Storyline
How UNC’s rules on women students’ hours and on visits in the residence halls changed from 1965 to 1969: the nurses’ lie-in, women moving into Joyner and Connor and off campus, the march over closing hours, self-limiting hours, and the visitation petition, marches and open-house experiment.
In briefBetween 1965 and 1969 UNC's women students, and the men in the residence halls, pressed against the University's rules on closing hours and visits. Nursing students staged a lie-in in 1965, and in 1967 senior and older women won the right to live off campus. In January 1968 about 500 women marched to the Women's Residence Council over closing hours; Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson at first rejected self-limiting hours, but in November junior and senior women won them with their parents' consent. After a petition with 3,904 names and marches to Lenoir Hall and the chancellor's house, Sitterson allowed experimental open houses in December 1968, though President William Friday kept the open-door rule in 1969. From 1970 self-limiting hours reached all women students, Morrison became a permanent coed hall, and students pressed for each hall to set its own visitation, which the University turned down in 1971. Coed housing spread through 1973, but in 1974 the dean of student affairs ended room-by-room coed living in Winston, and the trustees upheld him.
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On April 4, 1965 about 30 residents of the Nurses' Dormitory spread mattresses in their hall at midnight in a lie-in against what they called restrictive women's rules: closing hours, the ban on slacks or shorts on campus, signing out and the ban on living in apartments. In November 1966 the Housing Office announced that Joyner and Connor would become women's dormitories, and women moved into them in September 1967. That month Dean of Women Katherine Kennedy Carmichael told the Women's Residence Council that from the spring 1968 semester women over 21, and seniors under 21 with their parents' permission, could live off campus, a change that followed a referendum in which 1,469 women students voted. On January 9, 1968 about 500 women students walked through sleet to the council's meeting in Peabody Hall, and that night it voted to end closing hours for senior women and women 21 or older once key-card locks could be installed. In February ten of the eleven women trustees spent two days in the women's dormitories, and the council voted to drop the rule barring women from visiting men in rented bedrooms in Chapel Hill homes. Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson rejected the council's plan for self-limiting hours on February 28, but within days he and the deans agreed with the council on the principle that senior women and women over 21 should have special privileges. In October the University decided to post night watchmen at the women's dormitories, and on November 18 Sitterson announced that junior and senior women could set their own hours with their parents' permission, a policy approved by President William Friday.
Men students meanwhile pressed for visitation. On October 16, 1968 the Southern Student Organizing Committee handed Dean C. O. Cathey a petition with 3,904 names asking that each men's dormitory decide whether and when women could visit rooms, and on October 28 about a thousand students marched to Lenoir Hall, where the student-faculty visitation committee was meeting. On November 14 about 200 marched to the chancellor's house, found no one home, and filed into Memorial Hall to read their recommendations. On December 5 Sitterson adopted an experimental policy letting any residence hall, fraternity or sorority house that voted for it by a two-thirds secret ballot hold up to ten open houses a month with guests of the opposite sex. In May 1969 a committee asked that doors no longer have to stay open during visits, and a student affairs board agreed, but Friday kept the open-door rule.
In February 1970 sophomore women gained self-limiting hours, and from November women with those hours could enter their dormitories after closing by showing a stickered ID card instead of signing in; in August 1972 every woman student 18 or older in University housing got self-limiting hours. Morrison, whose upper floors took in women from the closed Nurses' Dormitory in September 1970, became what the Daily Tar Heel called the University's first permanent coed dormitory. That spring the Committee on University Residential Life recommended that each living unit set its own visitation rules, and in the fall the Student Legislature let houses choose round-the-clock visitation; Carr, Project Hinton and many other halls voted to set their own hours in defiance of the administration's limits. In January 1971 Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson said the self-determination policy had been turned down, and student body president Tom Bello urged students not to enforce the University's rules. Coed housing spread to Ehringhaus and more floors of Hinton James and Morrison in 1972, and the residence life committee backed a coed North Campus hall with an academic emphasis, approved in March 1973 as a living-learning center in Henderson Residence College. That fall Alexander, Connor and Winston opened as a coed college, with some floors divided room by room. In January 1974 Dean of Student Affairs Donald Boulton ended room-by-room coed living in Winston, residents sat in outside Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor's office, and on February 8 the trustees unanimously upheld the decision.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 31 dated events in the chronology →
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Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
Millicent Meroney's 1986 Duke honors paper on the 1969 strikes by food service workers at the University of North Carolina, an episode in the town's race relations and its civil rights history. Eighty leaves of typescript with a bibliography, covering labor unions in food service, the strikes and lockouts themselves, and university employees at Chapel Hill.
Two 1980 photographs of Lenoir Dining Hall at the University of North Carolina: students gathered in the Pit and outside the building, and staff among empty tables inside. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection, CHHS.002.
Faculty member E. J. Woodhouse drinks from a coffee cup outside the University Dining Hall cafeteria at UNC-Chapel Hill, about 1940, beneath a sign saying state law bars the hall from serving the general public. Hugh Morton took the picture, and a tight crop appeared in the 1941 Yackety Yack.
Ashley Davis, who entered UNC in 1968 and joined the Black Student Movement, recalls the 1969 strike by the university's cafeteria workers and the BSM's decision to stand with them when the workers asked. Recorded April 12, 1974, by Russell Rymer for the Southern Oral History Program, the hour-and-a-half interview touches on Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson, the Southern Student Organizing Committee and race relations among students on campus. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Lynn Roundtree covers the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1957 and 1972 through its three chancellors, William Brantley Aycock, Paul F. Sharp and J. Carlyle Sitterson, set against the student movements of those years. Part of the Coates university leadership series, published by the author in 2024 and running to 926 pages. It is twentieth century campus history.
A four page article clipped from Life, volume 61, number 20, dated November 11, 1966, on a dispute over academic freedom at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article concerns the instructor Michael Paull, Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson, Jesse Helms and Andrew Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress'. Illustrated, with portraits.
Southern Oral History Program interview with J. Carlyle Sitterson (1911-1995), chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1966, recorded by Pamela Dean on November 4 and 6, 1987, and running an hour and a half. Sitterson recalls the university in the 1960s: student demands over visitation rules, dress codes and privacy, the student movement, and the integration of the faculty. Interview L-0030 in collection #4007, published online in 2007 in Documenting the American South's Oral Histories of the American South.
Margaret Anne O'Connor, a professor of English at UNC, talks with Pamela Dean in July 1987 about her early years of teaching in Chapel Hill and how they drew her toward women's literature and feminism. She credits Katherine Carmichael and her own students with pushing for the first changes for women on campus, and she discusses the growth of the Women's Studies Program and its curriculum. About an hour and forty minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
Four items from Karen L. Parker, dated 1963 to 1966: a diary, a letter and newspaper clippings, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5275-z. Parker was an African American woman student at the university, and subjects include civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill, segregation in higher education and the Congress of Racial Equality.
Committee records documenting the North Carolina Distinguished Service Award for Women, 1953 to 1995, approximately 600 items in 1.5 linear feet, in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40192. The selection committee was based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Subjects include Katherine Kennedy Carmichael and Douglass Hunt, the Epsilon Beta chapter of Chi Omega, and Greek letter societies in Chapel Hill.
About 1,860 photographs made by Francis Lavergne Johnson (1901-1971) between 1948 and 1971, 1.8 linear feet in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Johnson photographed university faculty and employees, and subjects include William Aycock, Katherine Kennedy Carmichael, Albert Coates, Paul Green, Charlie Justice, Josephina Niggli and Louis Round Wilson among those who worked at Chapel Hill in those years.
Sydney Nathans's biography of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman from Orange County who escaped to the North in the mid nineteenth century and spent the following decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to free the family she had left behind. Chapter titles trace her flight, her years among Northern friends, a rescue plot, a long silence, and the reunion that gives the book its close. Published 2012 by Harvard University Press, 330 pages with 20 pages of plates, illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2012), Civil War Book Review (2012).
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Hope Summerell Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), published in 1926, which doubles as a picture of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century. It runs 325 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Selected writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), the Chapel Hill writer who campaigned for the university's reopening after Reconstruction, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1953. The 753 pages touch on Chapel Hill life, education and the university in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Sarah Brandes Madry's history of the Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treating both its architecture and the ideas attached to it. It takes in drinking fountains and water use in Chapel Hill and the university's history, with a chapter on Edwin Anderson Alderman, the president under whom the well took its present form in 1897, and one on water at the university. Published by iUniverse in 2003, 399 pages with illustrations.
Jennifer Fleischner's double biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker who had been enslaved, including years in Hillsborough, before buying her freedom and becoming the First Lady's confidante. Published by Broadway Books in New York in 2003, 372 pages with illustrations and a map. Topics include enslaved women in Hillsborough and the United States, dressmakers and women's friendships in the nineteenth century.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
Scotti Cohn's short biographies of notable North Carolina women, including Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Annie Lowrie Alexander and Cornelia Phillips Spencer of Chapel Hill. Published by Twodot in 2000, 198 pages with illustrations.
A Women's History Month project of 1993 and 1994 from the Orange County Women's History Month Committee, profiling women who were firsts in the county. Published in Chapel Hill in 1994, 13 pages plus unnumbered leaves with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits.
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