After a day at the Skiway during her first Winter Carnival in 1973, Mary Osgood '76 went back to her dormitory, disheartened by the Winter Carnival traditions that seemed unwelcoming to her and her female classmates.
Osgood recalled her senior year Winter Carnival with fondness, however, attributing the improvement to a quickly progressing coeducation environment that caused male students to include Dartmouth women in the festivities.
From the earliest days of Winter Carnival, when male students' dates participated in the "Queen of the Snows" pageant, to today, when flair-decked Dartmouth students vie for the titles of "Mr. and Ms. Big Green," the role of women at Winter Carnival has continually changed.
Jeanne Riegel, who was invited to Winter Carnival during the 1950s, recalled the enthusiasm with which male students anticipated their female guests.
"It was kind of like Animal House,'" Riegel said. "These young men had not seen women in ages and they just went wild."
Following the introduction of Carnival Ball in 1915, nearly 2,000 women flocked to Hanover each year from colleges across the Northeast, including Skidmore College, Radcliffe College, Vassar College and Wellesley College.
Women who often stayed in temporarily-vacated fraternity houses during the weekend attended sporting events and parties with their dates, and participated in events such as the Girls' Snowshoe Race and Girls' Rope Pull.
In the 1935 Winter Carnival Silver Anniversary Brochure, Frank Danzig '34 compared the original Carnival's female visitors with male students' dates in 1935.
"In [1910] it was customary for one's Carnival date to be selected on the basis of her skiing ability, and woe to the girl who couldn't snowshoe. Nowadays, one's guest must be more adept in the gymnastic arts," Danzig wrote. "She can expect to be almost frozen to death watching the outdoor events, danced to death in crowded fraternity houses, and stifled to death in a 2 x 4 room provided for her sleeping accommodations."
Before 1973, when the Winter Carnival Council announced that "changing attitudes toward the role of women in contemporary society" necessitated the termination of the traditional contest, the "Queen of the Snows" pageant epitomized the hype surrounding women's presence on campus. Each year, about 50 contestants pranced in ski suits and answered questions in front of a judge's panel of professors and administrators, hoping their beauty, charm and wit would earn them the title of Queen.
"With a classic profile, a pair of blue eyes or a winning smile, rarely does anyone steal the show from the Queen," a 1947 issue of Sports Magazine declared about the pageant. "There have been queens of all sorts. Girls who like to cook, girls who like to dance and even girls who like to ski!"
In 1968, friends of that year's Carnival Queen, Barbara Jean Harris, took extreme measures to ensure that she made it to Hanover from Oakland, Calif.
"She came to Dartmouth as a surprise to her date, whose fraternity brothers sold pints of their blood to raise money for her plane fare and mailed it to Barbara without telling [her date]," the Valley News reported.
In 1970, a skydiver plummeted to the Green from 3,500 feet to place the crown on the head of the Queen.
This female-related frenzy drew the attention of national press throughout the decades.
In 1928, the Boston Herald ran spread of women's fashion at the Carnival, while The New York Times featured women at the event in a 1966 edition of its paper.
In 1971, Playboy Magazine traveled to Hanover to shoot its "Playmate of the Month" issue during Winter Carnival.
Playboy photographers offered Bones Gate fraternity half a keg of beer to sculpt the playmate on their lawn.
The role and presence of women at Winter Carnival began to change when the College admitted women in 1972.
Despite coeducation, the Carnival of 1973 left many Dartmouth women feeling alienated by traditions that were once the staples of a male-dominated campus. Hallmarks of the past such as concerts, dinners and parties that required students to bring dates catered to male students who continued to invite women from other colleges, Osgood said.
"The focus was on men having dates, and they weren't going to date Dartmouth women," Osgood said. "Most Dartmouth women were pretty much left out that's the way we felt."
Both male and female undergraduates tended to invite dates from other schools, Howard Hodel '75 said.
"If you didn't have a date, you just drank," Thomas Hynes '75 said. "If you did have a date, it was great."
Several local newspapers reported that Dartmouth women could not properly enjoy Winter Carnival because male students treated them with little respect, often mocking female classmates with the taunt "co-heads, co-hogs, go home."
"They hadn't really figured out how to incorporate undergraduate women into the activities," Osgood said.
Although she felt isolated and "on the outside" during her first Winter Carnival, Osgood said that circumstances quickly changed, and she remembered later Winter Carnivals "with fondness."
As more women enrolled at Dartmouth, male students' attitude toward them changed, Hynes said.
"With women on campus it became a much more normal experience, rather than having these women bussed in for the weekend and then leave," he said. "We started to treat women as peers, as friends."
Hynes, who was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity, said that the fraternity members were "very welcoming to women throughout."
During Winter Carnival, members invited female friends to help build the organization's snow sculpture, he said.
"The men we were friends with became less concerned with having a date for Carnival," Osgood said. "The attitude just changed to be more accepting."
Hynes is a former member of The Dartmouth Senior Staff.
