Princeton University - Bric A Brac Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

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For some pt-oplt ' soci.il litr .it I ' lincctoii I1UMI1S little; for others it is ex crythiiij . 1 i ' ' think th.it 1 fit somcwhrre in the middle. From tliis position it is e;isier to see both sides. When speaking iibout social life and the effect of co- education, we have to ask whether women have affected it and. if so. what their effect has been. Unfortunately, by many of my friends Princeton womiMi h.ive gone unnoticetl; or. indeed, Prince- ton women have .iffected them adversely. Per- haps this is a statement only about my friends but 1 really don ' t think so. Rather 1 see it as a failure on the part of many Princeton women to contribute to the social life of this university. Of course, not all the blame is theirs. One of the major problems at Princeton is the unequal sex ratio. With three men to every woman it is quite difficult to meet and share ex- periences with a coed. From the engineer ' s point of view this is even more difficult since the male-female ratio is significantly greater than three: one. Even in those classes where the ratio is almost equal, it remains quite difficult to meet coeds. Of the Princeton women I know, there are not more than a handful that I have met in class. Of these, most are mere acquaintances. The amount of effort necessary to meet and date a coed is phenomenal. I know of one girl who was almost continually booked up for three weeks in advance. Needless to say. putting up with that kind of competition is more than most guvs can take. Another factor in the male rejection ot Princeton women comes from a desire to view women as being feminine; However, many a coed wants to be just another guy. One such example of the Princeton woman ' s drive for complete equality appeared last year when two well known female jocks decided to play lightweight football. Their desire was so strong that they even threatened to go to court if they were not allowed to play. Their wishes were granted but their mouths were bigger than their desires, and when spring conditioning came around, our two females did not. Certainly, one can understand a woman ' s de- sire to be academically and intellectually equal, but is it so much of an insult for a man to want a woman to be a little feminine? According to some coeds with whom I have spoken, this is exactly the ca.se. They do not feel they will be equal until their sexuality is completely ig- nored. Unfortunately, one definite problem with coeds is that they fail to see themselves in the capacity of females, so how can a guy think any differently? Along with coeducation came a decline of tra- ditionalism. Of course, this is another subjective view of mine. Not everyone thinks tradition should play a part at Princeton. One Princeton ti,i(iilH)ii still trying to survive is the all-male citing club. A person ' s private; life; should be his own; in consj-quence. the; disgust many women feel toward a club that will not admit them bor- ders on the ridiculous. Perhaps if they would view the all-mahr club merely as a viable alt(!r- nalive to th(! coed clubs rathcT than as a p(;r- soiial insult, they would be less upscM. While (iveryone is not going to agree with uh.it I have said. v(rry little searching is re- (piinMl to find that Princeton social life has not y(!l completely adjusted to cotiducation: this fact is made evident by th(! numb(!r of imports flooding the campus each w(M!k(md. For me a coeducat(Ml social life has been a satisfying ex- perience. For othi rs it has not. Quite; evid(!nlly there are still a number of problems that must be solved. Nevertheless, my grt atesl desire is to see a Princeton where men are men and women can view themselves as women without trying to deny their own femininity. Only then will a coed social life at Princeton reach the same heights achi(!ved by coed academics.

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considered bv a senior With the advent of coeducation at Princeton in 1969, the university began to assume a new image. The all-male orientation of previous years began rapidly to deteriorate. It was not long before we had women engineers, women jocks and women bartenders. From Marsha Levy ' s acceptance of the Pyne Prize in 1973 to Wendy Zaharko ' s accomplishments on the squash court, we saw women excel in all areas of Princeton life. The change was accepted by some, welcomed by many and rejected by others. Certainly the sight of girls going into McCosh, East Pyne and the library was a strange phe- nomenon for men of the classes of 1969-1972. There was a lot of adjusting to be done. Unfor- tunately, to the women it seemed as if they were doing it all. One graduate of the Class of 1973 vividly recalls the stares and looks of astonish- ment that often preceded her into a classroom. During my freshman year the stories of coed experiences were continually floating around. Thinking back on them, I can ' t help but laugh, although much of the laughter comes from ex- amining my own experiences with Princeton women and from finding that even today the stories hold a certain amount of truth. To a degree coeds are still not accepted by some male members of the university commu- nity. The reasons for these views are for the most part subjective, but they still deserve to be heard.

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i(nv(nl by a fn shmun As I turned my thoughts toward college in late Soptem- ber of my senior year, I was overwhelmed by the number of institutions willing to accept my application-pro vided it was accompanied by a twenty-five dollar check. One Saturday night, feeling a bit panicky, I sat down with a catalogue of U. S. colleges and a list of things I hoped to find in a college. Stuck somewhere in the middle of that list of criteria was the ratio of sexes: I wanted a college that roughly approximated society. By Sunday morning I had worked out a list of ten colleges that looked good. At this point coeducation really was an unimportant factor: it was easy to find colleges with sex ratios between five- to-one and one-to-five. Seven months later when 1 had to make the final deci- sion, the extent of coeducation became a much larger fac- tor. I had three colleges I was seriously considering, equal in almost every major aspect, and I was scraping the bot- tom of the trivia barrel in trying to make a decision. It was then that I began listening to all the prophets of doom preach about the sex ratios. Dartmouth, I was told, was populated by animals who, starved for female com- pany, regularly made mass weekend migrations to the more fertile southern lands. Princeton, being so close to New York, was great as long as you had a car and a bill roll that stretched across the country. Satisfying these conditions you might be able to date a coed once a month. Townies and exports, although not as intelligent, were more plentiful and better looking than the coeds af- ter you found the right contacts. Finding the right con- tacts, however, just might take all four years. The Yale alumni were convinced that Yale was vastly superior to all other Ivy schools in numbers and looks of coeds, and to prove their point, they made all their seminars coed one-to-one. Friends and classmates worked hard to con- vince those of us contmeplating Eastern schools that we were heading for instant insanity. They warned us that we would quickly be driven to the wildest lengths of des- peration chasing coeds that didn ' t exist. In all, it was a gloomy social picture I foresaw when, letting other con- siderations overrule the sex-ratio gossip, I chose to come to Princeton. Now, five months later, I can view the situation from a much more rational and knowledgeable position. It is true that girls are not on every street corner, but then again neither are they an endangered species. At times getting a date with a coed can indeed approach the im- possible, but with a little planning say two or three weeks of it, is is actually possible to go out on an occasional Sat- urday night. The situation is really not as bad as mere sta- tistics would seem to indicate. A helpful junior I met ex- plained it to me this way: First, one segment of any male class is so discouraged by previous reports that they never even try to get a date. Second, there seems to be a larger percentage of boys with girlfriends at home than girls with hometown boyfriends. Third, more boys turn into complete bookworms than girls. The net effect of these three factors is that the real ratio is reduced to the point where a perseverant male can usually find a date. However, since most of us spend more time going about trying to get educated than we spend searching for a Saturday night date, it is the day-to-day contact one has with the coeds on campus that is most important.