Although East Campus was full of women once again Saturday morning, the University wasn't about to reinstate the Woman's College 30 years after its demise.
Rather, alumnae gathered to celebrate the tradition of the Woman's College by reflecting on the impact it has had on Duke University. The weekend-long commemoration opened with a speech by President Nan Keohane on the role of gender in higher education that drew a standing ovation from the largely female audience.
The Woman's College--which got its start in 1930 after Washington B. Duke gave Trinity College a $100,000 gift with the condition that women be given the same caliber education as males--was progressive in many respects because it set in place parallel student organizations in which women could take on leadership roles that were normally filled by men. After the school merged with the once all-male Trinity College in 1972 these leadership opportunities were more difficult to come by.
"What would a truly co-educational institution look like?" Keohane asked the audience. "It is exhilarating to envision such a place. It would be a world in which gender and sex do not spill over into every avenue of life. Gender does matter greatly, and we will not bring about a better world unless we recognize that fact and deal with it."
In her keynote address at the kick-off plenary session in Baldwin Auditorium
Keohane also emphasized the pressure on female undergraduates at Duke to conform to unrealistic norms, ranging from body-image and dress to dating and relationship patterns.
"The structures and expectations in place at Duke today are channeling women into a narrowed notion of femininity," she said, stressing the importance of Duke's gender initiative, which Keohane launched last spring to evaluate the influences of gender on students, faculty and staff at Duke.
The plenary session also featured a panel of Woman's College graduates from different eras of its 42-year duration who shared their memories of the school and their thoughts on the legacy of the college. The panelists reminisced and paid homage to some of the influential administrators of the Woman's College like Dean Mary Grace Wilson and Alice Mary Baldwin, first dean of the Woman's College, for their contributions and leadership.
"I remember convocation for [the] Woman's College. It was as if the world had opened up," reminisced panelist Dara DeHaven, Woman's College '73 and past president of the Law Alumni Association. "The legacy [of the Woman's College] is that no matter how you educate women we always come out on top," she said. "You go girl is a pretty good summary of... the Woman's College."
Alumnae were enthusiastic about the opportunity to gather and remember the college. Some said they thought the Woman's College surpassed the academic experience a co-educational institution could have offered them.
"I really treasure the experience we had as a separate campus and college," said Patricia Heath, Woman's College '72. "I do not think [merging the schools] has been a real gain in the attitude toward women."
Missi McMorries graduated in the first co-educational class of Trinity College and said that the tensions of fully merging the schools were complex.
"Back then we thought that the only true equality could be attained by merging the two universities. Now I realize we probably would have been better off [had the schools not merged]."
She noted that even after the merger the women were subject to more rules than the men and that their participation in student organizations was initially limited. "I was a real lippy broad so I was kind of hard to intimidate," she added.
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