Facing Resistance as the Inaugural Class
The women in the inaugural class were met with both open arms and resistance. As they navigated their social and academic lives, Black women endured gender-based descrimination and race-based descrimination. They were dealing with the resistance due to their intersectional identities, a term that was not coined until 1989. During Karen’s college years, race and gender were treated as exclusive factors that shaped the different aspects of their lives. However, Race, Gender, and Class Intersectionality by Belkhir and Barnett argue that race, class, and gender “are interlocking categories of experience that affect all aspects of human life; they simultaneously structure the experience of all people in this society.”
In the midst of exclusion and unwarranted pushback, certain faculty and staff joined some students in engaging in sexist behavior against female students. These actions were meant to make these young women feel uncomfortable while sending the message that they “do not belong” at Dartmouth.
In 1975, the dean of the college, Carrol Brewster, joined in this behavior by singing the “The Cohog Song” with male Dartmouth students as they performed it on campus. “Cohog” was used to refer to female students as swines or pigs, and was also a combination of a “coed” and “quahog,” simultaneously referring to a species of clam as well as being a derogatory term for female sexual organs. “The Cohog Song” includes vulgar lyrics that blatantly displayed their prejudice behavior as these men sung the song to the tune of “This Old Man.”
“all here to spoil our fun,”
“they all ruined our masculine heaven,”
“they’re all a bunch of f—–g whores.”
“With a nick nack patty whack / Send the b-tches home / Our cohogs go to bed alone.”
Dean Brewster not only sang “The Cohog Song” with the male students, but publicly voted the song to be “The Most Creative and Original.” Behavior such as this made Dartmouth an unwelcoming place.
"I remember when I first got up there that one of the Black male students came up to me and basically said, I shouldn't be there because I was taking – I was taking a seat from a brother. I remember responding that if I wasn't there, there would be another woman there so you know. So that was really silly as far as I was concerned."
"I can't remember the name of the dorm but there was an all-female dorm and some guys went through, I think from the frats and overturned wastepaper baskets and wrote on their whiteboards and that kind of thing. And they did call us, some of them call us “cohogs,” instead of coeds. And in the spring they had on the spring sing or something like that and all of the frats would get together and they would sing. And one of the deans sang with one of the frats and they change the word co-ed to quahog. So you heard it on various levels."