HANOVER — When the men who ran Dartmouth College announced in November 1971 that the institution would admit women, they didn’t leave much time to meet the January application deadline.
As a result, many of the women who arrived in Hanover in the fall of 1972 had ties to the college. They were daughters or sisters of Dartmouth men, knew the lore and saw a chance to get a great education in the New Hampshire woods.
The prevailing view of the women of Dartmouth’s first four-year co-ed class is about how hard it was to be so outnumbered by men. There’s no question they faced some difficulties, including sexual harassment and sexual assault. Some of the first women who came to Dartmouth left, deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle.
But those who stayed gained something more than a bachelor’s degree: A lifelong sense that they had broken new ground.
“Honestly, it was such a gift to be a pioneer at this institution that it sort of made up for everything,” Martha Beattie, a member of the class of 1976, said in a recent interview.
As they approach their 50th reunion, Beattie and three other women from her class talked to the Valley News about their years at Dartmouth, about how the college has changed since then and about how it needs to change. The common thread among them is that they arrived on campus feeling they belonged there, and that Dartmouth belonged to them. And they feel that way still.
‘It was just magical’
Nancy Jeton went to an all-girls school in Rochester, N.Y., but both of her parents were from Laconia, N.H. She was born in Hanover, where her father was a surgical resident at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. Her brothers were already at Dartmouth when co-education was handed down.
“The window for applying was so small,” said Jeton, who now lives on the Maine coast. “So you had to be in the know.”
She had applied early to Middlebury (Vt.) College, another school for outgoing, outdoorsy kids, and had to break her commitment to attend in order to apply to Dartmouth. “Everything Middlebury had, Dartmouth had, and more,” she said.
Beattie, too, had planned to go to Middlebury from her science high school in Minnesota, but was lured to Hanover by her father, a member of the class of 1945, and by John Kemeny, a famed mathematician and computer scientist who was Dartmouth’s president from 1970 to 1981. She went on to major in math.
Growing up in Hanover, where her father eventually became dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Martha Hennessey heard Kemeny’s announcement on the radio that Dartmouth would go co-ed.
“On my way to school, I stopped by the admissions office and picked up the first application” for a woman to join the class of 1976, she said in a phone interview. But she decided to go to Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Many women in her family had gone there and she felt “I should go away to college.”
Vassar had gone co-ed in 1969, but it was harder for a women’s college to attract men, she found. “They accepted men who likely wouldn’t have gotten in if they’d been women,” Hennessey said. As a result, “the mood on campus was not great.” Dartmouth felt like a better fit, so she transferred.
As with many Dartmouth students, the outdoors was a lure. Judy Csatari first visited on a ski trip.
“It was one of those clear, blue-sky days out at the Skiway and it was just magical,” she said. Her school choir also performed at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and the college’s Rassias method of foreign language learning, which emphasizes free expression, also appealed to her.
It helped that her high school, the private Northfield (Mass.) School for Girls, was in the process of integrating with Mount Hermon School for Boys. “I thought, ‘OK, I can handle this. I can handle a school going co-ed,'” Csatari said.
‘At odds with the culture’
The dynamic at Dartmouth wasn’t hard to understand, Jeton said. There were many sophomores, juniors and seniors who had applied to a school for men. Some of them felt that with co-education a contract had been broken, she said.
“There weren’t a lot of those people, but they were loud,” Jeton said. It helped to have a sense of humor.
The puerile misogyny of the few and the loud has been thoroughly cataloged. They sang crass songs and rated women’s looks as they walked to the dining hall. They passed despicable flyers under the doors of dorm rooms.
“I just held my nose and stepped over some behavior,” Beattie said. If you couldn’t do that, you were in for a rough time.
“I just chalked it up to, that says a lot about them and not a lot about me,” Csatari said. “Most of those guys now feel pretty badly about that.”
It wasn’t always easy to ignore some of the male behaviors. Partly because she’d grown up on campus, Hennessey took a less conciliatory approach.
“I actually felt kind of like I owned the place,” she said. Dartmouth belonged to her as much as it did to anyone else, she said, so she spoke up about professors who treated her and other women unfairly, and about women who were sexually assaulted.
“It just wasn’t my style to laugh it off,” Hennessey said. The atmosphere at Dartmouth felt less supportive than it had at Vassar. “I felt at odds with the culture, in many ways.”
Hennessey, who served six years in the New Hampshire Legislature, revealed in September 2018, during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh, who’d been accused of sexual assault, that she had been assaulted during her senior year at Dartmouth. While it was not a sexual assault, it was rooted in gender bias. A male classmate beat her up and threw her to the floor at a fraternity party.
Dartmouth alums weren’t always friendly, either. The first women’s a cappella group on campus often was sent to alumni events, Hennessey said. “We were met with this, like, ‘You’re the reason I’m not giving money ever again to that college,’ ” she said. Kemeny was so appalled, she said, that he made sure to send an all-male group with them.
There was a life lesson there, Csatari said. “Do you want those people to scare you for the rest of your life? Do you want to avoid them for the rest of your life? Or do you want to be among those people and find a way to rise above their nastiness?”
She did stop singing in the glee club after her first year because of the meanness of its director, she said.
Some members of that first class decided that putting up with the behavior of the vocal minority wasn’t worth it. Though she didn’t personally experience physical violence, Jeton said she knew classmates who had. “Sadly, I know women who left because of that,” she said.
‘It was exciting’
Most often, though, the Dartmouth ’76 women pushed through.
When they arrived on campus there were 175 to 180 women in their class, and another 120 or so who had been admitted as transfers to upper classes, said Beattie, who later worked for Dartmouth, including more than six years as vice president for alumni relations. That meant that men outnumbered women by at least 8 to 1.
But time on campus, and the growing number of women — there were nearly 1,000 by their final year — fed a growing self-belief.
“I think that the Dartmouth experience enhanced my level of personal confidence to speak up and speak out,” said Jeton, who served as a Dartmouth trustee from 1997 to 2007.
Most Dartmouth men were in favor of co-education, and women found many allies among them. Beattie called them “heroes.”
“They should feel pride also,” Jeton said, “in having been agents of change and builders of a new culture at Dartmouth.”
“Some of them had to bring their brothers up short,” she added. “They weren’t just bystanders.”
There were surprising moments of generosity. Beattie was a rower, and Peter Gardner, crew coach from 1957 to 1988, put in the extra time to coach the women who were new to campus “on his own time and with no extra pay,” Beattie said.
He did it “because Dartmouth was a co-educational institution, and if the men were on the water, the women had to be on the water,” she said.
The few women in leadership roles on campus helped enormously, and don’t get enough credit, Jeton said. “Those poor women were probably overwhelmed,” she said.
Britta McNemar, who came to Dartmouth with her husband, a professor, was one of the women the college hired as the number of female students grew, first in an exchange program a few years before the advent of co-education. She was an assistant dean of the college, and shifted over to the dean of freshmen office in 1972.
“There were few women in the faculty or the general administration,” McNemar said in an interview.
The women who did have leadership roles — Ruth Adams, Evalyn Hornig, Brenda Silver, Nancy Vickers, Marysa Navarro, Katherine Stevens, Katherine “Kit” Ragone, Hilda Sokol, Andrea Fisher, Joan Smith, Marilyn Baldwin, among others — either became institutions themselves at Dartmouth or went on to lead other colleges or universities.
“It was exciting,” McNemar said. Everyone at the time was trying to sort out what their roles were and what they could get from a Dartmouth education.
There was power in being the first class of women. They could start new clubs and other organizations on campus. Beattie was among the first women ski patrollers at Dartmouth, for example.
And there was an overarching feeling that they were part of a wider social change, helping to open doors for women in general.
They also felt very much a part of the Dartmouth spirit.
Csatari had no prior connection to Dartmouth, but was swept up by it. She married a Dartmouth man (as did the other three), and they lived in Hanover for a time. Csatari was an assistant dean of admissions. Her husband, Tom’s, job took them to Texas, but they moved back to Hanover in 1997, and Csatari has stayed involved in her class.
Dartmouth is deliberate about linking the past, present and future. The women of the class of 1976 each received a flower from the class of 1926 when they arrived on campus, Csatari said, “and they wrote a very encouraging letter of support for all of us.”
Her class is doing the same for the class of 2026, and Csatari has taken a lead role, thanks to her residence in Hanover. The effort includes meals together, ice cream on the first day of classes and a newsletter.
Students from 2026 want to know about the experiences of 50 years ago, Csatari said.
“People have called us pioneers so often that it’s an inescapable moniker, you know,” she said. “It’s part of my DNA, I guess is what I would say.”
Still room for change
All four women have remained connected to the college, and each has had at least one child attend. They have watched Dartmouth change and grow.
The academic offerings are “so much more expansive,” Beattie said. There was no academic advising or student center in their day. “The support structures are so different,” she said.
Not everything has changed, though this is a problem with higher education more broadly and not just at Dartmouth, the women said.
Jeton’s daughter is a member of the class of 2012. “I know she knows women who were sexually assaulted on campus,” Jeton said.
Why this is still a problem, 50 years after the advent of co-education, is an irritant. Students now seem less interested in social movements than in a clear path to a job in finance or consulting, Csatari said.
“A lot of students are unaware of what’s going on in the world politically,” she said.
Hennessey’s husband coaches a women’s club soccer team, and they’ll host the team for dinners. Things are better for women than they were in the 1970s, but could be better still, she said.
“I think the college needs a change in the social fabric if it’s going to be the best it can be,” Hennessey said. The reforms of the college’s fraternity life have helped, but it could be more welcoming and not follow the old ways of excluding people through a social system, she said.
She spoke on the phone from the Boston area, where she was visiting the youngest of her seven granddaughters — “All pistols,” she said. They would be the third generation of women at Dartmouth. “That’s what I have to worry about,” Hennessey said.
