1969. When she realized she was late for a
required meeting, “I ran all the way back to
West Cobb, but they grounded me the
next weekend. I was infuriated. My parents
had not even been that strict. I couldn’t
believe it.”
“It was keep your legs together and
your mouth shut and be a lady,” Cornue
remembered Dean Carmichael conveying
to her. “You are here in this special thing,
and you’d better toe the mark, and our eyes
are on you. And there will be this special
dispensation for you to wear pants [to
work backstage on theater performances]
but you’ll wear a raincoat over them [when
you cross campus]. And no smoking, and
be in your dorm on time.”
This picture of
Katherine Kennedy
Carmichael juxtaposed with a female
student was in the
1970 Yackety Yack.
Carmichael had been
dean of women since
1946; in 1972, the
position was abolished. At right,
women in the 1960s
adhered to a fairly
strict dress code
that didn’t apply to
men.
‘Control of their lives’
A 1968 survey found that most undergraduate women were dissatisfied with the
curfews (called closing hours) and the visitation rules that governed when and where
members of the opposite sex could socialize. Led by Joyce Davis ’ 70, the Association
for Women Students threatened to hold a
sleep-out to protest the closing hours. The
plan, Marjorie Spruill remembered, was
that “women students would just not go in
one night and would sleep out on Polk
Place.”
The sleep-out apparently did not take
place, but in November 1968, junior and
senior women were granted self-limiting
hours. Over the next two years, first sophomore women, then second-semester freshmen gained the same freedom, and, by
1972, curfews had been abolished for all
women students.
Concurrently, men and women students
pushed for a rule change that would allow
private visits between members of the
opposite sex. Mary Turner Lane ’ 53 (MEd),
one of the few female faculty members at
the time, recalls serving on a visitation
committee meeting early in 1968 that was
interrupted by 1,000 students outside the
window shouting, “The Arb is cold! The
Arb is cold!” Later some of the students
came inside to make their case: Couldn’t
they spend time with their dates in the
dormitories on the weekend? The alternative — the Arboretum — just wasn’t comfortable.
Though a visitation plan soon was in
place, nearly two years would be spent haggling over the details of the open-door
rule. “The big argument was whether the
door had to be closed or could you prop it
open,” Lane recalled. “Could you leave a
book in it? How thick or thin would the
book have to be? We could have solved the
problems of the world with all the time we
spent measuring books.”
However trivial changes in the rules
might have seemed, Lane recognized, they
were important to the students: “That was
control of their lives, you see.”
In 1971, students gained the right to
close their doors when they had a date
over, though they still couldn’t lock them.
Other restrictions fell, too, including the
apartment rule and the requirement that
women younger than 21 live in University
housing. Slowly, women were gaining the
right to take responsibility for their own
‘We had to be
in our rooms
from 8 ’til 10,
I think. ...
You could only
leave your room
to go to the
bathroom but
not to shower,
to receive
long-distance
calls but not
to make any.
You could not
make local calls;
you could not go
to other people’s
rooms to have
a conversation.
You had to be
in your room
with your
roommate.’
