Female alums recall old days of IU

It was the 1940s and 1950s -- a time of manners and moral standards, when female students were told how to dress and act. Meals in dining halls were formal affairs, and no man was allowed on a woman's dorm floor. \nThe Association for Women Students wrote a yearly handbook of mandatory moral and social standards. A Dean of Women existed until 1946 to regulate young women's social, academic and moral behavior.\nWorld War II also demanded considerable discipline. As the military urged students to finish college, University officials wanted women to maintain feminine personas fitting for future wives or career women. \nAfter the war, this discipline remained as IU returned to a normalcy that could seem foreign to students of the 21st century. March is Women's History Month, a time commemorating women who sat in some of the same classrooms and experienced similar wartime tension students identify with today.\nThe future nurse\nIn 1943, Peggy Petranoff came to IU from Indianapolis to earn a nursing degree. Few career options other than nursing and teaching were available to women in the 1940s, she said. \nShe enrolled during World War II, when students in the Armed Forces packed the campus. The Army Specialized Training Program was in full swing. Petranoff estimated 10,000 ASTP men and 10,000 participants of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services trained on the campus her freshmen year. \nPetranoff didn't move into a dorm or apartment. Because of the war, she temporarily lived at Sigma Alpha Epsilon with other nursing majors. Rules were strict. Students had to return to the house by 7 p.m. \nAfter attending nursing school in Indianapolis for three years, Petranoff graduated in 1947. \n"We were pretty busy," said Petranoff, 76, who lives in Bloomington. "We had no time for extracurricular activities. It was all study."\nA journalist in the making\nWhen Marjorie Smith Blewett, a former IDS staffer, arrived in 1944 to study journalism, men who had trained on the IU lawns were serving in the war. With many men gone, Blewett and other women enjoyed being the majority on campus. \nBefore the war, men outnumbered women at IU three-to-one, according to enrollment records. But during Blewett's freshman year, women outnumbered men two-to-one. Blewett said this disparity between the genders was a good experience -- except when a girl needed a date. \n"I used to get tickled when you went to the library, and you saw these sorority girls from the fancy houses, making a play for these GIs," said Blewett, 76, a Bloomington resident. "And these were boys they would never have paid attention to, except they needed dates for their dances."\nBlewett lived in Memorial Hall, which was the first dormitory to open to female students in 1925, according to Dean of Women's Office records. Blewett slept on an Army-issued bunk. \nShe and her friends rarely partied, but occasionally used their student IDs to slip into Kilroy's Bar and Grill even though they were underage. Blewett said she didn't like to drink alcohol, but breaking rules was a thrill for her. \nLiving under the rules\nUniversities practiced a rules system called "In Loco Parentis." The policy ensured that University officials could enforce any rule that promoted student's moral welfare, just as a parent could implement rules on a child. \nNightly curfews applied to all women. They had to be in their dorms or houses by 10:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and by 12:30 a.m. on weekends, according to a list of Social Standards and House Regulations distributed to dorm residents. When female students moved into rooming houses, landladies could inform the University if they disobeyed curfew. \nFemale students were also told how to dress. According to the 1947 Chimes booklet, which listed suggestions for incoming freshmen, women were encouraged to bring sweaters, skirts, ankle socks and loafers. They weren't allowed to wear slacks or shorts to the dining halls. The manual also said jeans were reserved for lounging on Saturdays, at hayrides or at picnics.\nThe sorority girl\nThese rules were still in practice when Jean Robinson Peters enrolled in 1949. The war was over, and men once again made up the majority of students. Peters had been a Bloomington resident since birth. Because her dad was chairman of the anatomy and physiology department, and her mother was acting associate director of admissions, Peters was urged to attend IU.\nPeters, a French major, rushed Pi Beta Phi her sophomore year. She said sorority life was much different from what it is now. The 75 women living in the house were expected to dress up for nightly sit-down dinners. \nPeters said alcohol rarely was a problem in the house. She recalled one or two occasions when her house had to remove a girl's pin for coming home drunk. She also remembered curfews forced women and their dates home by 12:30 a.m. during weekends.\nPeters, 71, a Bloomington resident, said she fell in love with two things during college -- IU and her husband. She graduated a year early to marry him. Her two children graduated from IU, and a granddaughter is enrolled here.\n"Both of my sons said there's no other school than IU," she said. "It runs in my family, that love for IU"