Friday Follies: “their chauvinistic little hearts”, 1980

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Melissa Kean

Apparently the transition to co-ed colleges was not completely smooth.

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Bonus: Have a great Labor Day everyone! I’ll be back Tuesday.

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8 Responses to Friday Follies: “their chauvinistic little hearts”, 1980

  1. Lavelle Fritz Ferris says:
    September 4, 2015 at 6:42 pm

    The manifesto above was written to initiate a hoax on the campus leading up to the annual WRC party. WRC had sponsored a Howard Hughes hoax party the year before – and claimed that WRC was to be the recipient of some of his wealth (anyone remember the multiple Howard Hughes wills – he had lived in South Hall during his short Rice tenure.) The following year (1980) – we marched, protested, etc and then had a party where we “settled our differences.” And in actuality – going co-ed (for WRC at least) was relatively painless, at least in my opinion. I was a freshmen the year WRC went co-ed and felt very welcome from the beginning.

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  2. marmer01 says:
    September 8, 2015 at 9:28 am

    From what I saw in the early 80’s the coed transitions were pretty smooth. Of course I may have not been aware of everything. Hanszen was solidly coed by the time I arrived in 1980.

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    • Richard Miller (Hanszen '75 & '76) says:
      September 8, 2015 at 10:11 am

      All and all it was pretty smooth. Started off with the women getting section 3 in the old Hanszen (the east stairwell) and I think a stairwell in the new section. (My memory is that is was 8 or 9, the stairwells between the new tower and the master’s house. Upperclass women were selected in the previous spring and integrated at that point into the college leadership.
      The only real run was that of freshman serving. Hanszen was still doing it and resisted both the master’s wish and others and continued it thru at least the fall semester of ’73.
      I also think we got rid of the rules restricting female visitors and fully went to open house rules. (This was the de-facto stance since I got there in ’71 but the rules which prohibited overnight stays and required doors to be left open if a woman was visiting were finally removed from the college judicial code.)
      The only real incident occurred in spring of 1975. Hanszen was going to have the old section refurbished. The decision was also made the women would get the old tower the next year which upset many of the men. Because they knew the old sections were to be repainted, they left many graphic graffiti statements many of which were specifically directed at individual female members. This was also the summer the commons burned and we ended up at the RMC

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  3. marmer01 says:
    September 8, 2015 at 6:15 pm

    Freshman serving petered out by approximately Fall ’81. I had to do it in my freshman year, ’80-’81. However, I got the sense that more and more people just didn’t want to mess with it so there were increasingly common “family-style” days until freshman serving was gone.

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    • almadenmike says:
      September 8, 2015 at 8:49 pm

      I thought freshman waiting/serving at the weekday evening and Sunday noon meals was one of the best aspects of the college system (in addition to faculty associates eating lunch in the commons). It was a great way to integrate the new folks into the college community. I met nearly everyone in the college that way.

      These days, I can imagine that the myriad dietary restrictions/preferences that people have and the eat-whenever servery setups preclude family-style meals altogether. For some reason it didn’t seem to be a problem when I was an undergrad (late 60s).

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