She Roars 2018
They came by the thousands- three thousand four hundred to be exact. 3400 women graduates of what had been a bastion of affluent southern white anglo saxon protestant male privilege, descended on Princeton University’s bucolic campus to attend She Roars, a university-sponsored conference for women alums.
Women were there to celebrate, bear witness, remember, forgive, forget, reclaim, remind, reconnect, belong.
Some, like me, had been at the vanguard of coeducation in the Ivy League. I entered Princeton in in 1970, the second year, since its founding in 1746, in which women were admitted to a full four year undergraduate experience. These days, some refer to me and my female classmates as pioneers and they do so with respect and admiration. But since the admission of women in 1969, and in subsequent decades, countless male alums condemned our arrival and bemoaned our presence. As they saw it, women had crashed their “boys’ only” party, invaded their manspace, and defiled their tigers’ cave.
It has taken decades for women to establish their presence in that formerly testosterone-drenched wonderland that was once the exclusive province of some very privileged and entitled men.
It took a lawsuit initiated by a woman student in 1979, and court battles lasting 13 years, for the eating clubs to allow women to join. When the suit was settled in 1992 one of the defendants, Tiger Inn, issued a statement accusing Sally Frank, the plaintiff in the case, of “politically correct fascism.”
Fast forward 49 years- from the first class of women admitted in 1969, to She Roars 2018. Coincidentally and ironically, She Roars overlapped with the final two days of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process that resulted in his elevation to the Supreme Court of the United States. On the day before the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh, two Princeton alumnae, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan took the stage at the Jadwin Gymnasium and engaged in a conversation with another alumna, Yale Law School Dean, Heather Gergen.
Thousands of women, many of whom were not happy about the goings-on in and around the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings concerning Kavanaugh, listened with rapt attention to the Justices’ every word. On that evening, the outcome of the Senate’s upcoming vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was, pretty much, a foregone conclusion. Sotomayor and Kagan knew that it was very likely that Brett Kavanaugh would soon join them as one of the nine members of the SCOTUS. Not surprisingly, then, the conversation that evening in Princeton was carefully scripted; written questions from the audience sounded scrupulously scrubbed. Some in the audience were ambivalent about what they witnessed as Sotomayor and Kagan, two potentially fierce tigresses, tiptoed gingerly around the elephant in the room – the Kavanaugh mess.
When asked about the Supreme Court and its workings, Sotomayor and Kagan steered clear of the controversy of the moment (Kavanaugh) choosing, instead, to extol the virtues of collegiality and mutual respect among the members of the court.
In answer to a question about the Justices’ role on the court “in this time of political polarization”, Kagan asserted that the Court’s legitimacy depends on people (the public) seeing the court as not politically divided, not an extension of politics and as being above the fray.
Sotomayor emphasized how important it is for the members of the Supreme Court to rise above partisanship in their personal relationships, to treat each other with respect and dignity and to behave amicably despite differences in their judicial approaches.
As expected, on the following day, the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court , the highest court in the land. Kavanaugh snatched the golden ring despite what many observers characterized as his appalling, highly partisan and emotionally hysterical performance before the Judiciary Committee.
I suspect that my fellow alumnae at She Roars, even Kavanaugh supporters, seriously doubted that a woman who chose to shout, cry, threaten her political opponents and who condescended to Senators, as Kavanaugh did, would ever be rewarded with an appointment to this country’s highest court irrespective of how qualified and/or entitled she might feel or be. But Kavanaugh is not a woman. He had played the game according to the rules designed by men like him for men like him, he attended prep school and Yale, joined the “right” fraternity, attended law school clerked, and even did some school work and yada yada yada…. In his opinion, Brett was entitled to a seat on the Supreme Court.
So what, you ask, does Kavanaugh have to do with Princeton and She Roars? Let me acquaint you with the Princeton I met and got to know. In 1969, 170 women referred to as “coeds” at the time, stepped into the tigers’ cave (occupied by 3,251 undergraduate males) and became Princeton Freshman! In 1970, 175 women (including me) entered as freshmen.
The male to female student ratio at that time was 3 to 1. There were three women on the faculty, and three administrators.
Men, the two-legged tigers of Princeton lore, roamed the gated savannah and proudly strut their stuff. Some were determined to assert their power and prowess- to show the “girls” who was in charge and to keep them in their place. Male dominance was the order of the day, and it was jealously guarded by students and alumni alike.
From 1746 until 1969, Princeton University was a breeding ground of privilege preserved for affluent or near-affluent white men. Some of the women admitted in 1969 and after, were the offspring of, or otherwise related to, those men. Some delighted in following in Daddy’s footsteps; others sought to carve out a separate identity of their own. The tigers’ lair was familiar territory for those cubs. They knew, through nature and nurture, when to purr with pride, when to assert themselves and when to retreat. They also knew the courtship and mating rituals that could result in graduating with a dual degree- a BA or BS (Bachelor of Science) and an MRS (Mrs), complete with a glistening rock on the ring finger.
There were, of course, some, like me, for whom the journey from home (Brooklyn, NY) to Princeton, NJ was an exercise in intergalactic travel. The daughter of working class Puerto Rican parents who migrated from La Isla del Encanto (the Enchanted Island) to the mean street of NY, I had lived with my parents in a tenement and, later, in a modest house. I attended a tiny parochial school and graduated from an all girls Catholic high school run by nuns. Needless to say, neither I nor others like me were typical Princetonians.
When I entered Princeton where I dwelled among the Brett Kavanaughs of yesteryear, I knew nothing of prep schools, horseback riding camps, ski vacations in Vale, summers in Europe, debutante Balls, Princeton’s vaunted eating clubs, or tiger mating rituals. The meticulously manicured preppy paradise, into which I innocently wandered, was a mystery. In my first year there, I neither purred nor whimpered nor roared; I simply forged ahead quietly and guardedly. From freshman year through graduation four years later, I lived in a perpetual state of “fight or flight.” My survival instincts were on active duty, with few furloughs. They served me well.
So, for me, She Roars 2018, was a study in contrasts. A gathering of 3400 women graduates that count among their number the likes of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, Meg Whitman (of eBay and Hewlett Packard fame) and other notables, was shadowed by Brett “I like beer”
Kavanaugh and ghosts of Kavanaughs past. It was reassuring to be reminded by Emily Carter, Dean of the School of Engineering, that earlier that week a Princeton alumna from the class of 1979 had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
But that weekend, we, the pioneers of “coeducation”, simultaneously recalled U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a group that vociferously opposed the admission of women to the university. Like Kavanaugh, Alito was elevated from one exclusive “club”- the tigers’ cave in New Jersey- to the most exclusive club in the United States, the Supreme Court of the United States. There, he joined fellow alums Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor, Kagan and The Notorious RBG (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) comprised 75% of the women admitted into that pinnacle of legal careers in its, then, 229 year history; retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made up the other 25%.
The lawyer in me couldn’t help but notice that, at She Roars, we alumnae had courtside seats to view the SCOTUS,as well and our alma mater, against an orange and black-striped backdrop of pride and prejudice.
Despite the rage and roars of millions of women who opposed his candidacy and confirmation, Brett Kavanaugh (remember Dr. Christine Blasey Ford) was appointed to the SCOTUS and joined Clarence Thomas (remember Professor Anita Hill) and others in, what some see as, the right wing of that institution.
She Roars 2018 and Kavanaugh’s confirmation process were a study in gender and class-based contrasts. In retrospect, it appears that while much has changed, a lot remains the same.