Rewriting Tradition

Gina Barreca’s Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League is an interesting and poignant look at Barreca’s experience at Dartmouth College in the mid-1970s, just a few years after it became coeducational. While Dartmouth became coed about 50 years after the College of William & Mary, the comparisons that can be made between Barreca’s experience and what the first classes of women here would have experienced in the 1920s are striking. Barreca’s experiences with Dartmouth traditions are good illustrations of an institution's inability to change overnight from a bastion of male privilege and gender exclusion into an integrated learning environment. During a concert welcoming freshman, the choir sings a song with the lyrics “Dartmouth’s in Town Again, Run, Girls, Run/Dartmouth’s in town again, fun girls fun/our pants are steaming hot, we’ll give you all we’ve got” (Barreca 32), a parody in college tradition that makes Barreca supremely uncomfortable. While the Alma Mater, the College’s favorite traditional song, sung at every possible opportunity, does not overtly objectify the women of the College, it does not include them either. Written by James Southall Wilson, Class of 1904 (Choir of the College of William and Mary) the Alma Mater’s third and fourth verses assume only male students and alumni:

All thy sons are faithful to thee,
Through their college days,
Singing loud from hearts that love thee,
Alma Mater's praise

God, our Father, hear our voices,
Listen to our cry,
Bless the college of our fathers,
Let her never die.

While the third verse has been eliminated in practice (only the first and fourth are commonly sung), there is something incredibly dismissive in the lines “Bless the college of our fathers/Let her never die.” If they go by the song, students at the College were only preceded by men, not women. Yet the College itself is gendered female, much in the way that ships and other impressive objects are – as proof of male power and distinction, as something for men to treasure and protect.

Much like my continual confusion over the College’s ubiquitous catchphrase “Hark Upon the Gale,” (taken from the Chorus of the Alma Mater), Barreca was intrigued by Dartmouth’s “It May Be Small, But There Are Those Who Love It” (Barreca 53). While Barreca and friends found their catchphrase hilarious for a previously all-male institution (Barreca 54), the College’s is more appropriate. “Hark,” when used with an object, means “to listen to; hear” (Dictonary.com), while a “gale” is a storm. If the first women of the College were indeed Harking Upon the Gale, they were interacting with the forces trying to push them back, working through it, and pioneering a path for the women at the College today.

-Cate Domino