The Women of Tau Iota Tau

We were the members of Tau Iota Tau, one of Dartmouth’s least-official groups. Rather startlingly for a bunch of basically good girls raised in the cities and suburbs of 1960s and 1970s America, we made up a sorority in 1975 before any “real” sororities  hit the campus — and we called it called Tau Iota Tau.

TIT.

Our motto was “They May Be Small, but There Are Those Who Love Them.” You can imagine all the other jokes springing from this one-beat routine. We were uplifting. Etc….

But the official Tau Iota Tau photograph is more compelling than I remembered it. One of my friends is wearing the varsity sweater she earned on the track team, but her waist-length dark and wavy hair betrays a less-than-Olympic attitude; one is wearing a feather boa, rhinestone earrings, and a gaudy t-shirt; another is holding a stuffed bison (that she claimed had been given to her in 1976, on the bisontennial); others could be mistaken for characters from Cabaret, Annie Get Your Gun, and Threepenny Opera, respectively. 

As for me, I look like one of Dracula’s wives, showing a vast expanse of bare throat rising up from a lacy, Gunny Sax dress I’d worn to my senior prom. I’m holding a bottle of champagne (which was more than just a prop), and I’m laughing. 

We don’t look like Dartmouth students: Even the one wearing the varsity sweater looks like she stole it at gunpoint.
   
We were, as John Kemeny, the president during our tenure would have said, “Vomen of Dartmouth,” but we didn’t look like it; we didn’t feel like it. Part of the reason for feeling as if Dartmouth wasn’t completely available to me — or to many women I knew — was the reflex response “Honey-if-you-don’t-like-it-here-why-the-hell-don’t-you-just-leave?” if we dared to question business as usual. Why bother to imagine change if change seemed so unwelcome that the mere mention of it sent tribes of loyalists into seizures of frenzied “wah-who-wahs,” chanting against the possibility of progress and potential?

The funniest thing happened, however, when we wrote a letter to the Dartmouth newspaper announcing our “sorority” when we heard that an official sorority was about to be launched. Whether or not it was true, we heard that you had to submit your parents’ income tax form in order to be considered for that real band of sisters; it probably wasn’t the case — I think there existed even back then prohibiting such initiation rituals, along with the slaying of goats — but it was probably pretty close. So our motley crew thought, what the hell, let’s tell the world about our little gang. We signed our names and sent it in. A friend was the editor.

The paper printed it.

The response was immediate. And stranger than anything we could have imagined.

The young ladies who were starting the real sorority wrote a note to the paper — with a pink Flair, yet — saying in essence “If these girls are so against our enterprise, why didn’t they use their real names?”

We had. It was us, no disguise, no camoflauge. Our names were Barreca, Lager, Cohen, Rosenthal — with a handful of other names obviously unexpected for a Dartmouth by-line.

But the pink-Flair ladies thought we made ourselves up.
    
I was challenged time after time by guys in my classes, sometimes close friends, sometimes not, about why a woman wanted to attend a “man’s college.” “If I’m here, then it’s not a man’s college anymore,” I’d answer.

When my female contermporaries, however, thought I was ficticious, I figured I genuinely had it made: I could do absolutely anything I wanted because they didn’t even think I was real.

It was almost too good to be true. And it gave me permission, oddly enough, to be myself.

adapted from Babes in Boyland