Book celebrates centennial of Mary Washington

BY KARIN KAPSIDELIS
Media General News Service
Published: January 7, 2009

FREDERICKSBURG — When William B. Crawley began teaching there in 1970, Mary Washington College was a school in transition.

It had been only two years since Mary Washington students had won the right to wear slacks to class and given up the May Day spectacle that had charmed townspeople of another era.

And there were “coeds” on campus that fall semester — 22 male students admitted under a new policy forced on the University of Virginia board of visitors by a lawsuit.

From that vantage point in the school’s evolution, Crawley saw firsthand many of the pivotal changes that he documents in “University of Mary Washington — A Centennial History, 1908-2008.“

But his work is not just a 909-page history of a college. It’s also a lesson in the current events of the larger world that buffeted the campus, from civil defense offered by the MWC Cavalry after Pearl Harbor to the civil rights the first black students sought in the mid-1960s.

Two years after Crawley arrived in Fredericksburg, the tie to U.Va. also was gone. No longer the woman’s branch of U.Va., Mary Washington received its independence just as the women’s movement flourished around it.

Many women were proud of diplomas that declared them graduates of Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, Crawley notes. But although that U.Va. designation may have burnished their diplomas, it also had kept women off the Charlottesville campus.

When he began teaching history at Mary Washington in the fall of 1970, Crawley was 25 and occasionally mistaken for one of the new co-eds on campus. He has remained ever since, marrying an alumna and becoming the school’s official historian in 1988.

That year he did the first of the interviews he would conduct as he researched the school’s history for a centennial book.

“I felt like it was my duty, and I wanted to do it,“ he said of his decision to write the book.

He studied official records and newspaper accounts, including those written by students in the campus paper, the Bullet (a name briefly controversial during the antiwar era of the 1970s). He also relied on a history written by a former dean, Edward Alvey.

“It’s not an exposé. I didn’t try to turn over every rock to see what’s under it,“ he said of his work.

Some parts of the book were “not pleasant to write about, but it happened. It’s history.“

The book, published in October, covers the arrest of Mary Washington’s president in 2007 on a charge of driving under the influence. The subsequent ouster of that leader, William Frawley, led to the hiring this year of the university’s first female president, Judy Gayle Hample.

But far more painful are the stories students tell of the fear they felt when the hall phone rang late at night in their dorm. With Quantico just 20 miles away, many dated Marines, and during the Vietnam War era, those phone calls often brought sad news.

A member of the Class of 1968 told Crawley that her lasting memory of college “was not the frivolity of May Days . . . but the piercing scream that echoed through the dorm when her suitemate, called to the hall phone, learned that her Marine fiancé had been killed in the 1968 Tet Offensive.“

The college had shed the May Day court and much of its finishing-school manners by the turbulent weeks of May 1970, when about 80 students marched up U.S. 1 to Washington to join a massive anti-war protest after the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio.

“May days of a very different kind, indeed, were they,“ Crawley writes.

Mary Washington went through several incarnations after it was founded in 1908 by the General Assembly as the Fredericksburg State Normal and Industrial School for Women, with the first students arriving in 1911. It became State Teachers College in 1924 but by the 1930s had grown beyond that mission.

As liberal-arts classes were added, a successful campaign in 1938 allowed the state’s teachers colleges to change their names.

Mary Washington College was named in honor of George Washington’s mother. While “her name conveyed an unmistakable feminine image” that drew a joyous reaction at the time, Crawley writes, it would later become a source of contention.

The administrative merger with U.Va. in 1944 was also welcomed enthusiastically on campus, he notes. On both campuses there was opposition to coeducation over the years, but most adamantly in Charlottesville, where the Cavalier Daily described as a “horror” the prospect of “a large-scale female invasion other than for the purpose of a party weekend.“

It took a lawsuit in 1969 to end U.Va.‘s males-only policy. That in turn led to coeducation at Mary Washington, although men in fact had attended school there before as day students, particularly under the GI Bill after World War II.

The controversy over the feminine name continued, with heated debate between those who viewed it as an impediment to attracting males and others who saw sexism in the move to change it.

Some wanted a name that referenced the James Monroe Center, the new graduate and professional studies campus in Stafford County. In 2004, the school would become the University of Mary Washington.

Crawley, who takes his account through commencement 2008, said in an interview that Mary Washington is still expanding its horizons. He sees evidence of that in the new Eagle Village, a planned retail/residential project that will take the landlocked campus across U.S. 1.

Still, Crawley is reluctant to speculate on Mary Washington’s next chapter.

“I’m glad to be a historian, not a clairvoyant,“ he said.

Karin Kapsidelis is a staff writer at Media General’sRichmond Times-Dispatch.