Foley House

Established: 1926 (as Delta Upsilon),¹ 1966 as Foley House²

Formerly: Delta Upsilon³

The 1979 Esquire article exposing Dartmouth’s “male chauvinist pig”⁵ tradition names two of Dartmouth’s “alternatives to fraternities:” the new student center, and Foley House.⁶ Foley House was “co-ed,” so it lacked the traditional maleness of a fraternity, and it seemed to lack everything else that made a fraternity; it had “no pledging period, no hazing, nothing so formal as membership.”⁷ The House’s constitution declared: “The object of this house shall be the establishment and maintenance of an environment conducive to the promotion of friendship and the spirit of cooperation.”⁸

According to Mary Klages ’80, Foley House was full of “people who said things like, ‘I don’t like this heavily male, patriarchal environment.'”⁹ But according to the “guys who would come from some frat…and stand on the lawn at Foley House and throw rocks at the window…’Foley House [was] full of fucking homosexuals.'”¹⁰ Klages disagreed, at least in the beginning of her time at Dartmouth, but she said in her SpeakOut interview that “by the end of [her] senior year, about half the women in the house had come out.”¹¹ She attributed this to Foley House’s “welcoming environment” for “alternative lifestyles.”¹² Klages believed, however, that the “homosexual” accusations by drunk fraternity brothers were just insults they applied to any “anti-nuke,” “anti-apartheid,” “leftist” people.¹³ So while Foley House was not explicitly a gay-friendly space, it was both reputed to be gay and actually attractive to gay people by virtue of being a “social alternative.”

Foley House still exists, in a different form but with a similar cooperative spirit, as a Living-Learning Community at 20 West Street.¹⁴

Notes