Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/05/13/babes_in_boyland_when_women_were_cohogs.php

Babes in Boyland: When Women Were Co-Hogs

Friday, May 13, 2005

I am rather surprised that a market for the elite-university-exposé genre still exists. Tom Wolfe did not start the trend with I Am Charlotte Simmons, but he probably wrote the best book, and he certainly made the biggest splash. Soon to follow was Charlotte's little sister, Prep, which fits the genre, despite its boarding school setting. Then there was Privilege, an anecdote-laden critique of Harvard's meritocracy. March saw Chloe Does Yale, and just last month Gina Barreca's Babes in Boyland emerged.

Between Chloe, and Charlotte, and Prep, and Privilege, one feels the instinctual urge to shout, "Enough." Why bother reviewing another such book? Clearly most, if not all, of American youth's twisted mentalities, misplaced priorities, and decadent rituals have been catalogued and mass-marketed so that, today, every Barnes & Noble has a shelf dedicated to the genre. But Babes, you see, is special, for it is not an account of just any university—it is about Dartmouth. Furthermore, it is not simply about the College, but an attempt to tell the story of Dartmouth's oft-difficult transition into co-education.

Our College, of course, was one of the last to admit women. While three Ivies went co-ed in the 19th century, no women enrolled as Dartmouth undergraduates until 1972. Undoubtedly, they were not universally welcomed; even today, many older alumni have never forgiven the Trustees for granting women admission to Dartmouth's hallowed classrooms. Now, however, I would dare to say that the current student body is as supportive of co-education as past generations were hesitant. The transitional period, then, provides ample material for examination, as it was a time that fundamentally and irreversibly changed Dartmouth.

Enter Gina Barreca '79. She belonged to one of the College's first co-educational classes, before going on to study at Cambridge and New York's City University, eventually becoming a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Even considering her last, more dubious, qualification, Barreca was well-positioned to provide an important account of a pivotal time in the College's history. Instead, she wrote Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Co-Education in the Ivy League.

In sum, the book is heavy on personal and light on history. It consists of 70-odd episodic entries, ranging from thirty year-old diary passages and overheard conversations to family history and short narrative scenes. The literary glue that holds this multiform jumble together is haphazard pseudo-philosophical musings. Barreca's story progresses on two parallel tracks: the first centers on young Gina, from whence she came and where she is to arrive; the second track is her history of Dartmouth whilst it underwent co-educational transformation. This arrangement is thoroughly disappointing—instead of truly illuminating the experiences of Dartmouth's first co-eds, Barreca throws in a few token scenes of rude frat boys and unfriendly machismo, the same old tales that every undergraduate has already heard. The bread and butter of Babes is material that reads like a wanna-be bildungsroman: first alienation, maybe personal growth, but definitely final triumph.

Gina's story is of the off-the-rack variety. Immediately upon arrival, she realizes she is an outsider at an elite college, a label she is perpetually unable to shed. Eventually she settles into a niche, acquires solace through friends and love, and finds herself along the way. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it could vaguely describe Prep or a host of other writings.

Babes' relentlessly formulaic structure is maddening: lower class alienation at a bastion of wealth? Check. Attempt to fit in and subsequent failure? Check. Girl power versus the phallocentric establishment? Check. Romantic fling in a foreign land? Check. Self-discovery in a foreign land? Check. Poignant break-up? Check. The list could go on, but I yield in consideration for my reader. In fairness to Barreca, this isn't wholly due to her lack of originality. This litany is such a stereotype precisely because numerous students actually experience it. Universality, however, does not guarantee good writing, and here it makes for positive banality. I knew what was going to happen to Gina long before Barreca actually got around to telling the story—it is plainly a special breed of talent, which can lend a memoir the stale predictability of a bad airport novel. Most everything in Babes has been written before, and written better, at that.

This doesn't stop her from trying. Gina cannot fit in because of her middle-class background, her brown hair, and, most of all, her sex. She is, in her own words, 'five points below [the] curve, ten pounds overweight, [and] a hundred times too Brooklyn.' Tragic, certainly, but nothing out of the ordinary for numerous freshmen, and not particularly relevant to co-education.

But if the story is not terribly compelling, at least one would hope Barreca's trademark wit, so extolled on the dustjacket (she's a "feminist humor maven," don't you know?), could carry the work. To the contrary, her prose can be as cumbersome as her narratives. Trying to encapsulate a late-night road trip with a close friend, and possible inamorato, she produces this little gem: "We sang so that we didn't have to speak, and we didn't want to speak because anything we would have said as the white lines moved faster beneath the dark wheels we would have regretted later." Later she explains newfound resolution, "the bargain [she] made with herself; living as fearlessly as possible was the price [she] would pay for escaping what had once laughingly seemed like an easy life." This illustrates a problem that manifests itself throughout Babes: the writing is sloppily sentimental, but simultaneously too laughable to convey any sentiment.

Babes ambles along like that, illustrating young Gina's foibles and her profound detachment from the College's mainstream. Barreca reveals early —on page six—the linchpin holding together her visceral opposition to everything Dartmouth. "Women at Dartmouth," she explains, "had to learn the rules and play by them in order to figure out how to change them." She arrived not quite as an eager pupil, but as a guerilla, prepared to blend in and subvert "the system" from the inside. She had to butt heads with the un-evolved frat boys because they were paragons of the Old Order; they were the embodiments of the heritage she was born to destroy. And as any student of the College may have noticed, Dartmouth takes tradition pretty seriously: an iconoclast is bound to fit poorly.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote,

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

This was even more true when Gina arrived in 1975. It should not be at all astonishing that the men who held dearly the College's heritage did not welcome her hospitably. The very admission of women represented a threat to the historical character of the institution; the fact that many of these women—if Barreca is any reliable indication—arrived with chips on their shoulders, tenaciously determined to change Dartmouth, only multiplied the difficulty.

One must wonder if there wasn't a good deal of truth in the fears of Dartmouth's men. They understood there was an inherent trade off in co-education: by gaining women, there would be no way to predict what would be lost. Well, the College ended up losing quite a bit. Within a year of females' arrival, freshmen were no longer required to don beanies. The tradition of choosing a Winter Carnival Queen was abolished soon thereafter. A decade later, the administration banned freshmen from rushing the field at the Homecoming game. Over three decades, the College whittled away numerous traditions that had once defined it. Today, although few, if any, students would renege on that trade, the loss is undeniable. This is why Gina's male classmates were hesitant about co-eds.

Though her reception may not have been enthusiastic, Barreca's reaction to the situation is all the greater pity, considering the unique circumstances of her arrival. Belonging to the first generation of Dartmouth women, she had an opportunity to help define a new set of traditions and adapt existing customs for the fairer sex. One example was the formation of the College's first sorority. Young Gina might have been part of the expansion of the Greek system; she could have engaged in a time-honored rite of the College, and in doing so, made tradition more inclusive, without diminishing it. Did she? No. Instead, she fired off a letter to the Daily Dartmouth, lambasting the very idea of establishing a sorority. Perhaps the College did not exclude her half so much as she excluded herself.

Regardless of how her alienation came about, she is certain of both its existence and its centrality to her experiences at Dartmouth. Babes is filled with anecdote after anecdote distinguishing loud and brash Gina from her "better-heeled" peers. To the very end, she is an outsider, deciding to graduate early, with the knowledge she "was no more a man of Dartmouth... than [she] had been in 1975."

Sometimes, though, adversity builds character, and it would be incorrect to assume Gina gleaned no wisdom from her time as a student. One thing she discovered was that "anything worth doing was worth doing, period—worth doing well if you could, or doing poorly if you couldn't do better, as long as it got done with enthusiasm." I will not bother contesting the value of that conclusion, but I will suggest it is, perhaps, largely responsible for the publication of this book.

She picked up another bit of insight from her father the day she arrived at the College. Like most freshmen, she was understandably worried about setting off on her own. Her father lovingly advised, "You can always take the next bus home." For her it was "better than magic...because it's given [her] permission to take risks without worrying about the irrevocable." At its roots, this is a childish privilege—adult reality necessitates the irrevocable. Moreover, this most cherished of privileges is one that Dartmouth is wholly unable to entertain. For the College, there isn't any "next bus home." For institutions, change is sometimes irrevocable, and thus vigilance is required. This sort of knowledge is completely alien to Gina, living in a world characterized by whimsy and devoid of consequences. Such an existence constructed an absolute barrier between her and an understanding of Dartmouth's heritage.
Still, some lessons were more valuable than others. It is on a Dartmouth study abroad program in London that Gina finally learns an appreciation of heritage. She was in a museum, looking for a cup of coffee, when she stumbles upon a manuscript of The Canterbury Tales.

This wasn't like anything I'd ever seen at home... This was Something Else, with a history longer than anything I could imagine... and now I was part of that history just by walking into this beautiful building for free. These lusciously magnificent pages weren't hidden away in some small room for the exclusive and fetishistic gaze of serious scholars but were instead right there on the ground floor. Suddenly it felt as if there were enough of everything to go around.

Unfortunately, Ms. Barreca neglected her opportunity to commune with a society old and venerable. Instead, she opted to remain obstinately within the community of those who merely happen to be walking around.