and to reach the highest places I was sitting
on his shoulders painting,” she said. “I
remember thinking that if anyone saw that,
they would think it was ironic.”
“The huge surge of energy behind
women’s issues started in 1971 and 1972
and sort of snowballed,”Virginia Carson ’ 71
said. Before then, “the draft was the overwhelming issue on campus and next was
civil rights.” Carson herself was “a foot soldier and a supporter” in the cafeteria strike
of 1969, when both black and white students backed mostly African-American
cafeteria employees struggling for better pay
and better working conditions. Hard on the
heels of that strike came the student-led
campus shutdown in spring 1970 to protest
the shootings at Kent State.
For some women at Carolina, involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements led to leadership opportunities and
to increased activism on gender inequalities.
“Historically, the suffrage movement
came hand-in-hand with the abolitionist
movement,” said Carson, now director of
the Campus Y. “Women got interested in
their own history coming out of the
protest movements. Then the literature
began catching up to us. The Feminine
Mystique, Germaine Greer, Fear of Flying
— books by women began to be in circulation. Ms. magazine. All of a sudden, more
media were looking at women’s issues.
More women were looking and reading
and talking amongst themselves.”
One issue they grappled with was the
clash between feminist ideas and the ideals
by which they’d been raised. Struggling for
equity, after all, meant discarding long-held
notions about Southern womanhood.
“Southern girls of my era were brought
up to have a strong and distinct sense of sex
roles,” Carson said. “That was strongly conveyed by the culture.” Her two grandmothers had gone to college and held jobs,
which was unusual at the time. “
Notwithstanding, each had a strong sense of what
correct behavior was for women and girls. I
grew up with a view of the world that had
a designated place for women and girls, and
it looked a lot like home and family. It was
OK to be serious about school — my dad
was a college professor and my mom had
gone to college — but the price tag was
high if you flouted society by insisting on a
career or a separate identity or by standing
out from the crowd.”
