Women at Dartmouth

Recognized by COSO: 1975-76¹

Also Known As: Dartmouth Women’s Alliance (beginning 1979)²

From a COSO pamphlet, around 1975:

Women at Dartmouth is a new organization which feels a responsibility to held make co-education a successful venture. They feel it is their responsibility to disseminate literature, and support other Dartmouth women. It is their aspiration that the organization’s goals will change in order to meet the needs of the women students.⁴

According to a member of WAD, Sue Goodman Cohen ’79, the group was called “Women at Dartmouth and not Women of Dartmouth, ’cause we felt like women ‘at’ Dartmouth.”⁵

Aside from providing support for female Dartmouth students, Women at Dartmouth lobbied for issues like “gender-blind admissions,”⁶ and they published the newsletter Open Forum, which they called “the Dartmouth College women’s publication.”⁷

Bill Monsour, one of the founders of the mostly-(gay) male Students for Social Alternatives, “didn’t assume anything” but observed that “it was kind of thought that all the women in the women’s group were lesbians.”⁸ Though this was almost certainly not true, many lesbians considered Women at Dartmouth to be a more welcoming space than gay student groups that included men.⁹ In 1981, after WAD had become the Dartmouth Women’s Alliance, one lesbian student called the DWA the ‘nearest thing to a lesbian support group on campus.'”¹⁰

Relationship with Other Women’s Groups

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After attempting for several terms, Barbara Smith and Mai-Lan Rogoff from Dick’s House Counseling established a women’s group in the winter of 1978.¹¹ It was difficult for the group to maintain membership.¹² Dr. Rogoff observed that it was a “fairly conservative group,”¹³ and this may have been at least partly because a more “radical…angry”¹⁴ group already existed. One student who dropped out of the Dick’s House group did so because she was “more radical” and “more angry,” and thus related much better to Women at Dartmouth.¹⁵

The other student-initiated women’s groups had a similar perception of Women at Dartmouth, and they struggled to relate to each other because of it. CB, a women’s social organization, even resisted sharing a library with WAD because they did not want to “imply association between the members [of CB] and WAD.”¹⁶ CB and Sigma Kappa, the sorority, wanted to avoid stepping into political issues, and their members also worried that they would not be accepted in WAD at all if they did not fall in line with the group’s political views.¹⁷ The “negative associations…with feminism,” which included “bitchiness, anger and creation of problems or at least unnecessary escalation of them,”¹⁸ alienated WAD even from other women’s groups.

Notes