In Another Era, a Barnard Student Makes National Headlines After Moving In With Boyfriend

In the spring of 1968, Barnard sophomore Linda LeClair made her way onto the national stage when she defied college housing rules by moving off campus to live with her boyfriend, Columbia College junior Peter Behr.

While LeClair was singled out, her actions and the ensuing furor encapsulated the developing feminist movement among students on campus. At the time, Barnard’s in loco parentis policy held that the college assumed a parental role and could set limits on student freedoms. Specifically, students were required to live on campus unless they lived with their parents or had a live-in job.

LeClair had taken a leave of absence due to illness and didn’t want to return to campus housing. She lied on her housing form by saying that she had a job as a live-in caretaker, and she moved into Behr’s apartment on 110th Street and Columbus Avenue.

When the New York Times interviewed her for an article on unmarried students living together, LeClair requested anonymity. But her quotes were attributed to a Barnard sophomore from New Hampshire, and college officials quickly identified the source.
After weeks of uproar, she was issued a “slap-on-the-wrist” penalty and banned from campus dining facilities. A Spectator editorial remarked sarcastically, “We sympathize with Miss LeClair, who will now have to meet men at places other than mixers in the Barnard dorms.”

Larger Implications

While LeClair may have been the only student whose actions were nationally publicized, she was not alone in challenging Barnard’s housing policies.

“We all resented the rules of having to sign out of the dorms at night, meet curfews, and limit male visitors to certain hours,” said Estelle Freedman, BC ’69 and a history professor at Stanford University. When men were in Barnard dorms, Freedman said, “You had to keep your door open the width of a book, hence the ubiquity of a matchbook.”

“I was aware that there were quite a number of other Barnard students who were doing the same thing that I was doing,” LeClair said.

The controversy was only one part of a larger debate over women’s changing role in society, and critics noted the double standard between housing policies at Barnard and Columbia.

“Barnard students had to live at the dormitories, and there were some stringent curfews, and Columbia students could do whatever they wanted to,” LeClair said. “The media coverage made it into a story about sex ... but really what it was about was power and equality. There was a lot of unhappiness about the kind of patronizing attitude toward the college women that this represented.”

Public condemnation of LeClair was deeply rooted in the sexual mores of the era, in which abortion and even birth control for unmarried women were illegal. The intensity of the Barnard administration’s reaction to LeClair and Behr’s living together was arguably just as much a product of the culture of the time as the result of individual administrators’ views.

“People remember the protests and the hippies and this and that, and I don’t think they remember what a conservative time it was,” Behr said. “The idea that someone was having sex out of marriage was still pretty titillating.”

And in a letter to the editor published in Time magazine on May 10, 1968, Harriette Wagner of Northbrook, Ill. wrote: “I don’t know what kind of student Linda LeClair is or what kind of a mistress she makes, but judging from the picture of her apartment, she makes one lousy housekeeper. Doesn’t Barnard College have a Home Economics department?”

“Women had the same position in the civil-rights movement and the anti-war movement that they had in the culture at that point, and that began to change,” LeClair said.

She mentioned a documentary about the Sexual Revolution by Hart Perry in which a Barnard student said, “If a student wants to make a decision about where he should live, then he should be able to do that.”

“Here she is, a woman on an all-female campus, describing her experience with a male pronoun,” LeClair said.

LeClair and the Feminist Movement

Throughout history, LeClair said, there has been a tendency to trivialize actions women take against sexism in its various manifestations.

“In this case it got trivialized by making it be about the fact that I was living with my boyfriend, and about sex and speculation and innuendo,” she said, adding that the reasons for her decision to live with Behr were far less scandalous, having little to do with sex. “There’s a tendency to sensationalize and to ridicule and to minimalize rather than addressing the issue, and that still happens.”

The LeClair controversy preceded the peak of the feminist activism of the era, and indicated some of the sexism that movement would combat.

“Feminism on campus was almost nonexistent until about that year [1968],” said Elizabeth Pleck, a history professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, who has written about the LeClair case. “The essential framework that was being used at the time was not so much sexual double standards and women’s rights as it was students’ rights and ‘We’re really adults, and we should be trusted, because we’re adults, to have our own freedom.’”

In the summer of 1968, LeClair received a letter from Barnard president Martha Peterson inviting her to return to Barnard if she agreed to abide by its policies.
“I decided not to go back, not because I’m a horrible rule-breaker, but because what I had thought Barnard was—namely a place to support feminism, to support the empowerment of women—at that point wasn’t so true,” LeClair said.

“We didn’t mean to set the world on fire,” Behr said of the explosive situation. But while most agree that the incident was overplayed, its long-term repercussions are undeniable, as it significantly weakened in loco parentis and other similar policies not only at Barnard, but nationwide.

“A lot of schools kind of quietly changed their rules rather than go down that path,” Behr said. Meanwhile, Students for a Democratic Society—of which both LeClair and Behr were members—picketed in LeClair’s defense outside her administrative trial in one of the group’s “first gendered actions,” LeClair said.

And 40 years later, LeClair said, “I look at that young woman and the other women who stood with me at that time, and I’m proud just to be part of that.”

maggie.astor@columbiaspectator.com