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The SixtiesNovember 02, 2009 Here's another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem: A Writer's Education. I'm not wild about the title. I fiddled with "The Depths of Time," "Time Has Depth," "History Has Depth," and various variations but they all sounded way too portentous, pretentious, and abstract, none of which I'm trying to do here. There's a time to settle on titles, and that time is not now. This theme will come up again before I'm done, I promise. Arrive in a new place and its history is a shallow pool. You know what got there before you did and what got there afterward, and whatever happened after you came on the scene has considerably more depth and texture than what happened before. After a while, if you pay attention, you begin to perceive depth in the pool, glints of surprising color, movements so fleeting you wonder if your senses are playing sleight-of-hand. The person you took for an old-timer turns out to have arrived a scant two years before you did. When a friend says that so-and-so lives at the turkey farm and you know for a fact that so-and-so lives at Hillside Village, an elder housing project, you leap to the conclusion that your friend is dissing old people. Turns out Hillside Village was built on the site of an old turkey farm. Is that where the feral turkeys roaming through Vineyard Haven neighborhoods came from? Sometimes, though, you arrive in a new place assuming that although the place is new to you, it hasn't changed all that much since the year before or the year before that. I arrived at Georgetown University in September 1969, a freshman Arabic major in the School of Languages and Linguistics. Within weeks I was immersed in the movement against the Vietnam War. On October 15, I marched in my first antiwar demonstration, which I'd done my bit to help organize. On November 15, as a marshal (peacekeeper) stationed on Pennsylvania Avenue between Sixth and Seventh streets, I watched in awe as hundreds upon thousands of singing, chanting, dancing people came pouring down the road. The Moratorium and the great Mobe march were historic, precedent-shattering events: of course they didn't happen every year. But I had arrived at Georgetown as a great wave was beginning to crest and it was several months before I realized how much had changed since the very recent past. In September 1969 Georgetown's liberal arts college admitted women for the first time. There were already a few female undergraduates in the School of Foreign Service and the School of Business Administration; the language school student body was at least 50 percent female, and in the nursing school the figure was (big surprise) 100 percent. Many professors were Jesuits, and most of the rest were men. A year or two before, women students and faculty members had been required to wear skirts or dresses. Sitting on the lawn thus clad was deemed immodest, so sitting on the lawn was not allowed for people of the female persuasion. By the time I arrived, women could wear pants and anyone could sit anywhere, and my jaw dropped when my junior and senior friends told me that when they were freshmen it had been different. No battle had been won, however, though the front had certainly moved forward. Co-ed dorms were unthinkable. No one monitored the comings and goings in the men's dorms, but women had curfews and men were only allowed above the ground floor of the women's dorms at semiannual open houses. When the dean of my school proclaimed that the school's perceived lack of prestige was due to its majority-female student body and argued that the way to redress this was to recruit and enroll more men, only a few wild-eyed radicals (including me, getting wilder and more radical by the minute) found this outrageous. Point out that no one was trying very hard to address the lop-sided male majority in the foreign service school or the business school, and the usual reaction was "That's different," uttered with an exasperation that made clear the speaker thought you were either dense or being difficult. My freshman year a small band of intrepid students, male and female, integrated the "Animal Section," the all-male cheering section on the center line at Georgetown basketball games. Georgetown prided itself on not having fraternities, but the worst frat behavior flourished in the Animal Section, whose denizens prized their right to excoriate opponents and comment obnoxiously on the appearance of any female who caught their attention. Those who integrated the section didn't tell the Animals to stop doing what they so loved doing. It was the mere presence of the interlopers that inspired the Animals' rage. I had often seen on TV the hate-distorted faces of southern white people as black children entered their schools and black adults took seats at their lunch counters. More recently, and from only a few yards away, I had witnessed the fury of counter-demonstrators at antiwar marches. This was my first close encounter with a real mob, and its component parts were, like me, white Georgetown undergrads. Within two years, Georgetown had co-ed dorms, "intervisitation" was the rule, and the Animal Section was gone, unlamented by any but a few diehards. Now, forty years later, younger people are surprised when I tell them that when I started college in September 1969, at the very tail end of the 1960s, dorms were sex-segregated, women had curfews, and a couple of years before women couldn't wear pants or sit on the lawn. They've heard all about the Sixties, they know what the Sixties were about, and what I'm describing sounds more like the Dark Ages. I tell them that the year before I got there, the biggest protest had been a grand food fight in one of the cafeterias -- something one might associate with the Fifties, or fraternities, or maybe fifth grade, except that by the time I arrived the university did have a new food service. Times are as diverse as places, as deep and heterogeneous, textured and contradictory. Only from several steps removed would anyone hazard a generalization about a place or a time without hedging it round with caveats. A lot of the Sixties happened in the Seventies. They're happening now. So are the Dark Ages. Pass it on.
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