Item Information
Title
Mary deB. Graves, Yackety Yack yearbook, 1906
Description
Student Mary deB. Graves, writes about her experience as a female student in the Yackety Yack yearbook, 1906. Performed by Gwendolyn Schwinke
Creator
PlayMaker’s Repertory Company in collaboration with the University Archives at Louis Round Wilson Library
Date
2021
Language
English
Identifier
https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/items/show/7500
Transcription
Mary deB. Graves, writing in the Yackety Yack yearbook, 1906
When I was at a boarding school a man took dinner with a teacher one evening. As he walked through the long dining room between rows of staring girls not a sound could be heard but the creaking of the unhappy man’s shoes. Just as he arrived at the teacher’s table somebody in the far end of the room inquired in a stage whisper, “What’s its name?” This may sound funny to one who has never been the “it;” but a few weeks of lonely co-edism among six or seven hundred of the opposite sex will cure anybody of such an exaggerated sense of humor. You then learn what it is to feel like the sword-swallower or the ossified man in a dime museum.
The first time I went to class was the worst ordeal I had to undergo in running the gauntlet of critical eyes. There seemed to be about a hundred and fifty people in the room, and they all faced the door. There was just one empty row of seats in front of me, and I made for that, looking neither to the right nor to the left. One of the most remarkable things about being a co-ed is the amount of room you take up. You start towards an empty seat on the end of a bench and by the time you get there the whole row is vacant.
Walking through long halls is pretty scary, but marching up walks toward steps filled with loungers is the most nerve-wracking of all our experiences. You always have a creepy feeling that your hat is on crooked or that your hair is coming down. However, all this sensitiveness wears off by degrees.
So far the co-ed has had no part in college life. She has been an outsider. But as the saying goes “it may all be different in a hundred years from now.” Perhaps when the questions of woman’s rights has been settled and Miss Somebody is President of the United States there will be a change in things. Then maybe the campus will be filled with petticoats and these will be “the students.” Then the “co-ed” will be the lonely individual who occasionally wends his way towards the Alumni Building. Then the girls will hang over the radiators and watch him go by. And some one will say: “Will you please look at that tie! It would stop a train.” And the “co-ed” will grab his tie nervously and slip into some friendly door. Then the professor will say, “now young ladies,” when she speaks to the class, and she will skip the co-ed's name in the roll because it will be so apparent that he is there, for he will be sitting on the front bench with his eyes glued to the professor. But toward the end of the year he may grow more bold and will look around occasionally; then old time people will say: “I never did approve of co-education. It has such a tendency to make our sons forward.”
When I was at a boarding school a man took dinner with a teacher one evening. As he walked through the long dining room between rows of staring girls not a sound could be heard but the creaking of the unhappy man’s shoes. Just as he arrived at the teacher’s table somebody in the far end of the room inquired in a stage whisper, “What’s its name?” This may sound funny to one who has never been the “it;” but a few weeks of lonely co-edism among six or seven hundred of the opposite sex will cure anybody of such an exaggerated sense of humor. You then learn what it is to feel like the sword-swallower or the ossified man in a dime museum.
The first time I went to class was the worst ordeal I had to undergo in running the gauntlet of critical eyes. There seemed to be about a hundred and fifty people in the room, and they all faced the door. There was just one empty row of seats in front of me, and I made for that, looking neither to the right nor to the left. One of the most remarkable things about being a co-ed is the amount of room you take up. You start towards an empty seat on the end of a bench and by the time you get there the whole row is vacant.
Walking through long halls is pretty scary, but marching up walks toward steps filled with loungers is the most nerve-wracking of all our experiences. You always have a creepy feeling that your hat is on crooked or that your hair is coming down. However, all this sensitiveness wears off by degrees.
So far the co-ed has had no part in college life. She has been an outsider. But as the saying goes “it may all be different in a hundred years from now.” Perhaps when the questions of woman’s rights has been settled and Miss Somebody is President of the United States there will be a change in things. Then maybe the campus will be filled with petticoats and these will be “the students.” Then the “co-ed” will be the lonely individual who occasionally wends his way towards the Alumni Building. Then the girls will hang over the radiators and watch him go by. And some one will say: “Will you please look at that tie! It would stop a train.” And the “co-ed” will grab his tie nervously and slip into some friendly door. Then the professor will say, “now young ladies,” when she speaks to the class, and she will skip the co-ed's name in the roll because it will be so apparent that he is there, for he will be sitting on the front bench with his eyes glued to the professor. But toward the end of the year he may grow more bold and will look around occasionally; then old time people will say: “I never did approve of co-education. It has such a tendency to make our sons forward.”