May 2016 – Reunion Weekend II – Class Histories

The classes of 1951 and 1971 were paired and contrasted at the Alumnae Meeting (see 1971 and 1951 below).

Class of 1971 Class History, 45th Reunion, by Elizabeth Berens

Sixteen years after our sisters from 1951 graduated, the class of ’71 arrived on campus. Gracious living, parietals and smokers were still the norm; however, each had disappeared by the time we graduated.

In 1967, as we received our acceptance letters and excitedly prepared for our new adventure, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black Supreme Court justice, while that same court struck down the ban on interracial marriage.  Haight Ashbury epitomized an era of “free love,” and the British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality. The musical Hair premiered off-Broadway just days before John McCain became a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Although many recall the social changes and relaxing of rules during our tenure, our true foray into the forefront of change was self-scheduled exams. Mount Holyoke stood alone in showing it truly believed that its students could be trusted to uphold the honor system.

As the 60’s ended we enthusiastically tested the waters of co-education, visiting various men’s colleges for a week, a semester or a year. Some of us even transferred to those schools. Many of us determined that we wanted to graduate from Mount Holyoke College despite choices that did not exist when we applied for admission.

Student protests occurred on campuses near and far during our four years in college. In a serendipitous turn of events, the upheaval at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 led to David Truman’s becoming Mount Holyoke’s president.

By the time we graduated house mothers were replaced by house parents in some dorms, and our classmate, Wendy Wasserstein, was working on her play, Uncommon Women, based on our friends and classmates.

One of my few disappointments during those four years was that Kurt Vonnegut had to withdraw from giving our commencement speech due to health issues.

While on the surface it might appear that Joan’s class and my class had very different experiences at Mount Holyoke, we, like you, have all shared the experience of spending four years of our young lives mastering a rigorous curriculum taught by professors who believed in us.  There was never any doubt that we women could excel in any aspect of the world we would be entering. We left with a confidence that many “coeds” lacked at graduation.

Mount Holyoke, we thank you and remain your loyal daughters.

Class of 1951 Class History, 45th Reunion, by Joan Hartman

When we entered in 1947, our tuition, room, and board was $1200; when we left in 1951, $1600. Back then, that was a lot of money. We were paid $.35 an hour for on-campus work.

Mount Holyoke was smaller than it is now. 241 of us graduated; another 94 left after completing at least two semesters.

Our Mount Holyoke reflected the austerities of World War II. Many of us lived in temp doubles that had housed WAVES in training, two in a room designed for one. We got cinnamon-flavored margarine on our morning toast, though butter was no longer rationed. At lunch and at dinner we got butter, but only half a pat. A daily conundrum: to squander it all on one roll or spread it thinly on two? With luck one’s waitress could snatch extra butter from an unoccupied table.

Dorms had smokers, and many of us smoked. Starting to smoke was a ritual of maturity; the Surgeon-General’s Report lay in the future.  There we also drank coffee, played bridge, and knit; some of us could do all four at once. And there some of us assembled early to write papers, leaving roommates to sleep. We had telephones on each floor and one at the bell desk at the front door. We were paid to sit bells, that is, to watch the front door and take messages.

We were allowed to wear pants, mostly jeans, and Bermuda shorts during the day but had to wear skirts to dinner. President Ham set forth, in morning chapel, the difference between a Bermuda short, allowed, and a short short, disallowed. Wednesday evening and Sunday dinner required stockings. Wednesday dinner added candlelight and faculty guests. Gracious living, according to the college; “cautious living,” according to a cook in my dorm who rivaled Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop in delightful massacres of the English language.

We had classes six days a week and took five three-hour classes a semester. Those who came from small prep schools found the world of the college vast; those who came from large urban high schools, intimate. But our teachers knew us and we knew them. Each of them, it seemed to us, regarded our time as more or less exclusively hers, or sometimes his—women were a significant faculty presence. We worked hard, undistracted by television, and got an absolutely first-rate education. Plain living was offset by high thinking—our education was a luxury item.

Parietal rules were strict. We had to sign out to go beyond the boundaries of South Hadley: Moody’s Corner on the north, the bridge beyond the sash factory on the south, the Connecticut River on the west, and the Granby Road on the east. We needed parental permission for an overnight. One demerit was the penalty for an omission or mistake on a sign-out card.

We lived apart from the world but were not insulated from it. In 1948 the state of Israel was established and Harry Truman was elected president. In 1949 both NATO and the People’s Republic of China were established. In 1950, shortly after the Korean Peninsula was divided into North and South, hostilities broke out; by the time we graduated, our contemporaries, drafted, were fighting on the front lines. But domestically, shortly after we graduated, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president and we entered the placid Eisenhower years.

What unites us with the class of 1971, given our various experiences of Mount Holyoke, is that we remain her loyal daughters.