Breaking up the old boys’ clubs, 30 years later

It was the summer of 1978. Frank, a rising junior at Princeton, was interning with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey.

Frank’s sophomore year had been memorable: She had bickered Ivy Club, Cottage Club and Tiger Inn, the last three all-male eating clubs on Prospect Avenue. She was denied membership to all three.

That summer, her colleagues in the ACLU office encouraged her to sue on the basis of sexual discrimination.

“I was talking about how awful I thought the all-male clubs were to the executive director [of the ACLU],” Frank said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Monday night. “He comment[ed], ‘Why don’t you sue?’ and I said, ‘They are private clubs.’ And he said, ‘No, they are public accommodations.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ ”

There wasn’t much else to it at the time, Frank admitted.

“That was the level of thought and careful legal analysis that went into the decision to bring the case,” Frank said sarcastically. “A lot of thought went into why I objected … but in terms of legal thought, that was it.”

Frank had no way of knowing that the ensuing lawsuit would touch off a 12-year legal battle that would travel all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But on Feb. 21, 1979, 30 years ago last month, Frank filed a sex discrimination complaint with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights against Ivy, Cottage and TI.

Cottage settled with Frank in 1986 and became coed that year. Ivy began to accept women in 1990 after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Frank’s favor. TI, however, refused to admit women and twice asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but was denied both times. The Federal Circuit Court upheld the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling, and women first entered TI’s doors as members in 1991.

Responses on campus to the lawsuit were not positive, Frank said. Faculty members were skeptical of the legality of her case, male students who were members of eating clubs were unlikely to offer assistance, and students who were involved in advocacy on campus were uninterested in the inequality on Prospect Avenue, she explained.

“I was a campus activist, and that was my main circle, but that circle of folks couldn’t really relate to why I was doing this,” Frank said. “They were very supportive of my right not to be harassed, and when I was harassed, I could turn to them and get moral support. The people who would benefit from it wouldn’t dream of challenging it. So I was fairly isolated on campus.”

Frank said that she preferred taking legal action instead of organizing advocacy campaigns on campus because she was committed to other serious issues on campus, including encouraging the University to divest from apartheid-era South Africa, increase the number of tenured women professors, fix locks to bathroom doors in dormitory basements and create a women’s studies program.

After graduating from Princeton, Frank attended law school at New York University through a public interest scholarship. She clerked for a civil court justice in Manhattan and completed a fellowship at Antioch Law School, now the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. Frank is now a tenured professor at Drake University Law School.

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Before the lawsuit

In 1968, the women in the University’s critical languages program, which brought dozens of women to Princeton for a year of study in the era before coeducation, were offered membership at Stevenson Hall and Campus Club, two eating clubs no longer in existence.

Despite the clubs’ integration efforts, many women reacted negatively to the Street. One critical languages student interviewed in the ‘Prince’ in 1968 expressed her fear of becoming “just one of the guys instead of a prospective date.”

By the time Princeton’s first coeducational class was eligible to bicker in 1971, women avoided Bicker for other reasons.

“I think there were at lot of us who were not interested in Bicker and the eating clubs, and, of course, there were some eating clubs that didn’t accept women,” Alison Amonette ’73 told the ‘Prince’ in 2004. “We were also in the midst of a time — in the late ’60s and early ’70s — that was anti-establishment, and what could be more establishment than an eating club at Princeton? Few of my male friends went through Bicker either.”

In a piece in the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1972, Robert Earle ’72 investigated why Ivy, Cottage and TI resisted admitting women.

In the article, Dave Roberts ’72, then president of Cottage, said that members wanted a relaxed environment. He was quoted as saying that some members “feel more comfortable if they obey the laws of chivalry and stand when a lady enters the room.”

Earle concluded, “[O]bviously women as a permanent fixture would not be conducive to relaxation for this sort of person.”

The progress of the suit

In february 1979, Frank filed a complaint against the three clubs that had yet to admit women after being denied admission herself during Bicker the previous year.

The suit was still under litigation when Pamela Poff, director of the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights, announced in May 1987 that Ivy and TI had to admit women during the next year’s Bicker.

Poff also ordered the clubs to report to her office twice during the next two years to demonstrate their compliance with the ruling. The clubs’ reports had to include the number of women who bickered and were rejected by each club.

Poff’s order to integrate the clubs was based on the reasoning that because Ivy and TI had retained their ties with the University, they were subject to state laws that prohibit sexual discrimination in public accommodations.

“[Ivy and TI] have clearly been supported by Princeton University, encouraged by Princeton University, in effect have assisted Princeton University” by providing meals for their members, Poff told the ‘Prince’ in 1987.

At the time, Poff said the clubs could alter the nature of the case by severing their remaining ties with the University, at which point the clubs would not be considered public accommodations.

But meal exchanges between Ivy and TI and other coed clubs “link [Ivy and TI] to the club system at Princeton University [and] are … significant,” Poff said.

The Street today

More than 30 years since Frank’s efforts to bring radical change to the Street, the face of Prospect Avenue has changed, as have its problems.

“Obviously I can only speak from intimate experience from my club,” former TI social chair Parker Henritze ’09 said, “but I think it’s a huge testament in general to equality at TI that no one batted an eye that we had two female officers out of six [last year].”

TI has yet to elect a female president, though, and there are currently no women among this year’s eating club presidents.

This is not because of gender bias, Henritze said, adding that officers are “reflective of the club as a whole” and that she didn’t consider the lack of female presidents “worrying.”

“I honestly believe that if a female were the best person for a job, [she] would win,” she said.

For Frank, support of further reforms on Prospect Avenue extends beyond issues of gender equality.

“If I were designing a system from the ground up, and if things did not already exist, I would not create eating clubs,” Frank said.

The Bicker system promotes an unhealthy social discrimination process, she explained.

“When it’s selective, [you are asking] ‘Are you socially appropriate to eat with us?’ It’s one thing to select for a sports team or for a band or a cappella group or for acting, but for where to eat, it doesn’t seem right,” she said.

Frank applauded the University for increasing the amount of financial aid awarded to upperclassmen, aimed at covering a greater percentage of eating club fees. The initiative is not enough, however, to address the economic class system that still affects the clubs as a result of associated costs, she said.

“While the non-selective [clubs] don’t bother me that much, there are still class issues even in non-selective clubs because of the extra costs you don’t have with the residential college,” Frank said. “I think the residential system is a better social system for students.”

Non-selective clubs could be a “positive” addition to University life, Frank explained, if the issue of cost was resolved.