Documents – Page 3 – Forty Years: The History of Women at Bowdoin

This page is from the 1990 booklet that introduced the student body to the Greek Societies (Document SS, 53). The Alpha Beta Phi sorority was the only single-sex female Greek Society that Bowdoin has had. It was founded in 1983 after nineteen women decided to leave a coeducational fraternity. They left because they felt that women received unequal treatment from the men. They wrote in their mission statement that they existed specifically to provide a supportive and nurturing environment. The group, including those who had been involved in fraternities, felt that they needed a space where women, not men, dominated the discourse, and where women could assume leadership roles. They promise these things in their mission statement. In this way the women of ABP sought to bring about some social change at Bowdoin in a way that would empower women. Through experience they believed that this could not occur for women through the fraternity system as it existed on campus.

SS53 - Alpha Beta Phi Sorority Page from 1990

This memorandum (Document SS, 54), sent out on April 21, 1992, to members of the campus community, informed the community that the Governing Boards and the Student Affairs Committee decided to eliminate single-sex fraternities on campus. The memorandum emphasizes that then president Robert H. Edwards, along with John Magee, then Chairman of the Executive Committee, agree with and support the Governing Board and Student Affairs Committee’s position.

The Student Affairs Committee believed single sex social institutions harmed the college. One concern was that parents might not want to send their children to a school that supported organizations that discriminate based on gender. Despite the important social role that greek letter societies had played on campus, the Committee felt that, because the discriminatory societies dominated the social scene, they limited the students’ freedom to make social choices.

The resolution voted upon by the Student Affairs Committee recommended that organizations that discriminated on the basis of gender should be prohibited. It is important to note that this document was issued in 1992, twenty years after the implementation of coeducation at Bowdoin. In another five years, in 1997, the college would eliminate fraternities altogether.