In 1963-64, I spent one unhappy year at “Pembroke in Brown” as it was known then.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the antidiluvian administration was fighting – a fight they eventually lost – to preserve a way of life and a way of thinking about women in academia that had long gone by the board.
This morning, I found a good description and example in of all places, the Brown Alumni Magazine, which describes the “antiquated rules” that the late Dean Rosemary Pierrel Sorrentino and her Assistant Dean, the detestable Gretchen Tonks, insisted upon enforcing.
Interestingly enough, Dean Pierrel demanded the same freedom for herself that she wanted to deny to her students. She never understood that freedom of thought is the same creature, whether academic or social.
Evidently Pierrel married well: upon her death in 2004, her husband left a bequest to the University in her honor. Some thirty years earlier, in 1971, the College she headed dissolved, marking the end of “Penny Pembroker” and the beginning of the “Brown woman”. If I had an unforgiving spirit, I’d be tempted to write “good riddance” as a coda to both of those events.