by Miriam Kadansky and Alice Silverberg
When we were 15 years old, we spent 8 weeks at the Ohio State University as students in the Ross Program, a summer math camp for high school students from all over the country. The program was very intense. We worked nearly day and night, eking out about 4 hours of sleep each night.
We did have some time for exercise; our info sheet said "the boys will receive locker permits which will allow them to use the tennis courts, gymnasium, baseball fields and the swimming pool. The girls may also use the tennis courts at any time and the pool on designated evenings" (which turned out to mean just Wednesday evenings, the one time the boys were not allowed to cavort naked).
The counselors were crucial to the program's success. They were college kids who worked very closely with the high school students, and lived with us in the dorms.
The dorms were sex-segregated and were locked at night, after which we couldn't get into the boys' dorm and they couldn't get into ours.
The 39 boys had the benefit of 24-hour access to the 15 male counselors, while the 6 female students (4 in high school, and 2 who were OSU undergrads) only had 24-hour access to the 2 female counselors. We decided that wasn't fair; everyone should have equal access to all 17 counselors.
Miriam, the feminist and the most organized among us, encouraged us to protest. So Bindu, Lisa, and the two of us marched as a delegation to the math department and presented our demands.
Dr. Ross's secretary didn't know what to do with us, so she sent us to a young staff member cum grad student. His nickname was "Joe Cool", and he cultivated that image by wearing dark sunglasses indoors. Later, Alice came to think of him as the department bouncer, whom the department would sic on women (usually civil service staff who were hard to fire) to make their lives miserable enough that they'd leave.
We presented our demands to Joe. We wanted everyone to be in the same dorm, so all the students would have equal access to the counselors.
Joe Cool peered at us over his sunglasses, and replied that what we were asking for was "against the laws of the state of Ohio". If the dorm were coed, then it "would be called a House of Ill Repute and you would be labeled prostitutes", he told us.
We left in a state of shock. We had never before been called prostitutes (at least not in our hearing). When we told the older counselors what Joe had said, they informed us that just a year or so earlier, all the students had lived together in a coed dorm. Joe was just trying to get us to stop complaining.