In Hanover: The Big Green Battle of the Sexes

Through the drifts a young man chases a young woman who has quite deliberately stolen his hat and is just as deliberately allowing herself to be wrestled into the snow. Near by, a friend calls to his roommate, "Just let me get a picture of you in your wild and crazy cross-country skis." The roommate strikes a pose: "Hey, I'm just a Nordic guy." A visiting sophomore from New Haven says to her date, "We don't have winter sports like these at Yale. We have crime."

It is Winter Carnival time again, and up at Dartmouth College nearly everything seems to be in place. Boys and girls together. Beer flowing like champagne in the frat houses. The temperature at 15DEG below and more than a foot of snow on the ground. The population of Hanover, N.H., swollen to nearly twice normal size for the long weekend, as 4,000 dates stream into town from as far off as Southern Methodist University.

On the college green, backed by the high white tower of Baker Library, stands a huge snow sculpture of a prospector panning for gold, so tall (25 ft.) and so frozen that it had to be finished off by students climbing around with pitons and ice axes. On the hilly parts of the college golf course, assorted men of Dartmouth are cheerfully risking life and limb at a crowd-pleasing contest called the Downhill Canoe Race. The Skyway Lodge is full of schussers past and schussers yet-to-be, dates, officials, boots, parkas, day-packs, the friendly slurp of gulped hot chocolate, the crunch of doughnuts being engulfed, the smells of wet wool and wood smoke.

But even in a winter paradise these days, things are seldom what they seem. When Adam and Eve first stumbled out of the Garden, Adam supposedly turned to his partner and remarked, "My dear, we live in an age of transition." The same can be said of Dartmouth today. And of its carnival, which has figured in the romantic or rowdy reveries of Dartmouth men for decades. It all goes back to 1909. That was the year, at least, when an inventive sophomore named Fred Harris (class of 1911) first urged the formation of a ski-and-snowshoe club to organize social activities, the better to avoid going bonkers from cabin fever and the absence of the feminine touch.

The festivity that resulted eventually had a Winter Carnival Queen. The title and the role went out of style in the early '70s. Now the queen is celebrated only in a wonderfully awful 1939 Ann Sheridan movie that plays to packed houses at carnival time so liberated students can hoot at chaste girls "just dying to get pinned."

In addition to a queen, the carnival used to have a fine frenzy, a curious blend of gallantry and frustrated longing. Dartmouth men gladly vacated their fraternities and dorms so female guests could be sedately accommodated. Professors and their wives opened their homes and acted as chaperones to their students' dates. There was a great cooperative scurry to find segregated living quarters. "In those days," recalls Physics Professor John Kidder, "you could go all week without seeing a woman on campus. Then came carnival and women were everywhere. It made the whole place electric." Says another old grad: "You can't imagine the anticipation, the apprehension, the inevitable letdown."

But in 1972 Dartmouth's all-male world was shocked to the tips of its sweatsocks and the carnival was irrevocably altered when the college became coed, the last Ivy League school to do so. Had the bite been taken out of the apple, or was this the doorway to Eden? No one could say. But presumably because of the pain involved, the addition of women students has been taken in small doses. Even now, only 30% of the students are women. Their uneasy presence, plus coed dormitories and steadily changing sexual mores, have taken some of the old frenzy out of carnival. This is not to say that Dartmouth has now achieved a kind of truce in the ancient battle of the sexes, that easy friendliness and naturalness that unisex advocates always confidently predict. Dartmouth women feel alternately belittled and beleaguered. Says one young woman, class of '79: "You have to learn in the first few weeks of being here how to say no without feeling guilty about it." Dartmouth men, especially jocks and fraternity men--the latter also only 30% of the student population--frankly lament the change. "What's wrong with four years without women?" a fraternity boy asks. Just lately the faculty has stirred a certain amount of rage and despair in many a Big Green breast by urging the college to abolish its 22 fraternities on grounds that they are antithetical to academic progress, unhealthy for social conduct, as well as being noisy centers of alcoholic disruption and childish antics.

A visitor begins to sense some of the change when a bus from Wellesley, what the unrefined at Dartmouth call a "meat wagon," pulls up outside the Hanover Inn. A cute, brown-haired girl hops out of the doorway, her loosely tied sleeping bag unrolling all over her arms. "Not too optimistic, eh?" a passing male snickers, suggestively eying the bag. "Maybe," she answers lightly. But she can't quite pull it off. Between the sleeping bag and her uncertainty, a thin red blush swims up over her face. Clearly, life was easier in some ways when girls were expected to sleep in separate quarters.

"Have you seen many of the women up here?" a fraternity man asks the visitor during a discussion of education at Dartmouth. "I doubt if the Playboy people could find anybody they'd want. Men get in here because they're good athletes and are generally pretty good looking. Women get in because they are smart." The view is not confined to inquiring males. At the Cheese, Etc., a coffee house crowded most of the weekend with Dartmouth men and their out-of-town dates, one boy says to his girl, "It's so good to see a real woman again."

On carnival nights at least, girls are warned not to go near Theta Delta Chi House, locally known as Boom-Boom Lodge, without taking a solidly protective date. Theta, like Alpha Delta, provided most of the raw material used by Chris Miller, Dartmouth '63, when he wrote Animal House. Surely here, a visitor thinks, will be found just the bunch of "animals" to make every dream, or nightmare, of collegiate debauchery come true.

Not so. Frat parties do indeed blast through the nights. But to an outsider they very much resemble freshman mixers everywhere in the country. Large, smoky rooms, reeking of beer and shuddering to the sound of loud music, are often filled with revelers shoulder to shoulder. Clusters of boys approach clusters of girls like amoebas making tentative contact. The approach is sometimes individual. At one frat party a red-faced boy holding a beer edges closer and closer to an apparently preoccupied brunette. "Hi," he says, over the music. "Where are you from?" "Wheaton College," she says, giving him nothing. "Oh," says the boy. "What's your major?" The girl moves away. So does the boy, to another girl. "Hi," he says. "Where are you from?"

Even upstairs, diffidence rather than debauchery seems rampant. In the darkened Alpha Delta TV room, for instance, a girl with piled-up blond hair seems absorbed in the 11 o'clock news. A frat brother approaches her. "If I don't see the news I feel out of touch," she explains, rather breathlessly. "But if you want to change it to Saturday Night Live, it's O.K. with me." He does, and they sit together watching. In quiet darkness, or boozy haze, most of the conversation seems as timeless and fraudulent as ever. "You got a date?" "No babe yet. But it's early." "Well, lacrosse tryouts are coming up next week. Coach doesn't like us going in for stuff like that. It cuts your wind."

Mornings after, fraternity brothers are draped across beat-up furniture like limp spaghetti. At most fraternity houses just about the only sign of civilization is a composite picture of the members that hangs over the fireplace. Upstairs in Theta House a green banner forlornly proclaims, WHEN BETTER WOMEN ARE MADE, DARTMOUTH MEN WILL MAKE THEM. Through halls that seem to carry scars from ancient battles, a brother who has just wakened stumbles along, scratching his chest and testing the elastic of his underwear. He is sucking sleepily on a lollipop. "Boy did I get messed up last night," he mutters, turning lazily toward the showers. Another brother offers the visitor an opinion: "Every time there is anything all-male, the women can't wait to break in."

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