Women first arrived on campus in 1972 as full-time students and degree candidates to signs that read, "Co-hogs go home." At the outset of coeducation, women often found it difficult to feel comfortable at Dartmouth and even harder to voice their opinions and establish their presence on campus, according to religion professor Susan Ackerman '80, who attended the College in the late 1970s when women were still new and in the minority on campus.
"Many of the organizations where women can speak as a collective didn't exist," she said.
Ackerman currently serves as the chair of the religion department, and she is a member of the faculty of thewomen and gender studies program. She noted, however, that campus groups for women did not exist years ago.
"Those organizational structures often help develop confidence and leadership," she said. "When you don't have those, you don't have the forum in which those skills can develop."
Some efforts were made to give women spaces where they could congregate and feel comfortable within such a hostile environment. Women at Dartmouth was formed in 1976 with the purpose of improving gender relations at the College. In 1977, WAD developed its Older and Wiser mentoring program to match each female member of the freshman class with a female upperclasswoman to ease adjustment to college life. In time, women also began to make substantial efforts to voice their frustrations with the hostility directed toward them by their male counterparts. In 1975, "You Laugh," an eight-woman play that criticized the treatment of women at Dartmouth, was performed at the Intramural Play Competition. Four years later, the first "Take Back the Night" rally, an event intended to raise awareness about sexual violence and women's issues, drew 200 people. Seven years later, it drew nearly 1,000.
Of course, things often seem better on paper than they were in reality. Ackerman said early results of efforts to provide resources to women at Dartmouth, such as the Women's Resource Center, were less useful than they promised to be.
"It was a small space a walk in closet, essentially and in it were two books," Ackerman said. "One was Our Bodies, Ourselves,' and the other was a bootleg cassette tape with a tape player and a bulletin board."
Nevertheless, the College and its students eventually began to make other, more substantial efforts to truly foster forums for women on campus. Ackerman said that the founding of the women's studies program in 1978 was a particularly important development.
"It was extremely empowering for me to find class space where we thought seriously about issues of women and where women's voices were taken seriously," Ackerman said.
Since then, Dartmouth has become a very different environment for women. Today, there is a sizable number of places where women can offer each other mutual support and make their voices heard on campus, including sororities, performance groups, mentorship programs, career-oriented support networks and event-oriented forums.
Skye Zeller '07 and Frances Vernon '10 founded Link Up, an organization similar to the previous Older and Wiser mentoring program, in 2007 to connect women of all ages at Dartmouth.
"We heard from seniors and freshmen that they wanted to get to know each other better and get a better understanding of what Dartmouth was like," Zeller said. "We found that there had been a bunch of mentoring groups, but none had followed through."
The value of these kinds of connections can be career-specific, such as in groups like Women in Business and the Women in Science Program, which try to foster support networks for career areas that have historically excluded females and continue to be male-dominated.
"Having gone through an internship experience, being a part of WIB was really crucial to me," WIB vice president Adrienne Cohen '12 said. "People talk about the glass ceiling and feeling awkward in the work force, but I never experienced it until I was there. There were certain points where conversations I had with women really helped me with that process."
Kathy Weaver, assistant director of WISP, said the purpose of the program is to encourage women who want to pursue traditionally male-dominated career paths and help them "persist through some of the doubts."
Stephanie Chesnut, assistant director of the Center for women and Gender, said that women must work to deliberately create support networks and mentorship opportunities.
"Generally speaking, men have had more access and outlets to those types of relationships going to play golf or grab beers," she said. "It's not that they intentionally exclude women, but it doesn't occur to them to include women. But that's networking, so women have to be more intentional about creating those relationships."
The most potentially controversial aspect of such programs is that similar ones do not exist for men, according to Chestnut. She said, however, that there does not seem to be a demand for these sorts of organizations for male students.
"I don't have men knocking on my door like women do," Chestnut said. "If men wanted to do this, I would welcome it, but we don't see that happening. Women feel the need because they feel like their voices aren't being heard, and until we fill that need, we'll keep having all these programs."
Another mission of these groups is to establish open forums for women's voices on campus. Link Up sponsors a termly "Proud to be a Woman" dinner to foster conversations with members of the faculty and staff, who can act as mentors to female students, according to Hannah Levinson '12, the chair of Link Up.
Other events, such as the Vagina Monologues, offer other forums for female students to share both positive and negative experiences of being a woman.
"Something like the Vagina Monologues, where women talk about themselves and their own personal experiences, is very self-reflective, healing and empowering," Chestnut said. "That's why those events are so important."
