This month’s issue of the Rutgers Alumni Magazine arrived last week. As usual, I immediately flipped back to the class news section and was not surprised that Class of 1977 column was short and didn’t include any news about anyone I knew. I tossed the magazine on the coffee table so Dave could take a look at it before it went to the recycling pile. A couple of days later he asked me if I’d read the article about the first class of women at Rutgers. In my haste to move the mail along from the box to the bin, I’d totally overlooked the story. I decided to give it a read.
I already knew most of the information about that first year; that 40 years ago this fall that 600 women were admitted to the campus on the banks of the old Raritan into a population of almost 5,000 men and that Rutgers was the last non-military, all-male state school to go coed. The article described the peculiarities of the formerly all-male dorm bathrooms having the word “Men” on the doors as well as urinals on the walls, something I was aware of since they were still there the following fall when I arrived as well as some very colorful graffiti. (There was one memorable piece of art on the door of the middle stall on Brett 3rd floor involving a moose and a guy named Ferrell which now, as I think about it, I wonder why it wasn’t painted over before the women arrived.)
There were also things I did not know, such as the lack of female faculty members and the resistance on the part of male department heads to vote in favor of adding a gynecologist to the clinic staff feeling that female students could get the information they needed from their mothers! Amazing. It got me thinking about my first months at Rutgers College, just one year later.
This is me at eighteen, just a few weeks into my first semester at Rutgers College. I’d arrived the day after my 18th birthday and was very excited about the prospects of joining in on the second year of co-education and continuing the raid on the all-male bastion of education. But in the end, I found it to be not such a big deal. Yes, there were more men than women, but there were no visible signs of animosity or inequality. I guess any that had been there was addressed the previous year.
Yes, there were differences in my experience compared to those of my female counterparts at other schools. Yes, we had urinals on the walls of our bathrooms, which were very handy since for the most part, the bathrooms became coed after midnight. Yes, the graffiti in those former men’s rooms was bawdy. And yes, most definitely there were many more men on campus than women; probably five or six to one my freshman year. I never felt intimidated, threatened or afraid.
To be honest, that first year had all the romance and magic of a fairy tale complete with villains, witches and damsels in distress. I freely tested my limits and stretched my boundaries. One of my most famous personal test involved my tolerance for drinking beer; I apparently have none. Twice I found myself trying to keep up with my male friends, beer for beer with very unpleasant results earning me my nickname OBM – One Beer Monica. There are worse things to be called.
By the end of that first year I’d grown up a lot. I’d made some incredible friends and even met my true love. No other year in my time at Rutgers ever measured up to the first. The thrill of being as Alice in a Wonderland of streakers and toilet paper wars in the quad, round the clock frisbee throwing to gain fame in the Guinness Book of World Records, of attending a frat party on Halloween dressed as a cat in leotard and tights complete with a braided black yarn tail and headband tethered ears (which oddly enough turned out to be a bachelor party – not a Halloween party) to finding my prince after kissing many, many frogs. It was a marvelous year. I’m not sure what part my being a member of the second class of women played in the outcome of my life. Would I be so different today if I’d accepted my offer to attend Douglass College which at the time only admitted women? I don’t know. I can only say what is, and it is very good.