Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Another trip down memory lane.

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

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Daily Diary, Day 1372:

Busy morning. Cleaned, took first walk, had a brief phone call from a friend, the men came and installed the counter, and I went to the clinic to get my yearly mammogram. Another gray morning, with some promised sun. It did get up to 71 degrees yesterday, probably hit the same today, unless the sun comes out earlier.

And now for a little historical tidbit (if one uses the rule of thumb that anything that happened at least 50 years ago is historical.)

Yesterday, as I read a couple more of the letters that I sent to my parents the first semester of my freshman year, I ran into a letter that told my parents that my dormitory section had chosen me to be section president. (I was amused to note this was the first sign of what would become a pattern for me of volunteering to take up the “privilege” of doing something that no one else wanted to do, a skill I was learning, by osmosis, from my mother.)

According to the letter, not my memory, the main duties of a section president was to be on rotation to lock up the dorm at night, and then I went on to describe how my first chance to do this had been “hysterical” because I had trouble getting the boys who were in the lobby to leave as well as having difficulty figuring out how to lock the doors.

This reminded me of the rather draconian list of rules that governed female (and not male) students when I started college, and later in the letter I addressed some of these rules when I wrote:

“I am so glad you didn’t give me any restrictions in that permission form. I feel so trusted. Carmen’s parents only let her go on public transportation to come home visit women, friends, and go on faculty sponsored trips, she was so mad, and to top it all off, her mother decided at the last minute that she couldn’t even ride a bicycle!”

On a blog post I wrote in 2019 to accompany the publication of Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series that had a mystery set on the campus of UC: Berkely, I went into more detail about those rules, so I thought I would reprint here a part of that post, entitled: In loco parentis, a comparison of 19^th century and 20^th century coeducation.

Twentieth Century Oberlin College:

In 1967, when I left home to attend Oberlin College (a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere in the state of Ohio), most colleges still accepted the idea that they should act in loco parentis (like a parent) towards their students. As a result, most schools like Oberlin had regulations governing student behavior, on and off campus––rules that were often different for women and for men.

Some of these regulations said students couldn’t have a car on campus or leave campus over night without their parent’s permission. Others said women, not men, weren’t allowed to ride bikes with out that permission and that women were responsible for cleaning their rooms (while men could leave that up to the paid housekeepers.)

From my perspective as a student, a lot of these rules were a nuisance and were pretty much unenforceable––something we laughed at when we received the student handbook as freshmen. Although I remember being shocked when a friend broke her arm riding a bike…and got in trouble because her parents hadn’t given their permission to do so.

However, the rules that did have a good deal of impact on my day-to-day life as were the ones that regulated when male and female students could be alone together. We could be together in public—in classrooms (which is where I met my future husband), dining halls, the library, or outside, walking from building to building. Nevertheless, when I started college, men and women could only be together in private in a dorm room on Sunday afternoons or in the so-called “dating parlors” in the student union in the evening. After dinner, students would race across the quad to see who would get to the union in time to sign up for one of these precious rooms.

Even these limited opportunities for couples to be together in private were regulated—you had to keep the door to the rooms propped open by a wastepaper basket and keep “three feet on the floor.” (Yes, that was a written rule!)

Perhaps even more problematic, if you were female, was the regulation that female students had a curfew. If you planned on leaving your all-female dorm after dinner, (which was on the opposite side of the campus from the male dorms) you were supposed to sign out.  Then, when you came back to the dorm, you were supposed to sign in to show that you had returned for the night.

The doors to the women’s dormitories were locked at a certain time each night, which meant that you would therefore be “caught” if you were out past curfew (either because you would have to ring the bell and get the “house mother” to let you in, or if you tried to stay out all night, this would be revealed because you wouldn’t have signed back in.)

For the life of me, I can’t remember what the punishment was if you failed to return on time––I think that it might have resulted in a letter to your parents and eventually being dismissed from the college if you achieved too many “demerits” for missing curfew. 

However, male students did not have curfews, their dorms were not locked, and they could stay out all night if they so chose.

Now, I don’t want to make it sound like we all mindlessly obeyed all these rules. For example, after several months of dutifully signing out and signing in and worrying about getting back in time for curfew, I remember when an older student told me that if I didn’t sign out, no would know I was out past curfew, and that I could always get someone who lived on the first floor to let me in.

Of course, once the nights got cold, and the classroom, library, and student union buildings were locked, there really wasn’t much reason to stay out past curfew—unless you were one of the brave souls who were willing to try to sneak into your boyfriend’s dorm room, or you were one of the fortunate students dating a senior who lived off campus.

Nevertheless, what I find amazing, is how accepting many of us initially were of these rules—including the explicit sexism of them. I don’t even remember thinking about how ironic the sexism was, given that in 1833, Oberlin had a very liberal reputation, based in part on the fact that it was the first college in the nation to permit women to attend college alongside men.

That liberal tradition, however, and the active participation of Oberlin students in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, may have explained why Oberlin was also one of the first colleges in the nation to change its rules.

At the end of my freshman year, a group of female students held a co-ed “study-in” in a male dorm to protest the rules governing privacy and curfews, and the faculty voted to end their responsibility to act in loco parentis. As a result, the curfews and restrictions about where and when students could be alone ended, and the first co-educational dorms were opened, getting the college featured in a front-page story in Life Magazine in 1970.

I would love to hear from you all who attended college in these years what the rules were for you!

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