When Northwestern celebrated its centennial in 1951, a woman couldn’t date two men in the same fraternity, most students were engaged or married by the time they graduated, and students actually headed south to party.
What a difference 50 years can make.
At a forum called “Dating at NU through the Decades” on Saturday afternoon, four NU alumni and two current students comprised a panel discussing the campus dating scene throughout NU’s 150-year history.
“NU is an interesting school because of its intense academics, but it is also a social school,” said panelist Alex Rorke, a 1975 NU graduate.
In addition to Rorke, the panelists included Suzie Israel, an Education senior; Keith Carter, a Medill senior; Ginny Landwehr, ’54, who served as dean of students from 1975 to 1992; Monica Metzler, Education ’86, director of the sesquicentennial events; and Assistant to the Vice President for Student Affairs Margo Brown, Medill ’59, who coordinated the event.
About 40 students and alumni attended the forum at the Guild Room in Scott Hall, which Brown called “the perfect location.” During her years at NU, students hung out at a restaurant called The Grill in the basement of the building. “It was the dating headquarters,” Brown said.
NU’s dating history started in 1869, when the first female student attended, Brown said. And through the 1950s, the university regulated the dating process.
“Women could only receive phone calls from men on Friday and Saturday nights,” Brown said of the turn-of-the-century dating scene. “And their parents had to approve of the callers.”
All the women lived together in Willard Hall, so dating became more common as women learned to scale the walls of Willard, Brown said.
“The atmosphere back then was actually very much like the ’50s,” Brown said. “During the 1950s the university acted like a parent.”
The dating scene during the 1950s was much more routinized, said Landwehr, who attended NU during the earlier part of the decade.
“The Greek system predominated society,” Landwehr said.
When a Greek couple got serious, she said, the man pinned the woman, which meant they were “engaged to be engaged.”
Most of her friends were engaged by junior year. “We were looking for a husband when we came to NU,” she said.
When Rorke attended NU in the 1970s, students lived in coed dorms for the first time.
“It made the pageantry of dating disappear,” Rorke said of the coed living environment.
The dating scene also became more informal, allowing students to attend dances as friends or as couples. The drinking age was 18 then, but because Evanston was dry, students frequented bars on Howard Street.
However, when Metzler attended NU a decade later, she was able to get a drink in Norris University Center.
“The Bar,” which served 21-and-older students during the ’80s, was the only bar in Evanston at that time, but “it did not radically change the social life on campus,” Metzler said.
Israel said one of the major challenges to dating today is simply lack of time.
“Between balancing friends, social lives, study lives and personal time, people have no time for each other,” she said.
Musing over the entire discussion, Carter said: “In some situations things have changed, but in many they’ve not changed at all.”
• Read more coverage from the Sesquicentennial Celebration
