Free Course Correction by Ginny Gilder

equipment. Not for girls.” The voice was closer now, as the men’s crew captain stalked toward our lifting station, hands balling into fists.
    â€œOh,” Chris stared him down, standing taller than him even though she was a foot shorter. “I see, boys. So you must pay more tuition than we do, right?”
    No one moved for a long moment. Veins protruded from the captain’s neck. His fists remained by his sides. He glared at Chris … then finally shrugged and returned to his teammates, stiffly uncurling his fingers. The men continued to stare as if they could shrink us to nothing. But I was no longer afraid: Chris buoyed me with her aggressive confidence.
    â€œThere aren’t any girls on our team,” she told me between sets. “We’re women. It’s the Yale Women’s Crew. They don’t call the heavyweights the Yale Boys’ Crew, do they? Don’t let anyone diminish you by calling you a girl.”
    We belonged in that weight room. We deserved consideration and respect. I basked in the familiarity of an older sister looking out for me, leading the way. My own inner resolve edged forward, my confidence infused with Chris’s.
    We completed our sets, unloaded the weight bars, and put the equipment away.
    â€œBye, boys,” Chris said as we walked across the room. As I swung the door open and stepped safely across the threshold, the dam of silence behind us broke.
    â€œSee ya, cracks.”
    â€œGood riddance, sweat hogs.”
    What? Chris had to tell me what the epithets meant. My sister, Peggy, had called me names, but a stranger never had. It stung.
    These heavyweights were Yalies; they were supposed to be smart. I was shocked by their apparent belief that their gender granted them a valid claim of superiority. It was 1976, but the Dark Ages prevailed in New Haven, Connecticut.
    The weight room incident was not the first or last attack: verbal skirmishes with the guys continued all winter. Maybe the men were tired of indoor training too, as the brutality and intensity of daily workouts increased. Maybe their longing to return to open water and rowing in real shells clouded their judgment. Maybe they were big babies who didn’t want to share. Whatever, by winter’s end, their words no longer hurt: I’d moved on to anger and disgust.
    Women undergraduates had first matriculated at Yale as transfer students in 1969, not a moment too soon for my purposes. In 1967, I had started fourth grade at my new school, white-gloved Chapin located on East End Avenue, four blocks south of Gracie Mansion, the home of New York’s mayor. The all-girls student body was a change for me, coming from the co-ed P.S. 6 on 81st and Madison, but I had no trouble adjusting to the fact that girls held every position of leadership. I never gave it a second thought, coming from a family where my big sister ruled, and I settled into the protected environment without realizing my good fortune.
    I set my sights on attending Yale University that first autumn at Chapin. Miss Proffit, my homeroom teacher, assigned Fritzi Beshar as my desk mate and positioned us smack in the first row, directly in frontof her desk so she could keep an eye on us. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but she didn’t know that yet. Nine-year-old Fritzi, however, already had developed a reputation for outspokenness. She and I traded tidbits of our family history the first time we met and became fast friends. Both of us had two sisters and one brother, first-generation immigrant mothers, and fathers who were Yale graduates. Upon discovering this common ground, we confided in each other that we, too, planned to attend that venerable institution when our turn came. We sealed our friendship with an agreement to room together, ten years in the future.
    Luckily, no one told us that Yale wasn’t open to women undergraduates. My father taught Yale fight songs to the entire family and regaled us with stories of