Endeavoring to Do Better

1960s Carleton Spotlight

The Evans Revolt

A declaration of independence from a fed-up women’s dorm

In the 1960s Carleton’s campus was split in two–men on the West Side, in Davis, Burton, Sevy, and Musser, and women on the East, in Gridley, Nourse, Myers, and Evans. While each side was governed by its respective dean, league of elected representatives, and student floor monitors, the rules for men and women were strikingly different. Like most colleges at the time, Carleton followed the common law doctrine of in loco parentis, where it assumed the role of parents, giving students protection and guidance. But while the men could come and go as they pleased, the women were bound by and required to enforce an extensive set of rules, which were designed mainly to prevent premarital sex. Unlike the men, women had to sign out of their dorms and return according to strict curfew “hours.” Unpaid floor counselors and elected Women’s League representatives were responsible for supervising hours and doling out punishments for being late. A handful of tardies or a single instance of 30 minutes late got a violator sent to court with the likely punishment of evening confinement to her room without calls or visitors for a week. Floor monitors on both sides of campus were supposed to enforce rules during specified “open house” visits–lights on, doors half open, no drinking–but men were paid, women were not. As the decade progressed, students began insisting that they deserved a say in the rules they were expected to live by. The women especially resented being forced to police their peers without payment. The administration disagreed and regularly disregarded organized protests and petitions.In February 1967, the Women’s League voted to become a body “solely representative of the interests of women students with no direct responsibility to the college administration.” But when the administration threatened to cancel open houses, the WL backed off, postponing the implementation of their new policy till the start of the next school year. The presidents of Gridley, Nourse, Myers, and Evans quit the WL in protest, and Myers and Evans refused to replace them with candidates who’d go with the program. The women of Evans went even further: a majority of its residents voted to secede from the league and, in effect, from the college’s system of governance. Evans formed its own government, electing two representatives from each section. They burned their sign-out cards, propped open a door past curfew, and hung a banner from a window declaring their independence. The following weekend they held an open house that ignored all the rules designed to prevent intimacy. The men’s and women’s deans wanted the renegades brought to campus court, but the tide was turning. The CSA passed a resolution in support of the “Evans movement,” and the open house committee pointed out that without officers in Evans, there was no one to refer the case. When the dean of women threatened to take matters into her own hands, students argued in opinion pieces and letters to the editor that if the authority of the student-run court wasn’t honored, the system would be revealed as a sham. After ten days, under pressure to be part of a unified front in negotiations with administrators, Evans rejoined the Women’s League. But their brief stint of self-government galvanized students, who continued to lobby for change. That spring their dean decided to replace floor counselors with paid RAs, and in the fall the administration adopted liberalized women’s hours, drinking rules, and open house procedures. In November 1968, students were finally added to the faculty-administration committee on social policy, with equal representation and voting power, and in January 1969, the trustees approved all-day open houses and abolished rules on doors, lights, and alcohol. Students had been fighting for community government for a decade and they finally got their votes.