The sorority-sponsored events of this year's Winter Carnival are a far cry from certain antiquated Carnival traditions, which in many ways embraced women themselves as the festivities. Decades ago, when Dartmouth was all male and even more isolated than it is today, the annual pilgrimage of thousands of high school and college girls to Hanover each winter caused quite the stir.
In those days, women with coveted Carnival invites arrived at the Big Green in droves by bus and train, from colleges throughout the Northeast, including Vassar, Skidmore, Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Wellesley.
Before 1973, when the Winter Carnival Council decided that "changing attitudes toward the role of women in contemporary society" necessitated the termination of the carnival pageant, female guests were invited to compete in the Carnival Queen pageant, called the "Queen of the Snows." Each year, about 50 contestants -- representing the various fraternities -- pranced in ski suits before a panel of professor and administrator judges. The competition even garnered national media attention.
"With a classic profile, a pair of blue eyes or a winning smile, rarely does anyone steal the show from the Queen. There have been queens of all sorts. Girls who like to cook, girls who like to dance and even girls who like to ski!" declared a 1947 issue of Sports Magazine about the pageant.
In its 1960 Winter Carnival edition, The Dartmouth printed the following notice to the College's new guests: "Welcome to Hanover and to the gala 50th Winter Carnival. Mrs. Westerberg informs us that you're one of 2000 young women who have invaded Hanover. Just one thing...are you over 14?"
In 1970, a skydiver plummeted to the Green from 3,500 feet just to place the crown on the head of the Queen of the Snows.
In 1971, Playboy Magazine traveled to Hanover to shoot their "Playmate of the Month" issue. They offered Bones Gate Fraternity half a keg of beer to sculpt the playmate on their lawn.
Lee Matyola, who attended Winter Carnival in 1963 with her now-husband Daniel Matyola '63, remembers going to parties with music where she danced and talked, but did not drink much.
"I didn't go to really wild [parties]," Lee Matyola said. "[Dan] knew better. He didn't want to take me places I wasn't going to want to go."
Despite the weather, which she described as "the coldest I had ever been in my life," Matyola has fond memories of her visit to Dartmouth over Winter Carnival, when her date proposed to her at a pizzeria, after they had had seven dates.
The women bunked in the Occom Inn or fraternity houses, which the brothers vacated to accommodate their dates. Chaperones monitored the sleeping halls.
"[The chaperones] did not see themselves as cops and were there to make sure that it was okay and safe and so forth, and it was," said Suzy Hartford, who attended four carnivals with her now-husband Robert Hartford '65. According to Suzy Hartford, the sleeping rooms at the Occom Inn, where she stayed, were flooded with visiting girls in bunk beds.
"At the end of the evening some of the girls came back to the bunk room in pretty good shape, and some of them didn't -- some of them came back worse for wear," she said.
According to Matyola, the male students' treatment of the visiting women was commendable.
"I heard stories that sometimes they would be less then gentlemanly, but I never noticed it," Matyola said. "It wasn't around the people that we were there with."
"I did hear stories that if [a Dartmouth boy] didn't get a girl that was pretty enough, or wasn't bright enough, or wasn't up to their standards, they just disappeared and the girl would be left alone," Matyola said.
Hartford said that, while she heard stories of rambunctious Dartmouth men, the spirit was light hearted.
"I always thought the guys were great," Hartford said. "It was one last chance for boys to be boys, as opposed to be all suited up and grown up. Yes, there were hijinx and so forth, but I did not have a problem with them. I didn't have guys that were jerks that I ran into."
For a few years after the College began admitting women in 1972, male students continued to invite non-Dartmouth women to Winter Carnival, much to the dismay of their new female classmates. Women who often faced the taunt "co-heads, co-hogs, go home," were displaced by new faces invited to help alleviate the eight-to-one ratio of males to females.
As the ratio balanced, however, women's place in the Carnival progressed to the sorority-filled hoopla it is today.
