The vagina dialogue: Women’s integration at Georgetown

In the fall of 1969, Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences admitted its first class of female students. 50 women were added to the student body, and the administration planned to expand the class size to make it clear that women were not taking spots from deserving males. These 50 women were the first to break a long tradition of single-sex education in the College, which the constituted the majority of the undergraduate student body.

However, they were by no means the first women to attend Georgetown. Each of the other graduate and undergraduate programs had been slowly accepting increasing numbers of women for years, and the Nursing School exclusively admitted women at the time. Aside from one admission in 1898, the Medical and Dental school began to officially admit women in 1947. The School of Languages and Linguistics had admitted women since its founding 1949 (it merged with the College in 1994 to become the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics). The School of Foreign Service had reluctantly opened its doors to women in 1943, albeit in a limited capacity. The majority of the 43 women attended language classes, held from 6-8 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays on East Campus—then the center of activity for the SFS.

Among the first women at the SFS were those who had already proven competence and leadership in other fields. For instance, Jessie Pearl Rice was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Women’s Army Corps, and was deputy director of the organization when she enrolled. The administration was adamant that coeducation was an experimental “wartime concession,” according to a 1943 article in The Washington Post. However, as women’s roles in the State Department expanded, so did the class size.

Students expressed skepticism about women’s academic abilities despite their presence in other schools. “Tradition Crumbles: College Adds Girls” read a headline of The Hoya in September 1968, a year before the first class of women was admitted and the Voice was founded. Even a pro-coeducational Hoya editorial published in May 1968 was accompanied by a comic depicting a surprised Jesuit cutting open a cake as a woman jumped out at him from inside. In that same issue, a letter to the Editor decrying coeducation as “Degeneracy!” was printed, complaining, “Is nothing sacred?”

The general attitude toward women on Georgetown’s campus was narrow-minded. When the first female switchboard operators were employed in June 1938, a faculty member reportedly thought he had the wrong number upon hearing the woman’s voice on the phone. In April 1964, when it was rumoured that a female student was aiding in research in the Astronomy Department, The Hoya excitedly published a short article referring to her as “femme” and a “wench.”

Another challenge women faced as their numbers grew on campus, even before the College opened to women, was the issue of housing. Georgetown was struggling even then to meet housing needs for all students, and it was the women who were pushed off-campus first in order to make room. Female student enrollment was rapidly rising, and mixed dormitories were not yet an option until Copley Hall’s third floor housed women in 1969. In all of 1957, there had been 373 total female students—in four short years, the number increased to 484. In the 1960-61 academic year, women were sent to the Meridian Hill Hotel in Northwest D.C. in order to accommodate student needs. The now-defunct SFS publication The Courier reported as early as February 1959 that “Female Housing is Subject of Student Council Discussion,” although, ironically, the one female member of the Student Council was not present at the meeting. When Darnall Hall was built in 1965, it was a step forward—although it was outfitted with a larger parlor area in which to receive dates, as well as special hair-washing equipment.

In the December 1965 edition of The Courier, a male student using the name King Sparrow wrote a piece in which he asked Georgetown women to question whether a college education was truly beneficial. “Women who do continue in the traditionally masculine pursuits of…professional life,” he wrote, “often surrender a good part of their female essence… are you as females learning the potency of your distinctly womanly characteristics?”

In the rebuttal in the same issue of The Courier entitled “B.S. or MRS?” by Louise Lague, Father Joseph Sebes, then Active Dean of the School of Business Administration, embodied the attitude of the times. While conceding that female students, “being women…naturally want to find the right man,” he agreed with the author that women at Georgetown value their education for education’s sake, choosing to study independently of whether going to college presented an opportunity to find a husband and get married.

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The circumstances surrounding the decision to make the College coeducational were unusual. The expansion was largely prompted by the demand to meet rising costs, wrote Susan Poulson (GRAD ‘90) in Going Coed: Women’s Experiences in Formerly Men’s Colleges and Universities, 1950-2000. Lauinger Library was to cost $6 million to build, the number of academic programs was growing, and women offered a new financial base for the University’s expanded ambitions. There were very few internal disputes, although there was surprise on the part of the University and the public.

“GU Offers Languages to Girls” trumpeted The Washington Post in 1943, when SFS began to admit women. “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” blared a Hoya headline in 1966. Until the late 1980s, women at Georgetown were consistently referred to as “girls,” as opposed to the “men” in both off- and on-campus publications, infantilizing the female students and only reinforcing the notion that women’s education was to be viewed as a frivolous exercise.

Contrary to this view, women actually had to work harder to get to the Hilltop than their male counterparts. According to the Georgetown University Office of Admissions Annual Report in July 1969, the first fifty women admitted to Georgetown averaged in the 92nd high school percentile. The men in the same admissions pool averaged in the 78th percentile.

In the early years of coeducation, female students were constantly monitored: The 1967 edition of the administration-written guidebook Miss ‘G’ Goes to Georgetown stated, “Your bed must be made and your room in order by 11 A.M.…room checks will be made twice weekly and demerits assigned for disorderly rooms by a member of the Residence Staff.” Women were also expected to dress modestly, with the 1966 Miss ‘G’ prohibiting women from wearing pants and shorts outside the dormitories, except on Saturdays. Needless to say, the standards for male students was much lower: The ‘G’ Book for men only required that “Georgetown gentlemen are expected to keep their rooms neat and orderly.”

The integration itself was largely uneventful. Although The Hoya mockingly entreated female students to remove “frilly things” from their windows in the event of an alumni visit, there were no highly publicized bias-related incidents on campus.

As told to Poulson, the first female graduate of the College, Maria Angermeier (COL ‘72), reported being treated with some “subtle hostility” by students and professors. But, she added that “there was nothing directed toward me in particular…I really can’t make any generalizations about the experience.” Students happily adapted to the coeducational life. Patricia Reuckel, the former Dean of Women, said in 1975, “There is no longer a mystique about male and female qualities because students like to know one another as persons, friends, classmates, not as future mates and sex objects.”

Sexual relations between students were strictly monitored. There were curfews for both men and women, but women were expected to be home half an hour before men. Although other schools loosened their intervisitation policies, in part due to the sexual revolution and in part due to student pressure, “at Georgetown, men were not permitted above the first floor of the women’s dorm, and women were not allowed in the men’s dorms ‘unless accompanied by a Jesuit,’” wrote Poulson.

In the 1966 Hoya article “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” the main topic of debate was whether allowing liquor in female dormitories would lead to an increase in sexual activity. The article reinforced stereotypes about heterosexual relationships, quoting students who said, “A boy’ll go out and have his fun and everything, but when it comes time to getting married, he wants his wife to be a virgin,” and citing the existence of “a list of girl’s [sic] names stating whether they’re easy or not, and their qualities and such.”

This attitude is not surprising considering the on-campus culture previous to the integration of women. The Hoya published a series of articles on the local girls’ schools, their cultures, their curricula, and, most importantly, whether the girls were open to dating male Georgetown students. The caption under a photo of girls at Immaculata Preparatory School, a Catholic school that shuttered its doors in 1968, read, “The Immaculata girl dates even American U. boys,” showing that some prejudices never die.

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A long history surrounds the admission of women to Georgetown’s undergraduate and graduate programs, and the narrative is not yet over. Although in recent years Georgetown has rocked the boat with social justice initiatives such as the LGBTQ Resource Center, its traditional Catholic identity has hampered certain women’s rights initiatives. Both students and faculty faced challenges as they attempted to break the stained-glass ceiling.

The Georgetown University Women’s Center was established by students in the 1989-90 academic year. Specifically, the students founded the center because they saw “students facing difficulties…women’s health, violence, or eating disorders…and they wanted there to be a place on campus where women could go to deal with those particular problems, and would collect resources to help them deal with those problems,” said Nancy Cantalupo, the Director of the GUWC from 1995-2003.

The first GUWC office was in a small converted closet in New South, with a part-time coordinator position added in 1995. Over the next two years, Cantalupo worked with students to accomplish a number of goals. In addition to working toward establishing events such as Take Back the Night on campus, the Center lobbied hard for better office space as well as to add a full-time director to the program. The GUWC moved to the Leavey Center in 1997. Support for the Center “ebbed and flowed” depending on leadership, with budgets and salaries contingent on the religious views of the Dean of Students. “There were certainly [women] who found the campus to be unfriendly at the time,” Cantalupo said.

“Over the time that I was Women’s Center Director,” she added, “I definitely…felt like women’s issues were more prominent on-campus, and some programs like Take Back the Night developed that were really widely attended by students and were major, central events on campus, and I think that raises the visibility of women’s issues on campus.”

Speaking about Georgetown’s Catholic affiliation, Cantalupo emphasized the importance of serving all women on campus. “The idea was to provide services and promote a safe space for all women on campus…we basically tried to stay away from hot-button issues because we did see ourselves as having a mission to serve all women…To the extent that we could, we focused on issues that were less divisive.”

Another important aspect of generating conversation about women’s issues on-campus was the development of what would become the Women and Gender Studies program. Professor Pamela Fox came to Georgetown as an English professor in Feminist Literary Theory in 1990. As she wrote in an email to the Voice, “The program’s founding was absolutely essential to creating a climate that made feminist inquiry even possible at Georgetown… I was…not in on the ground floor of that initial Women’s Studies program founded in the 1980s but I benefitted from, witnessed, as well as contributed to its impressive, dogged development through the ‘90s, which accomplished some major milestones that made its institutionalization possible. It was exhilarating to be a part of that work.”

Fox expanded on the issues pertaining specifically to the Women and Gender Studies program: “Although it’s now thriving, I would love to see the University commit more resources to all of its interdisciplinary programs, allowing them to become full-fledged Departments with the capacity to hire their own, stable tenure-line faculty.”

The struggles of Mary Anne Summerfield, who was rejected from a position teaching physics at Georgetown in June 1954 because only men were employed as faculty, seem distant in the 21st century. But, just over a decade ago, in April 1992, only six women were elected to the Georgetown University Student Association, the highest number elected up until that point.

Miss ‘G’ still has a long road to walk to achieve absolute parity, but in the 42 years that Georgetown has been completely open to women, everyone can agree strides have been made in the right direction.  As Poulson put it, “The presence of women adds weight to the influence of feminism on and off campus. The presence of women in the student body gives rise to the need for more women faculty…Women and feminism have changed Georgetown…not only as places but also as processes, for education is ultimately a process of personal and social change.”