage of all that it offered. And I am proud that I managed to give something back as well, setting the stage for all the women who followed." —Beattie

"The friends I made—both men and women—remain the best part about Dartmouth. I'm sure there hasn't been a week in 30 years when one of them hasn't helped me with work, a message or a smile. There also hasn't been a week when I wasn't asked what it was like to be in the first class of women. I always answer the same thing: It was crazy and I loved it.' " —Hunter

"ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING MOMENTS WAS CONVOCATION IN 1972, WHEN PRESIDENT KEMENY OPENED IT UP AND SAID,  "MEN AND WOMEN OF DARTMOUTH." THE PLACE WENT WILD!

BONNIE BARBER works in Dartmouth's communications office and is the volunteer assistant coach for the women's tennis team. She lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? An update on the 17 women interviewed for this article. Viola Allen is a seventh-grade English teacher and lives with her husband in Pennsylvania. Martha Johnson Seattle is president-elect of the Alumni Council. She's married to Jim Beattie '76 and mother of three, including Sam '07 and Nell '09. Martha is the daughter of the late Spencer D. Johnson '45, Tu'48. F. Marian Chambers worked on Capitol Hill for 21 years as a professional staffer with the House International Relations Committee. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband. Susan Corderman-Clifford is a CPA in Savannah, Georgia. She's married to Stuart Clifford '75 and has two daughters. Susan is the daughter of Douglas Corderman '52. Judy Burrows Csatari teaches French at the Richmond Middle School in Hanover. She and her husband, Tom, are the parents of three children, including Emily Poulin '99. K. Brewer Doran is dean of the Bertolon School of Business at Salem State College in Massachusetts. Noreen Quinn Fisher, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, is now a village trustee in Scarsdale, New York. She's married to Rip Fisher '76; they have three daughters, including Jenny '08. Ann Fritz Hackett is the director of Horizon Consulting Group in McLean, Virginia. She is married with three children, including Conor '07 and Kelly '09. Sandy Helve is president and CEO of Helve Group in Nashua, New Hampshire, where she resides with her husband and son. She's a former class president. Sara Hoagland Hunter is a writer and producer in Weston, Massachusetts. She's married and has two children. Nancy Kepes Jeter is an urban planner in Andover, Massachusetts. She's married to Peter Jeton '76 and has two children; her father is the late Dr. Joseph Kepes '46. Jenny Kemeny is the principal of Kemeny Consulting in Etna, New Hampshire. She is married and has two children. Meri Miller Lowry is assistant vice president and senior counsel for UnumProvident Corp. in Portland, Maine. She's married to Lee Lowry '73; they have two children. Joan Tyier Marable heads the nonprofit Diversity Awareness Initiative for Students in Brooklyn, New York. She's married with two children, Kimberly '05 and Jonathan '08. Meianie Fisher Matte is director of tax technology practices at KPMG LLP, in Montvale, New Jersey. She has one daughter. Letitia "Tish" Burns O'Connor is managing director of Perpetua Press in Santa Barbara, California. She is married and has one child. Cindy Wolcott is a partner with Palmieri, Tyler, Wiener, Wilhelm & Waldron LLP in Irvine, California. She's married to Jim Scott '69; they have one child.