Ten years ago, East Campus went from a mix-and-match zoo of men and women of all classes to a codified home for zany freshmen who didn’t realize that their Giles or Wilson Dormitories were named after women.
Thirty-two years ago, East Campus had made a different change, going from a home for the Woman’s College to just a piece in a complex puzzle of an officially co-ed Duke.
Somewhere in that messy middle lies the modern history of women at Duke. Only in recent years, has the University made a wholesale shift in its focus toward the role of women in higher education.
Leading up to the merger between the Woman’s College and the all-male Trinity College in 1972, the two coordinated colleges worked on a separate but parallel understanding. “They used to say that Duke was a co-ed institution with a mile and a quarter hyphen,” former University Archivist Bill King said.
The separation fostered a strict but nurturing community of women over on East Campus.
But then came what some Trustees told King was the toughest vote they ever had to make, when they officially joined the two schools—a vote that, in hindsight, many alumnae of the Woman’s College wish the Trustees hadn’t made.
Still, women have made tremendous progress in marking the University with their own talents and achievements.
Though white gloves and hats gave way to bell-bottoms and tangled hair, academic discourse about gender issues was inconsistent at the University over the course of the next decade.
Then, in 1983, Professor of the Practice Jean O’Barr almost single-handedly started the Women’s Studies Program from her office, known as “the blue parlor,” a hub for feminist thought on campus.
Six years later, the Women’s Center stood strong on West Campus as a beacon for student affairs and social issues. It would expand in 1991 to add sexual assault counseling to its repertoire.
All that slow progress sped up fast, though, when Nan Keohane arrived in 1993 as Duke’s first female president. Her mere presence aside, Keohane carved out the role of women as one of her pet issues, encouraging a stronger female presence in the faculty and administration. After running a $2.36 billion capital campaign and supporting numerous building projects, she tackled an in-depth study of women’s issues on campus as her farewell move.
The year-long Women’s Initiative study came at a time when the physics department was taking heat for its treatment of female faculty, when date rape entered the dorm rooms, when an anonymous column in The Chronicle provided a rallying cry for female students who were battling insecurity.
“Entering the world meant walking outside to see ‘effortless perfection’ striding across the grass, stepping on the bus, strutting down the runway,” the unnamed student wrote. “It meant seeing the world through the film of inferiority.”
And although societal pressures were much of the substance of the Initiative’s final report, the principals involved admitted that they had no quick fix, no merger, no way of telling what might happen. “We don’t have, by any means, a monopoly on useful answers,” Keohane said when the report was issued in September 2003, adding that it was “not the end of something, nor the beginning, but a crucial high point along the way.”
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