Girls, Girls, Girls

Anyone who has walked around Columbia in heels knows that women were not part of the equation when the Morningside campus was built. This is perhaps understandable. When planning began in the 1890s, the University had been exclusively male for almost 150 years, and the first agreement with Barnard was not signed until 1900.

Still, I don’t know why people make such a big deal over the fact that Columbia College “only” went coeducational in 1983, which makes perfect sense and is completely explicable. There was certainly no need for the Spectator staff to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. or use 96-point, Pearl Harbor-type for the headline “Coed At Last.”

Similarly, it is a relative nonevent that women were the valedictorian, salutatorian, and class president of the first coed CC class (1987). Really, no one should have been surprised, since every other division of the University had been admitting women for decades, some of whom grew up to be almost astoundingly influential—please try to overstate the importance of Barnard’s Margaret Mead or GS’ Jane Jacobs.

But there is still much that is obscure about the women in Columbia’s past. Obviously we know a little about the writers (Kate Millett, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Probst Solomon, Jhumpa Lahiri, among countless others). We also know about people who inspired (i.e., subsidized) or otherwise supported writers—Jack Kerouac’s GS-student starter wife Edie Parker, for example, or her roommate, Joan Vollmer, a Barnard student who was by all accounts brilliant yet nevertheless suffered the double indignity of being shot in the face by William S. Burroughs and portrayed on film by Courtney Love.

One of the more vivid pictures of pre-coed life comes from the noted feminist and literary critic Carolyn Heilbrun, a Columbia grad student who later taught in the English department for four decades. Heilbrun, like most female professors at Columbia in the 1960s, taught in GS (CC, GS, GSAS, and SIPA had separate faculties until 1991, though professors could, and often did, hold multiple appointments). Her scholarship was well received (outside Columbia), but she was usually at personal and ideological odds with her colleagues, and getting tenure was a struggle. She also wrote mystery novels transparently about Columbia under the pseudonym Amanda Cross (deconstruct that). There are perhaps better ways to make friends.

Heilbrun/Cross wrote more famous books, including one in which the Middle Eastern studies professor who “falls” out of his office window is definitely not Edward Said, but my favorite is Poetic Justice, in which Lionel Trilling may or may not figure prominently in a murder that may or may not have anything to do with the contemporary debate over GS’ right to grant the B.A. It is also full of insight on “The College” (“as they so maddeningly call it”) and the 1968 building occupiers (“crawling around the ledges like so many monkeys and shouting obscenities”).

Although the Cross books provide a glimpse of how women on the faculty were treated, they don’t spend much time in the undergraduate world. It seems that the situation of female students at Columbia is more or less that of the broader situation of women in America, but for anyone who hasn’t seen some sort of video montage of the 20th century, I will divide things crudely into three basic periods/modes of interaction:
1. Fear—as everyone knows, women and their mysterious cycles are not to be trusted. They are also intellectually deficient, distracting, etc. Or so the story goes for many prominent Columbians, including some whose names are on quadrangles.

2. Polite Repression—in 1960, confronted with the lurid spectacle of girls working it in Bermuda shorts, University President Grayson Kirk calls for a dress code—Barnard students are allowed to wear shorts on their own campus but have to cover their shame with a coat if they cross the street. As late as 1966, the yearbook gets away with a section titled “Diversions” that consists primarily of photos of Barnard students.
3. Anarchy (present-day)—in the late ’60s, as excellently named feminist groups abound—Radicalesbians, Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters (BOSS)—everything famously explodes, bringing a greater deal of social integration (including cohabitation). This of course results in very predictable complications (“Co-Ed Sauna Draws Ogling Males,” read one 1975 Spec headline).

Still, social integration did not entail academic integration. As Rosalind Rosenberg’s Changing the Subject reports, for most of the 20th century Barnard students took less than 20 percent of their classes at Columbia. Nor was the idea of a merger between CC and Barnard—proposed by CC during its mid-’70s nadir, as was a merger with GS—appreciated by either Barnard partisans or the central administration. The issue was often presented in not-so-helpful anthropomorphic terms, which I will now paraphrase: “Barnard is/is not strong and independent. She does/does not need some male institution to complete her.”

Of course CC going coed did not, as prophesied, destroy Barnard. And since—as has been widely reported—at the moment more women are going to college than men, any hypothetical future merger will likely be a matter of choice rather than necessity. The names on Butler are still all male—despite the best efforts of GS alum Laura Hotchkiss Brown, who, during the 1989 Commencement ceremony, tried to cover the frieze with a banner listing the names of women authors. She was arrested (though the University later allowed the banner to be displayed). More substantively, as of 2006 less than 25 percent of tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were women (although women constituted 40 percent of those eligible for tenure).

Obviously this column—which is certainly not a blatant attempt to ingratiate myself with the eventual rulers of a future utopian gynocracy—has omitted large portions of the history of women at Columbia (there is an entire section of the Barnard alumnae Wikipedia page devoted to spies, for example). Still, though, we can probably grasp how liberating (and simultaneously burdensome) college education must have been for young women, or for older women returning to school—or at least we will be able to do so next week, when the professors stop tormenting us.

Robert Ast is a senior in the School of General Studies.
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