During the first years of coeducation at Dartmouth, when male students still greatly outnumbered females, flocks of women from other colleges came to Hanover for Green Key Weekend. According to some of the first female Dartmouth alumnae, these visitors were often set up on blind dates with the male students on campus.
"In a way, busing girls up was good for a lot of the guys because certainly there were not enough women to go around, but some of us, as real Dartmouth students, were kind of offended," former Association of Alumni President Amy Cholnoky '77 said. "It seems like such a bizarre thing to do, and we definitely did not like it. As Dartmouth girls, it seemed really strange."
Female Dartmouth students who graduated around that time period said they felt their experiences with Green Key were very different from those of the women who visited for the weekend. Despite some resentment, though, many alumnae remember feeling badly for the visiting women, since they were commonly attached to their dates throughout the weekend.
"I felt badly for my friends who had no escape route and were locked into an entire weekend either in one frat or with one person," Sara Hunter '69 said. "I was in classes with all these great guys, and the weekends were naughty for everyone. I always felt like I had to apologize to all my friends who were coming in for the weekend."
Cathy Brennan '76 said she also sympathized with the visiting women.
"Half of these girls got fixed up as blind dates, and they would show up with their suitcases to be the date of some guy they had never seen before," she said. "They would soon realize that the intentions of the guys were not always honorable."
Female visitors would often go to female-only residence halls and ask to spend the night on the floor or in the hallway, she added.
For some Dartmouth men, it was important to have a date for the weekend who was not a Dartmouth student, according to Brennan. She recalled visiting a friend at Wellesley College, where she met a male Dartmouth student who was looking for a weekend date to bring back to Hanover for the weekend. He asked Brennan to be his date, but quickly retracted his offer when he learned she was a Dartmouth student, Brennan said.
Hunter explained that living on campus gave her an advantage over the women who were only visiting for the weekend, since she was able to maintain her role at the College in her own space.
"The salvation was that you belonged to the Dartmouth community and were an integral part of it, so you were not just an attachment or import or just hanging there," she said. "It was your school and your life."
Students who were part of the "Pioneering Nine," a group of nine women who enrolled in drama courses for the 1968-1969 academic year and who were among the first women enrolled at the College before coeducation, also witnessed the mass arrival of women during Green Key.
"Those women would hit campus with all their finery," Nanalee Raphael, one of the "Pioneering Nine," said. "We would be schlepping off to class in our blue jeans, and we would look like absolute slobs as these women were dressed to the hilt for the weekend."
Alcohol was a key social lubricant on Green Key, Dudley said, adding that the members of Bones Gate fraternity served particularly powerful beverages.
"[The drinks] could kill you," she said. "You didn't even have to drink it, you could just look at it."
Dudley added that some male Dartmouth students lacked experience interacting with women and were often uncertain about how to act around them.
"They just wanted to jump on you," she said.
