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In the winter of 1976 I was a freshman, new to rowing and politics, when our captain, Chris Ernst, issued instructions to the Yale women’s crew. Invoking the newly passed federal legislation, Title IX, we would protest Yale’s inequitable facilities for the women’s rowing program by staging a strip-in.
Certain details remain vivid: the locker room scene of our marking each other’s backs with “Title IX” in Yale blue magic marker; the unison of our steps as we walked up to the office of the head of women’s athletics, Joni Barnett; Barnett, who asked us, “Do you want this guy in here?” (the Yale Daily News reporter); Chris waving off her question and reading the strident statement she’d composed; our disrobing, as one, shedding our Yale blue team issue sweatpants and sweatshirts emblazoned with the Yale Women’s Crew logo; then turning our backs to Ms. Barnett to expose the writing we’d penned across each other’s muscles, and waiting silently while the import of the moment sank in; returning triumphantly to the locker room, yet never dreaming that we were making history.
Over the next few days, parents and friends sent clippings from papers across the country and the world. The story had gone out over the Associated Press wire, had landed on the first page of the second section of The New York Times, and been picked up by the International Herald Tribune. Although our coach, Nat Case, expressed disappointment at our behavior, we remained satisfied with our world class performance. And Yale quickly built an addition to the Bob Cook Boathouse.
That addition, plus the rest of Yale’s Derby boathouse, is being demolished in 1999 to make room for the construction of the Gilder Boathouse, the new facility with the name of one of those Title IX protesters on a facility for a sport that once was jealously guarded by its male legions.
More than the Title IX protest, I remember the outrage we experienced countless times during my freshman year, hearing the slurs and seeing the graffiti on our temporary trailer locker room exterior calling us “sweathogs.” Yet those early experiences as a rower served as toughening agents as I raised my sights to higher and higher levels of competition.
When I made the leap from collegiate athlete to Olympic rower in 1980, I left my Yale crew experiences behind. I spent another five years competing as a national team athlete, carrying a stronger affiliation to the U.S. Rowing Association than the Yale Women’s Crew. Then, I left the sport behind completely when my first daughter was stillborn in 1986, and the tug to go out on the water lost its pull.
Life doubles back. Ten years later, my buddy from Yale, Margaret Mathews, started urging me to get involved with the boathouse project. My response was: “No thanks.” I had enjoyed rowing at Yale, but that was eons ago, and I had moved down life’s stream.
But, Margaret, knowing my family’s resources, remembering the central role our on-the-water activities had occupied in my Yale life, and well trained in persistence, dogged me with e-mails, insisting on knowing the logic behind my “no.” She then methodically dismantled every component of my argument.
During the Yale/Princeton football game weekend in November of 1996, Margaret and I met with Rick Levin, Yale’s president, who informed us that our $4 million gift to a $10 million project would not be sufficient for the university to agree to proceed, as additional alumni support would not be enough to fill the gap. Only $1.2 million had been raised for a new boathouse, over two years.
Stunned, Margaret and I decided to raise the remaining funds. We assembled fundraising partners, other rowing alumni from the 1950s through the 1990s, drafted a case statement, and set to work. Our goal was to encourage participation, regardless of gift size. The university’s development office supported our efforts by printing and distributing the case statement. By late February 1997 we had raised an additional $1 million. From then on, the pledges and cash continued to arrive.
During the summer of 1997, Levin reconsidered his position. When we reached $8 million, the university would commit to the project, and by the end of 1997 it was a done deal and the design competition to select the architect was launched. A year and a half later, construction is due to begin.
In retrospect, as it had 20 years earlier, it took some feisty women rowers to transform the boathouse dream to bricks and mortar. That’s what we learned from rowing: how to make the impossible happen.
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