Gina Barreca - Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Co-Education in the Ivy League

To Phyllis Deutsch goes all the credit and none of the blame for turning my vague idea about a book on co-education into what has become Babes in Boyland. Her enthusiasm for the ideacoupled with her remarkably astute skills as an editortransformed a dozen notebooks into a manuscript.

To Nancy Lager, Pam Katz, and Tim Taylor go sincere apologies and enormous love, in equal measures, for being the best of friends for almost thirty years. That they acknowledge me on the street is amazing, given their experience of my rococo emotional life. They listened, cajoled, deplored, cheered, forgave, and encouraged in precisely the right ways. I stole their stories shamelessly and changed their names, but they know the truth. Bonnie Januszewski, John Bussey, and Brenda Gross also admit they know me, which is really good.

Rose Quiello wasnt kidding when she suggested that I take my early stories and turn them into something real: the first of my computer files for this project are in folders called Story for Rose. Catherine Conant, storyteller extraordinaire, helped me construct a framework for the narrative.

To Bob Sullivan and Jay Heinrich go my deepest thanks for giving me permission to embrace Dartmouth as a grown-up. Bob and I met at Dartmouth, true, but only years after wed both graduated. He was a real Dmouth guy and yet we became true friends almost instantly, which meant that I was forced to reconsider my perspectives on real Dmouth guys. Bob read a lot of this writing in earlier stagesand he inspired some of it. As editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Jay invited me to use humor in addressing longstanding issues; many of these chapters started as pieces in DAM under Jays wise and provocative editorship. Brooks Clark, a buddy from the Schmooze on the Lake, was generous enough to grant permission to reprint his perfect parody/poem.

To my graduate assistants Mara Reisman, Barbara Campbell, Karen Renner, and Margaret Mitchell go limitless thanks. They did the hard parts: typing from crumbling and yellowed notebooks, organizing, researching, proof-readingevery thankless task was theirs, with years of take-out Indian-food lunches from Wings Express as the only fun part of their scanty recompense. Lindsey Keefe, my undergraduate assistant, read the whole manuscript in one afternoon while sitting on the floor; she, too, is terrific.

To these I also give heartfelt thanks: the members of an organizing committee daring enough to invite me to be the dinner speaker at the twentieth reunion of the class of 1979, where I had a blast and told most of these stories to welcoming waves of laughter, which frankly shocked me; Professor Donald Pease, who gave me my first official invitation to speak as a feminist scholar at Dartmouth; Dr. Richard Scaldini, now President of Hiram College, who gave me that C+; Professors Faith Dunne, Blanche Gelfant, and Mary Kelley for their inspiration; editors of publications where earlier versions of some of these writings first appeared, including the Chicago Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and the Hartford Courant; my friends, students, and colleagues at the English Department of the University of Connecticut, where I have been fortunate enough to teach since 1987.

To my father and brother, applause, love, and thanks; to the memory of my mother, a gin-and-tonic toast, and curtsey.

And to my husband Michael Meyer, I want to say this: You know you got it, babe, if it makes you feel good.

Babes in Boyland

1.

If I could have talked my high school boyfriend into marrying me I would not have gone to college.

I couldnt comfort myself that he wasnt the marrying kind, either. He got hitched right after his freshmen year to the perky girl hed taken to the senior prom. Perkiness was a quality I was low on in those days. She was skinny, with big blue eyes and an upturned nose. Of course he married her; she was Barbie.

I was Betty Boop. Betty Boop did not have a wedding dress. She had a black garter strapped across her thigh and an annoying voice. Which pretty much summed me up on a good day.

If Id managed to get married, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. I would not have worried about being the only person at Dartmouth whose last name ended in a vowel (except for Michael Corleone and he was fictional). I could have skipped torturing myself for having lousy skin in a world composed of flawless porcelain. I wouldnt have felt bad having a blanket of dark curly hair when everybody else in Hanover looked like an extra at a casting call for a Sun-In hair-lightening commercial. It was clear that the blondes sauntering across campus were real blondes, girls for whomas they laughed in the old neighborhoodthe drapes and the carpet matched.

Had I married the boyfriend, maybe I wouldnt have been jittery about having to explain that vulgar joke to somebody who pretended not to get it. Or, worse, explaining it to somebody who genuinely didnt get it and looked at me as if I were from another planet.

If only it had been me tripping down that aisle into the arms of safe destiny to the strains of Captain and Tennielles Love Will Keep Us Together! I would never again have had to worry about being five points below a curve, ten pounds overweight, or a hundred times too Brooklyn. If Id gotten married, I wouldnt have had to worry about being exposed as a fraud. As an impostor. As part of some weird experiment. Maybe I wouldnt have been as nervous as an outlaw: a desperado breaking