Inclusivity at Princeton's Eating Clubs

A Timeline of Coeducation in Princeton’s Eating Clubs

As has been discussed, Princeton’s eating clubs have had a complicated and long journey with inclusion. They act as spaces meant for students at Princeton University, yet are private institutions that are not accountable to the university for the larger part. In many ways, they act as amplifiers and symbols of many of the issues that students navigate, face, and discuss during their time as an undergrad. Thus, it may be no surprise that there is no difference when it comes to the inclusion of women.

Below is a short chronology of key events that frames how women interacted with and were included in eating clubs and, in order to contextualize, the University more widely.

Written on May 5, 2021

While the timeline provides a good overview of the main events that affected women and Princeton social life, it is also necessary to provide context as to why eating clubs are so fundamental to Princeton’s being. When the University administration was considering co-education, one alumnus responded, saying “you want coeducation—you want to kill the eating clubs—you want to turn Princeton into an institution designed to meet the requirements of the average—please feel free to do so—but do not ask me to support it.” Eating clubs are not only an aspect of social life, but they have in the past acted as arbiters of the Princeton undergraduate experience, enacting on women how they could behave and how they were meant to take on space, and serve as an extension and representation of the University climate as a whole.

Is Inclusion Just Membership?

The exclusion of undergraduate women from eating clubs denied them opportunities. And it is important to note that the decisions to allow women to bicker were made exclusively by men already in the eating clubs, meaning the conversations they were having might not have been exclusively relegated to the well-being of women on campus, but instead more centered upon misogynistic grounds. The very construction of an all-male club allows its nature to be different, to be rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic (similar to the exclusion of any marginality).

And so, even after the inclusion of women, there still remains the important issue of how women are accepted in these eating clubs. Membership is an important step in inclusion because it provides access, but inclusion does not end there. Inclusion depends on the attitudes of male members, the atmosphere in the eating clubs, the conversations being had. Many women felt that the eating clubs were still predominantly male spaces – built for men by men and enacted upon by men. Women before coeducation were called “imports” by members of the eating clubs. After coeducation at Princeton, they referred to fellow female undergraduate students as “coeds.” Both construct an idea of the other or something (or someone) outside the expected norm – male. In language alone, male members alienated their female classmates.

In a Daily Princetonian op-ed dated March 6, 1975, Mary Anne Franke ’75 argued that the “presence of all-male eating clubs only serves to perpetuate” sexist attitudes, which she saw rooted in the eating clubs that treat women as “sex objects.” In her article, she specifies that it is not only the clubs that remain all-male but every club because they were founded all-male. This has created a tradition of male domination. A 1994 piece in the Daily Princetonian entitled “Fighting for a place at the ‘Street’” tells the story of Maria Katzenbach ’76, who was a member of Tower. In the mid ‘70s, the men in the club wanted to hire a stripper for a Christmas party, but several women objected. They were told to lighten up or quit and the stripper was hired anyways over their objections. The issue here is not the stripper, but rather the silencing of women members in favor of a continued tradition of a male-centric atmosphere.

Yet even with all of this knowledge about the construction and attitudes of eating clubs, female students felt obligated to join, as Ronnie-Gail Emden ’74 recounts in her oral testimony for the Princetoniana Committee Oral History Project:

• “I was in Tower. Not as – well, as a freshman, yes, because I dated a guy who was – who ultimately joined Tower. And so I ended up spending a fair bit of time at the club because of him, and on weekends and stuff like that. The other thing you have to remember is that the whole social environment at Princeton at that time was completely different. It was the clubs or you were an independent. Your first two years, you ate at commons, and there was no network, if you will. There was no smaller group identity. The colleges didn’t exist in those days. And so at the end – the beginning – middle of your sophomore year, you had to make a decision as to whether or not you were going to stay independent or join – I guess Wilson College and Princeton Inn were both available, but they were sort of living and eating arrangements – or if you were going to join a club.”

Eating clubs had become (and in many ways still are) so central to social life, networking, and creating a sense of identity and belonging on campus that many people feel obligated to follow the system. The eating clubs served as a way of finding a smaller group identity. Inclusion, when necessary, can then serve as a further method of exclusion. From the same oral histories project, Macon Paine Finley ’77 recalls feeling uncomfortable in the bicker process because of the scrutiny placed upon her. And in a November 8, 1979 article, Joel Achenbach writes about the continued allegation in eating clubs of “body bids” on women, in which male members advocate for a female bickeree solely on the basis of her appearance. Thus, women are not made to be real members in a sense that they belong to the clubs for the same reasons that the men do.