by Ginny Gilder
In signing up for the crew, I knew what I was getting into. Making the varsity was the goal. I welcomed the gauntlet that rowing posed: the chance to prove myself, whether a quitter, a wimp, or someone I could be proud of. I told myself I could drop out any time if I couldn’t handle the pressure to perform, the jostling for position, the reality of my rank staring me in the face every time the varsity launched without me. I told myself that if I couldn’t cut it, life would continue and I would move on.
Without my training companions, I may well have quit that first winter. Luckily, during those dark and dreary afternoons, there was no dearth of compatriots ready and willing to tackle the posted workout. Although I depended on my teammates to help me stay the course, I hesitated to embrace the team as mine, to declare my loyalty. I had learned the hard way that for all the feel-good moments of connection I got from friendship and relationships, in the long run trusting others brought me disappointment and sorrow. My job was to make myself tough and reliable enough so I would never need others or disappoint myself.
Yet, the power of teamwork was impossible to ignore or refute. Within the first several weeks of winter training, I had to concede I was stronger as part of a functional unit than as a loner. I could get myself to practice every day, but the companionship of others, sweating and grunting beside me while they both did their best and tried to best my efforts, got me through. But I was a reluctant learner and needed an abundance of evidence to sway me.
An ordinary practice, a weight-lifting day, offered some. I was lucky. Chris was my workout partner that afternoon, the perfect partner it turned out, who, along with spotting me while I hoisted bars loaded with iron, taught me about sparring and standing my ground.
“Hey, what are you doing? That’s our equipment!” echoed an irritated voice from the far end of Tank A. I looked up from the weight rack, suddenly uneasy. I felt my gut do a back flip. I saw several heavyweight male rowers stretching on the mats staring at me and Chris, scowling.
Chris didn’t stop her calculations as she loaded the weight bar. “We need a twenty-five and a ten on each end to start. We’ll go up from there,” she continued.
“Hey!”
“Hi, guys. You have a problem with our using the equipment?” Chris’s question hung in the air. She stepped in front of the weight bar, adjusted the protective weight belt that rested above her slim hips, and positioned herself to start her first set of cleans. She knelt in front of the bar, feet hip width apart, grasped it from above with both hands shoulder width apart and took a deep breath, as she prepared herself to lift the weighted bar straight up to her chest in one explosive motion, flick her wrists up, sink down into a squat, absorbing the bar’s weight as it reversed direction and settled into her palms.
“This is our equipment. Not for girls.” The voice was closer now, as the men’s crew captain stalked toward our lifting station, hands balling into fists.
“Oh,” Chris stared him down, standing taller than him even though she was a foot shorter. “I see, boys. So you must pay more tuition than we do, right?”
No one moved for a long moment. Veins protruded from the captain’s neck. His fists remained by his sides. He glared at Chris … then finally shrugged and returned to his teammates, stiffly uncurling his fingers. The men continued to stare as if they could shrink us to nothing. But I was no longer afraid: Chris buoyed me with her aggressive confidence.
“There aren’t any girls on our team,” she told me between sets. “We’re women. It’s the Yale Women’s Crew. They don’t call the heavyweights the Yale Boys’ Crew, do they? Don’t let anyone diminish you by calling you a girl.”
We belonged in that weight room. We deserved consideration and respect. I basked in the familiarity of an older sister looking out for me, leading the way. My own inner resolve edged forward, my confidence infused with Chris’s.
We completed our sets, unloaded the weight bars, and put the equipment away.
“Bye, boys,” Chris said as we walked across the room. As I swung the door open and stepped safely across the threshold, the dam of silence behind us broke.
“See ya, cracks.”
“Good riddance, sweat hogs.”
What? Chris had to tell me what the epithets meant. My sister, Peggy, had called me names, but a stranger never had. It stung.
These heavyweights were Yalies; they were supposed to be smart. I was shocked by their apparent belief that their gender granted them a valid claim of superiority. It was 1976, but the Dark Ages prevailed in New Haven, Connecticut.
The weight room incident was not the first or last attack: verbal skirmishes with the guys continued all winter. Maybe the men were tired of indoor training too, as the brutality and intensity of daily workouts increased. Maybe their longing to return to open water and rowing in real shells clouded their judgment. Maybe they were big babies who didn’t want to share. Whatever, by winter’s end, their words no longer hurt: I’d moved on to anger and disgust.
Women undergraduates had first matriculated at Yale as transfer students in 1969, not a moment too soon for my purposes. In 1967, I had started fourth grade at my new school, white-gloved Chapin located on East End Avenue, four blocks south of Gracie Mansion, the home of New York’s mayor. The all-girls student body was a change for me, coming from the co-ed P.S. 6 on 81st and Madison, but I had no trouble adjusting to the fact that girls held every position of leadership. I never gave it a second thought, coming from a family where my big sister ruled, and I settled into the protected environment without realizing my good fortune.
I set my sights on attending Yale University that first autumn at Chapin. Miss Proffit, my homeroom teacher, assigned Fritzi Beshar as my desk mate and positioned us smack in the first row, directly in front of her desk so she could keep an eye on us. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but she didn’t know that yet. Nine-year-old Fritzi, however, already had developed a reputation for outspokenness. She and I traded tidbits of our family history the first time we met and became fast friends. Both of us had two sisters and one brother, first-generation immigrant mothers, and fathers who were Yale graduates. Upon discovering this common ground, we confided in each other that we, too, planned to attend that venerable institution when our turn came. We sealed our friendship with an agreement to room together, ten years in the future.
Luckily, no one told us that Yale wasn’t open to women undergraduates. My father taught Yale fight songs to the entire family and regaled us with stories of his freshman year on the Old Campus, his upper-classman’s life at Branford College, and his tenure with the radio station, but he somehow neglected to mention that the school was only for men. Of course, I knew nothing about the status of girls and women beyond my school’s front door. It was normal for mothers not to work. I didn’t wonder why mine didn’t. Fritzi’s mom was a lawyer, but I knew she was special, especially because she passed the New York State bar exam without ever attending law school.
I didn’t know that in those days, marriage automatically excluded women from employment and educational opportunities; even Luci Baines Johnson, the daughter of President Lyndon Johnson, was refused readmission to Georgetown University’s School of Nursing following her marriage, as the school did not permit married women to matriculate.
I didn’t know that Billie Jean King won her first Wimbledon title in women’s doubles as a seventeen-year-old in 1961, long before she turned pro in 1968, and was never offered a college scholarship. I didn’t know that women were considered too weak to run as far as men and were, in fact, barred from doing so. In 1966, a woman secretly ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time, although she didn’t enter the race. Bobbi Gibb hid in some bushes near the starting line and waited until about half the entrants passed, then jumped out and ran without a number. In 1967, the first woman formally entered the race, but because she used her initials on her entry form, “K. V. Switzer,” her name slipped by the race officials. Around the four-mile mark, one of the race’s cofounders, Jock Semple, r
ecognized Kathrine Switzer for who she was and physically accosted her, yelling, “Get the hell out of my race.” After escaping from his grasp, she managed to complete the full 26.2-mile course without further incident.
I didn’t know that colleges all over the country were closed to women. For example, Virginia state law prohibited women from admission to the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Virginia, the most highly rated public institution of higher education in the state: only under court order in 1970 was the first woman admitted. Yale was not the only Ivy League school that reserved its hallowed halls for half the educable population. Princeton University was for men only, while Brown, Columbia, and Harvard maintained affiliations with women’s colleges (Pembroke, Barnard, and Radcliffe), but remained single-sex institutions. Only Cornell and University of Pennsylvania were well ahead of their Ivy League brethren, accepting women beginning in 1870 and 1880, respectively.
I was too young to notice the sea changes rippling through American culture at the time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded access to the Constitution’s promise of equal opportunity and represented a national commitment to end discrimination. The legislation prohibited discrimination in employment based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion, but didn’t address access to education. In 1965, President Johnson extended the antidiscrimination laws when he signed Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. He amended the order, effective October 13, 1968, to include discrimination based on sex, thus preparing the legislative soil for the passage of Title IX.
Against this backdrop, all the Ivies began accepting women. Yale accepted its first female undergraduates as transfer students in 1969 but capped the number of admits to satisfy its restless alums, who doubted the wisdom of such a monumental change. That same year, a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland, Bernice Sandler, became the first complainant to invoke Executive Order 11246 to fight for her job and equal pay. In applying the rationale that higher institutions of learning, as recipients of federal funding, could not legally discriminate against women, she planted the seeds for Title IX.
From there, the first flakes of change coalesced rapidly, and the growing clamor for legislation snowballed over the next three years. Representative Martha Griffiths (a Democrat from Michigan) gave the first speech in Congress focused on discrimination against women in education on March 9, 1970. Only three weeks later, Harvard University gained the dubious distinction as the site of the country’s first contract-compliance investigation of sex discrimination.
During the following summer, Representative Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon, in her capacity as chair of the subcommittee that dealt with higher education, took the first legislative steps that resulted in the passage of Title IX, overseeing the first congressional hearings on the topic of education and employment for women. She partnered with Representative Patsy Mink, a Democrat from Hawaii, to draft the legislation that would prohibit sex discrimination in education.
The first woman of color elected to Congress, Mink had extensive and relevant personal experience. Turned down by twenty medical schools, she completed law school instead, only to discover no law firm would hire her. Motivated to fight to remove the barriers she encountered, she entered politics.
In 1972, Mink and Green introduced, and Congress passed, the legislation whose preamble reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” With his signature, President Nixon enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments, codified as United States Code, Title 20, Chapter 38, Sections 1681–1686.
Title IX applies to all educational institutions receiving federal financial assistance, from kindergarten through graduate school. It addresses ten key areas, including access to higher education, career education, education for pregnant and parenting students, employment, learning environment, math and science, sexual harassment, standardized testing, and technology, and extends to all of an institution’s operations, including admissions, recruitment, educational programs and activities, course offerings and access, counseling, financial aid, employment assistance, facilities and housing, health and insurance benefits and services, and scholarships. And athletics.
The first women who enrolled as freshmen at Yale graduated in 1973, a year before I submitted my application. I started my freshman year with a student body that was still two-thirds male. When I started rowing, I had no idea I was entering a cultural battleground, where the fight to define femininity commingled with the fight for equality. Only four years earlier, a Connecticut judge had rejected a high school girl’s petition to join the boys’ indoor track and cross-country team because there were no girls’ teams, declaring, “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls.”
The women’s rowing program at Yale started as a club sport in the fall of 1972 and retroactively earned varsity status in 1974, after only two years, thanks to a strong showing that spring racing season. That year also marked the establishment of the Eastern Association of Women’s Rowing Colleges and the first EAWRC Sprints Regatta in which the Yale women’s eight took second behind their instant nemesis, Radcliffe. Nineteen schools participated in that spring competition, held in Middletown, Connecticut: the first championship competition for women in any sport, in any Division I conference, although back then women’s rowing was not exactly on the roster of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) sports.
Title IX may have been enacted, but change came slowly, as did the dawning of my own awareness. Growing up, I didn’t experience many sexist putdowns, other than my father’s teasing that I threw “like a girl” when we played running bases and he taught me the correct arm motion. But, for the first time, I discerned new undertones in my family’s comments.
During Thanksgiving break freshman year, my stepmother, BG, grabbed one of my hands and turned it over to see my palm, dotted with its unique array of healing blisters and rough-edged calluses. She recoiled in horror and, dropping it quickly, said, “What boy would want to hold your hand?”
My mom saw pictures of me with my crew and remarked with obvious relief that I wasn’t “as big” as my taller teammates. Did she see the irony, wanting to squeeze my unconventional dream into a narrow definition of femininity, tugging me in the same direction of capitulation she had headed twenty years earlier, assuming the role of wife and mother, and losing her dream to travel the world, her independence, and for at least a while, her sanity?
On the Yale campus, Tony Johnson, the men’s varsity rowing coach, supported the women’s program. Nat, who began coaching the women in the fall of 1973, was a former Yale varsity rower himself. He’d rowed for TJ in the late 1960s and was one of his guys. TJ even contributed $600 from his budget to help launch the women’s club program, but his support seemed to extend only so far, stopping at the doorway of his own crew’s locker room. A handful of dollars couldn’t compensate for his athletes’ vocal dismay regarding the women’s presence. The fact that TJ left their behavior unaddressed communicated his own ambivalence: as long as the women didn’t interfere with the men, we could row. But no rocking the boat.
As a club sport, the women’s program was relegated to the stinky and confining lagoon, where the men’s freshmen recruits rowed for a few weeks in the fall before joining the rest of their squads at the Robert Cooke Boathouse, twelve miles off campus in the rumpled town of Derby, on the banks of the mellow Housatonic River. The real boathouse remained off limits to the women until they achieved varsity status; after all, rowing emblematized tradition at Yale, and that meant men’s rowing, which dated back to 1852, the year of the country’s first collegiate sporting event—a rowing race between Harvard and Yale.
Both th
e heavyweight and lightweight men’s programs operated out of the Robert Cooke Boathouse. Reaching the three-story, three-bay boathouse, painted in Yale’s traditional blue-and-white, required a twenty-five-minute bus ride from campus. Two boat bays were stacked with elegant and pristine Pocock racing shells—singles, pairs, fours, and eights—to provide a full complement of training opportunities for the men. A third bay was reserved for the full-time boat rigger, Jerry Romano, who worked to keep the fleet of shells fighting fit, repairing damaged equipment and rigging boats to suit the coaches’ specifications.
History nestled in the highest boat racks: aging hulls, graying with dust, names painted on their bows that hearkened back to rowing greats from the 1920s and ’30s, their equally ancient oars sporting leather collars and pencil-thin blades, clustered at the rear of the boat bays.
At the top of a rickety wood staircase in the back of the middle bay was a pair of tiny offices for the coaches. A large, airy locker room fully equipped with standard toilet and shower facilities dominated the second floor. An uncovered deck stood on the downstream side of the building and gave an unimpeded view of the finish line.