Students familiar with the Winter Carnival posters that hang in Thayer Hall may have noticed a certain peculiarity: the presence of women in many of the signs that date back as late as the 1930s.
Indeed, long before coeducation made females' participation in the annual snow festival inevitable, women played an integral, if sometimes controversial, role in the Carnival.
Their presence was always highly anticipated, sometimes even competitive, as the men of Dartmouth scrambled to find dates to accompany them during the winter festivities.
Once on campus, the women participated in events that would make contemporary female Carnival goers cringe. Far from the partially clothed jump that many current women students take into the icy depths of Occum Pond, the women of the Winter Carnival's past participated in, among other things, competitive beauty pageants and contests.
Women by the busload
The Dartmouth, in 1968, deemed the Winter Carnival a weekend of "skiing and wenching."
Special trains with extra cars ran to White River Junction from Boston and New York on the Friday of Winter Carnival, where the men of Dartmouth eagerly awaited the arrival of their dates.
Busloads, too, transported women from all over New England, drawing females from single-sex institutions such as Wellesley College, Smith College, and Colby Junior College, among others.
In 1955, a record 1,728 women ascended the Hanover plain for the Winter Carnival. The College enrollment that year was 2,850 " nearly two thirds of Dartmouth students had dates that winter.
Fraternities and residence halls were vacated to accommodate the surge of female guests. All students living in those buildings were required to move out from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon.
Chaperones patrolled the houses -- the women's rooms upstairs were off-limits to men --and some women's colleges even required room confirmations from the College to ensure their female students would not be staying in dormitory rooms with male students.
The tradition of importing women by the busload was so firmly entrenched by the 1940s that The Dartmouth featured beauty tips from female guest columnists.
"Don't wear ski pants unless you can stare yourself down in a rear-view mirror," Wellesley College student Dorothy Halsey advised Carnival guests in 1946. "Broad on the beam may be a Navy expression, but if you aren't careful it may mean you."
Beauty pageants
Perhaps the most central event of the old Dartmouth Winter Carnivals was the selection of the Carnival Queen.
In its heyday, the Queen of the Snows pageant was staggeringly popular. For the 40 to 50 women who entered the Carnival each year, snagging the Carnival queen crown was a chance to receive national recognition.
The pageant was so much a part of this institution that former College President John Sloan Dickey served as one of the judges during the 1946 Winter Carnival.
That year, Dickey and other judges crowned Faye Chase, wife of Russel Chase '45, as Queen of the Snows.
"All the publicity that went with it was amazing," Faye Chase told The Dartmouth in 1996. "It was truly a wonderful experience."
She appeared in dozens of publications, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times and Life Magazine, and photographs of the event still hang in her home.
"It is an event that has followed me through my life," she said. "It has made me a celebrity -- at least among our friends."
The Carnival Queen's win also served as a "huge ego trip" for the date and his fraternity, former Associate Director of Alumni Programs Jim Tonkovich '68 told The Dartmouth in 1985.
For the 1968 Carnival, the brothers of Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity pooled money to fly one member's date in from California. They sold their blood for $15 a pint to obtain the funds.
That year, the Tri-Kap member's date was selected Winter Carnival queen.
Despite the popularity of the pageant, the tradition ended in 1973 with the beginning of coeducation.
The Winter Carnival council eliminated this once nationally famous contest, saying that ranking women based on their physical beauty was becoming increasingly unpopular.
The last Queen of the Snows was crowned in 1972. That year, The Dartmouth described the winner as "eminently brainless and beautiful, carrying her full bosomed body with grace and ease." She was entered as "the property of Kappa Kappa Kappa" fraternity.
Members of the audience greeted her with "What a lay!" and "Jesus Christ, what boobs!"
A flier circulated the dormitory that year which read: "Intelligence isn't necessary, as this year we are concentrating on beauty."
The end of an era
With the start of coeducation in 1972, the face of Winter Carnival weekend changed forever.
Although women still visited Dartmouth for the Carnival by the busload through the early 1970s, the tradition was on the decline.
One of the first visible changes was the abolishment of the Winter Carnival queen in 1973 "-- when women, for the first time, took part in the winter festivities as students of Dartmouth, not solely as dates.
"The time when being crowned Queen of the Snows was the big point of any sensible college girl's life was most certainly on the decline," The Dartmouth wrote in 1973.
Some of the men of Dartmouth, however, refused to date their female classmates, whom many viewed as intruders.
"It would be like dating your sister for the biggest college weekend in America," a male student wrote The Dartmouth in 1973.
