On Monday night, six Bowdoin women came to campus and relived a time when Reagan was president, bright workout gear was all the rage, and Bowdoin still supported fraternities. The panel, titled, "Claiming Spaces: Bowdoin Women of the 1980s," spoke of reclaiming the history of the decade. The event was sponsored by the Gender and Women's Studies program and the Women's Resource Center.
Student organizers introduced the panelists as "not only pioneers, but women who have claimed spaces." The panelists then introduced themselves briefly, and were then invited to "chat away."
Ann Johnson Prum '84, an art history major who experienced Bowdoin in the beginning of the 1980s, opened by humorously recalling finding herself "with a beer in one hand and a big decision in the other," wondering whether or not to join a fraternity.
Opting out of fraternity life, Prum described how "the non-frat was its own sort of frat," while other panelists elaborated extensively, and often personally, about the importance of the fraternities in campus life at that time.
Sonya Dockett '85, a health care lawyer, detailed that "women could be members of frats, but not with full rights." She turned to the African-American society, WBOR, and theater in order to claim her space at Bowdoin and connect her childhood in urban Detroit with her new life at Bowdoin.
Associate Professor of Art History Pamela Fletcher '89, who has been both a student and a faculty member at Bowdoin, described a 1980s campus with "a liberal administration but a conservative student body," and acknowledged that female life was "much more complicated" in social spaces than in academic ones.
"It still feels like a pretty male place to me in a lot of ways," she said, drawing from her unique and seasoned perspective of campus life. "There are painful things about that."
Marya Hunsinger, the first coordinator of the Women's Resource Center, said she "found a place for [her] feminism," in the WRC. As coordinator, her duties included keeping the center going even in years when attendance was "very sparse" so that future women "wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel."
She characterized the WRC of that era as "a place to stop by after frat parties," and one which "provided a space for all types of women to come and speak." She recounted a Wiccan speaker that the WRC brought to campus despite angry bomb threats.
Bridget Spaeth '86, an alumna heavily involved in the WRC and a current staff member, said that "space [for women] was being claimed through publication," and cited maintaining the library as the "defining mission" of her era in the WRC. "The library was a living, breathing reality of opening worlds," she said.
Spaeth recalled a campus climate that had "a silencing effect on many of us." She referenced not only the now-defunct conservative publication, The Bowdoin Patriot, which she coined the era's "Republican rag," but also The Orient's insensitive use of the word "dyke," and the general campus' avid defense of "the bastion of fraternity."
One member of the notably participative audience did emphasize that: "It wasn't all bad. A lot of us got politically awakened in that environment."
Professor of Sociology Susan Bell shocked the audience when she revealed that in 1983 there were fewer than 10 women on the faculty. She described how she and her colleagues "used collective power to enter into the governance of the College."
Among these victories were the instatement of a sexual harassment policy, the opening of a childcare center, the establishment of a Women's Studies program, and increased maternity leave for female faculty and staff, strides which a college "still marked by [its] history as a college of men" often resisted making.
"Now things today are very different, but of course there's still work to be done," Bell said.