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The Dartmouth
July 25, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Women depicterd in new light

Sarah Johnston '97 will soon distribute several hundred free copies of "Women of the Ivy League," a literary and artistic publication produced by Ivy League women in response to a recent Playboy magazine pictorial of the same name.

Johnston, who spearheaded anti-Playboy protests at Dartmouth last spring, said she will leave the magazines in high-traffic areas like the Collis Student Center and Thayer Dining Hall.

The October Playboy issue featured photographs of 26 Ivy League women in various states of undress, including two Dartmouth undergraduates. Six Dartmouth women contributed work to the alternate magazine, which was the brainchild of two women from Yale University.

The 32-page publication consists of photography, poetry and prose contributed by women from six of the eight Ivy League schools and several pieces by women not attending Ivy League institutions. The publication addresses topics like sexual discovery, rape and lesbianism.

"When Playboy came in May, I was in contact with several women from other Ivy League schools," said Johnston, who collected submissions from Dartmouth women. "We talked about how we felt that Playboy did not show what Ivy League women are really like."

According to the alternative magazine's introduction, "This magazine is free from the notions of women as objects and the 'playthings' of men ... There is more to our bodies, our sexuality, and ourselves than Playboy knows."

Works by Carla Rogers '97, Michelle Willner '97, Stephanie Yu '97 and Christine Dean, a Dartmouth graduate student, are featured in the journal.

There is also a submission by an anonymous female member of the Class of 1997, with the note "The author was raped the second day of her freshman year in a fraternity" appearing before the submission.

"I now realize that the crime was all yours. You robbed me of the days, the hours, the minutes, the seconds that made up my year. For every minute I contemplated my own worthlesness, another minute slipped away, into the mud-brown burlap bag in which you collected my life, bit by bit, moment by moment," the story reads. "With this realization, I am stronger than ever before. And I want my year back."

Yu, who contributed a poem titled "Revelation," said the piece she submitted "was a poem that I had written for my English 80 poetry class in the fall ... After hearing Sarah [Johnston's] description, I thought that it would fit."

Yu's poem describes an unpleasant sexual encounter.

"Honey liqueur slides down my leg / As you cut me with your knife / From inside. / Slicing through me, / I thought I knew the meaning of love," Yu wrote.

Most of Dartmouth's contributions are from juniors because the journal was compiled during Summer term, when all members of the Class of 1997 were on campus, Johnson said.

"I spent a couple of hours writing down every woman in the Class of '97 on a BlitzMail list to search for submissions from Dartmouth," she said.

Yale sophomores Kyla Carrigan and Sarah Russell, who coordinated the project, were inspired by a similar magazine produced by Yale women in 1986, Carrigan said in a telephone interview yesterday. The 1986 issue was also produced in response to a Playboy pictorial featuring women of the Ivy League.

Students and alumni provided funding for the project, Carrigan said. The magazine includes an advertisement for a feminist bookstore in New Haven, Conn.