My William and Mary Tour: Stop 4, Barrett Hall

Barrett Hall (#500 on the map above) is just below the red square with the #4 in it; it occupies the corner of Jamestown Road and Landrum

Barrett Hall is one of four linked dormitories that line the south end of the campus along Jamestown Road and Landrum Drive.  Built in 1927, it was named after prominent Virginia civic leader Dr. Kate Waller Barrett, who was the second woman to serve on the College’s Board of Visitors.  This was an all-female dorm when I lived there, although I think it currently houses men and women on alternating floors.  This is the dorm I lived in my junior year at the College, 1967-68 (I’ll talk about the place I lived my sophomore year, Dupont Hall, at Stop 9 on July 15).  My roommate was Gail White; Gail and I had joined our sorority together our freshman year and we were both looking for a roommate for our junior year.  Gail was dating Mike Lubeley, who was Tim’s closest friend in high school, so I knew Gail pretty well.  We lived on the second floor of this building.

South side of Barrett Hall as it rounds the corner from Jamestown Road to Landrum Drive

This is the campus (north) side of Barrett Hall.  Gail and I lived in the room in the red circle above. The “balcony” outside of our room was never intended to be a balcony – it was the roof of the porch – but we climbed out the window to sit outside on occasions.  Tim may or may not have shinnied up the pillar and sneaked into my room using this handy balcony at some point during the year I lived there.

Gail and I lived in Room 232, circled on the floor plan above.  This dorm also had only one bathroom per floor, in the center of the hall as indicated above.

By the time I was a junior, I had this college thing down pat.  Tim and had been dating since our freshman year, and my memories of this year at college are linked to things we did together.  By this time I was a declared Economics major, and I had begun to take some political science classes as well.  William and Mary didn’t allow for declared minors at this time, but if they had, political science would have been my minor field.  This was to have some impact later on, as I decided to go to graduate school in political science a few years later.

Probably my most significant memory associated with the year I lived in Barrett was the night we broke out of the dorm after hours and burned our copies of the William and Mary Woman, the handbook that governed the female students at the college.  This handbook documented the dress code, curfews, and other behavioral topics.  One of the most unusual rules was that women should not smoke “standing up.”  I first encountered this rule when I was a freshman and I remember asking what this actually meant.  The RAs that were going over the rules with us hemmed and hawed a little and then said that apparently the people who wrote these rules thought that it was unseemly for a woman to walk around smoking, but that smoking while seated was okay.

The rules in this book had loosened up a little since I had first encountered it when I was a freshman.  The curfew had been slipped to midnight on weeknights, and women students were allowed to say out until 1:00 am four Saturdays during each semester.  Weird, right?  Anyway, the next year the curfew slipped to 1:00 for all nights, and within a few years, curfews were gone.

I’d like to think we had something to do with this.  On a designated night, we all left the dorm (climbing through windows where necessary) and went to the Sunken Garden where we burned our copies of the William and Mary Woman while we chanted “Burn, woman, burn.” Now, I’ve seen some sources that say this happened in the spring of 1969, but I know it happened when I was living in Barrett, and I wasn’t living there in the spring of 1969.  Who are you going to believe – me or the printed historical record? Maybe our 1968 event was a practice run?

More things happened while I was living in Barrett, but that’s all I have for today.