Possible link-fu in support of my negative appraisal of Darthmouth in the early 1960s

[walkitout]

So far, I am 0 for 2 in terms of convincing friends who read _The Bass, the River and Sheila Mant_ that the “Poor Sheila!” remark in the final paragraph is a nasty little authorial chuckle at the expense of the real-life woman who was raped by Eric Caswell, who strokes 4 for Dartmouth. I have, unfortunately, read in the past about exploits of Dartmouth men of this era and earlier, so I assume the worst. My friends are much more prepared to just assume the author is narcissistically thinking “Poor Sheila! I lost interest in her so quickly! She’s just not a very interesting person! Poor her!”

I tracked down photos (in The Aegis) of both crew teams for 1962, and the men sitting 4 do not appear in subsequent year book crew or in subsequent yearbooks seniors. That doesn’t mean much — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t angle in on scandal at Dartmouth in that time frame.

https://1962.dartmouth.org/s/1353/images/gid315/editor_documents/articles_by_d-62_authorsr/bob_marrow_rye_magazine.pdf

The author describes his academic path and is insecurity leading him to emulate the worst of his local environment which got him suspended from Dartmouth, quoting “an unauthorized but popular version of the Dartmouth Football Fight Song”

“Dartmouth’s in town again, run girls run
Dartmouth’s in town again, fun girls fun
Our pants are steaming hot, we’ll give ‘em all we’ve got
Virgins are just our meat; Rape, Rape, Rape!
Down from the hills we come, surge on surge,
F**king like Dartmouth men,
We’ve got a biologic urge
Dartmouth’s in Town again.”

I don’t even know _what_ to say.

https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/1980/9/1/the-dartmouth-animal-and-the-hypermasculine-myth

This is an amazingly thoughtful if somewhat dated piece about hypermasculinity in the context of early 1960s Dartmouth and the impact at mid-life on relationships, for the alumni magazine.

Wetherell’s story was first published in 1983, for timeline purposes.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/archives/oral_history/community/transcripts/Sjogren_Interview_Edits.pdf

An amazing interview in 2013 with someone who was at Dartmouth in the relevant years. Sjogren refers to “When Better Women are Made, Dartmouth Men Will Make Them” as something that made him uncomfortable at the time he was there. It was _not_ just Dartmouth that used that phrase, which apparently represented the anti-coeducational perspective. You can find this for at least Harvard and Yale (the only other ones I have searched on) on auction house websites and at Etsy (vintage), and Princeton you can find an alumni weekly online from 1955 with their version. I’m 3 for 3 so far.

Cornell has a box in their library: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMA03439.html

I can’t find Columbia or Brown doing this (but that means nothing, given the trend!).

Williams college having its own reckoning with the sentence: https://williamsrecord.com/92897/features/yearbooks-give-insight-into-the-colleges-complicated-past/

Lehigh’s entry in the genre:

https://www.lehigh.edu/lts/lib/speccoll/memorabilia.html

Comments

[ethelmay]

Just want to be super clear that I do think the author clearly describes a situation in which Sheila is at risk of rape (or for that matter a drunken car crash). I am just not convinced the author actually thought that was an important part of the story.

I have a vague feeling that "make them" is a pun - that is, the rape implication is a pun on a term of art regarding someone being accepted to a college or to a fraternity/sorority. But it's not proving an easy term to look up. (I am not saying that is any better. And anyway I may have misremembered.)

What Happened to Sheila

[walkitout]

I agree, the author did not think that was an important part of the story. I think the author thought that was a funny punchline. Which is why I am so persistently incensed.

I will say this, I have learned _so much_ about so many different things, poking around at the edges of this time / this place / this story.

Re: What Happened to Sheila

[ethelmay]

A funny punchline is structurally very important. I meant that I think that for Wetherell it was background information that he not only didn't emphasize but may not have even brought to mind. The threat of sexual assault was that normalized.

[ethelmay]

I saw something attributing "When better women are made, I will make them" to F. Scott Fitzgerald. No idea if it's really in his notebooks and if so at what date and whether he was saying it himself or writing down something that struck him.

Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson?

[walkitout]

I saw that reference, too, but haven’t been able to figure out what Donaldson’s source for it was.

Have you run across the _Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald_? _That_ would make for an interesting text to assign in a 9th grade English class. (Not advocating for doing that!)

OK, here’s this: http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/notes/notebooks.html

And the quote is in “loose notes” 2074, same site:

http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/notes/notebooks_z-loose.html

If that is in any way a legit site, then Scott Fitzgerald is definitely an earlier source for the phrase than the anti-coed years. Presumably they knew they were quoting him? Perhaps there is a still earlier source?

Anyway. The _pervasiveness_ of that anti-coed campaign is _astonishing_. I’ve found versions of it for Wabash and Washington and Lee. Just every fucking all-men college. It’s amazing. R. tells me that MIT was always co-ed, and that is probably somewhat close to true, but they sharply limited attendance by women, had limited housing, additional chaperonage, and otherwise if you were a woman and wanted to attend, you had to do it as a commuter student and live with your family, until roughly the same time frame as all the other co-ed changes in the ‘60s. It looks like co-ed integration of dorms happened relatively forcefully (that is, it was done by the students and the faculty kinda decided not to argue).

Re: Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson?

[ethelmay]

Carleton had the student-led co-ed dorm integration as well - my oldest sister was there at the time. But I think they may already have had men's and women's floors in the same building, which made things easier. There were still one or two single-sex floors when I was there: I was on an all-women floor my freshman year.