“We have concluded that Bowdoin should abandon its long tradition as an all-male college. We believe that some form of coeducation is one of the most pressing needs of the College and the step best calculated to give new vitality to the entire Bowdoin community.”
The Pierce Report, May 1969.
Bowdoin became fully coeducational in 1971. Introducing women into the community was not without its complications. With the arrival of women on campus came feminism. And many feminists took exception to the basic character of the college, including its vocabulary. For instance, they deemed the word “freshmen” too exclusive and saw it as part of the college’s biased and patriarchal past. Our eighth Preliminary for the Bowdoin Project, “Gender Deconstructed,” traces the campaign in the 1990s to strike from the record any lingual trace of Bowdoin’s all-male history. Bowdoin’s lexical reconfiguration included rewriting its alma mater, its college catalog, and President William DeWitt Hyde’s “Offer of the College.” But Bowdoin did not stop there. It also closed its fraternities and began a campaign to remodel its athletic program.
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Since September 2011, NAS has been conducting an in-depth, ethnographic study of Bowdoin College in Maine. We asked, “what does Bowdoin teach?” and examined Bowdoin’s formal curriculum, its residential and student life policies, and its co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. We have dedicated a page on our website to the Bowdoin Project. The full report will be published there in April. In the meantime, we will continue posting a series of Preliminaries which will provide context for the report.
