The stark traditionalism of Martha Cook
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 // The Statement
5B
An Afternoon Tea
A
s I pass through the doors
of Martha Cook Residence
Hall at the University of
Michigan, I enter a hallway
clad in wooden panels whose austerity
of color and design evokes past eras.
Brightly lit by ostentatious chandeliers
and archaic windows, the space draws
the eye to the Venus de Milo statue situ-
ated at the end of the hallway. To the
left, near the windows, there’s a table
that displays silver platters with per-
fectly manicured pyramids of cucumber
sandwiches and chocolate pastries. The
sound of laughter and the clinking of
glasses echoes through the main floor.
The effervescent atmosphere in the
building can be felt as women stroll in
and out of rooms in their formal dress:
It is Friday afternoon tea time.
Walking into Martha Cook is like
traveling back to the early 20th century.
The halls and impeccable entertainment
chambers feel unfamiliar and incongru-
ous with the happenings and progres-
sive values of our modern campus. The
building, standing almost unchanged
from the time of its inauguration, seems
to be a world away from the University,
yet it occupies a central place on our
campus.
Coming to campus as a woman of
color, I never questioned my place at
this university. I believed myself to be
as qualified and deserving of a world-
class education as any other student
who vowed to never step on the bronze
block ‘M.’ Like most, I took a tour before
officially enrolling as a student. My tour
guide briefly signaled Martha Cook
as a women’s only dormitory, but any
thought or preoccupation with it was
forgotten by the time we walked past.
I was highly ignorant of the history of
women on this campus and complete-
ly unaware of the origin of the word
“coed.”
It wasn’t until one of my professors
assigned a reading on Martha Cook that
I first considered the history of women
on campus. It should not have come as a
surprise to read about the long-lasting
paternalism faced by women on cam-
pus. However, the most jarring aspect of
learning about this history was becom-
ing aware of every blind tradition and
system of oppression that has prevailed.
I came to see the dormitory as a constant
reminder that, despite being an enclave
for progressive thinking and inclusion,
the University of Michigan still held
onto small artifacts of its exclusive past.
But in my incredulity, I wanted to see
this community firsthand, not satisfied
to simply read critiques of it on paper.
O
nce inside, I was ushered
by the Tea Chair — the
member of the house board
who organizes Friday teas
— into the Gold Room. Heavy curtains
framed the windows. An antique piano,
Elizabethan furniture and two fireplac-
es adorned the room, which is illumi-
nated by the dim light of gilded lamps
and the reflection of the snow outside.
Almost every chair or sofa was taken up
by girls immersed in conversation. The
majesty of the room astounded me, but
it seemed to be a given for the rest of
the girls who were sipping on their tea
and eating cucumber sandwiches off of
crystal platters.
Most of the girls who come to tea
every week, like Business freshman Jac-
queline Kenny, use it as an opportunity
to socialize.
“I knew I didn’t want to rush a soror-
ity, but I still wanted an all-female com-
munity where I could live and make
friends so Martha Cook sort of fit the
bill,” Kenny noted.
Martha Cook’s lively tea tradition
may seem innocent from an outsider’s
perspective, but an intuitive Univer-
sity student or community member may
realize that the dormitory’s walls are
tainted with a history of female oppres-
sion as well as racial and socioeconomic
divides. The girls that once inhabited its
rooms and walked its halls came from
predominantly white, upper-class back-
grounds with much more rigid social
norms.
Women were first permitted to enroll
in the University in 1870, and the first
cohort of women arrived the following
year. At the time of Martha Cook’s inau-
guration in 1915, they were still relegat-
ed to second-class status to their male
classmates.
“All the spaces of a college campus
were assumed to be for men, unless
they were specifically carved out for
women,” Carla Yanni, a professor of art
history at Rutgers University, writes in
an architecture journal. In fact, women
were referred to as “coeds,” because
“student” had implicitly only referred
to males during the era.
The idea for a women’s dorm came
about when the University Women’s
League — an organization representing
female students — discussed inadequate
housing situations for its members.
Plans were drawn for the construction
of the first University-affiliated dormi-
tory, which would also be women-only.
Upon hearing of the project, William
Cook — a wealthy lawyer, Michigan
alum and namesake of the Law Library
— immediately offered a large donation
for the construction of this building.
However, once he saw the ideas origi-
nally brought forth by the Woman’s
League, he deemed them insufficient
and set forth a plan of his own. In
exchange for his large donation, Cook
ensured the building’s administrators
were to follow a specific set of rules to
create an environment that fostered a
“model for gracious living,” according
to the “Martha Cook Building History
and Traditions” pamphlet.
As a patron, Cook intended for his
building to “create young women of out-
standing sophistication and savoir faire,”
according to Yanni. Though portrayed
as a beacon of egalitarianism, Martha
Cook, Yanni explains, “was intended as
a quasi-domestic retreat within the set-
ting of a masculinist campus.”
The result of these guiding principles,
and Cook’s place in society as a white
upper-class male, created exclusivity in
the Martha Cook residence hall. Only
upper-class Anglo-Saxon women who
intended to become caretakers of their
homes were encouraged to reside in
Martha Cook.
At the time of Martha Cook’s estab-
lishment, women’s dormitories were
places where “coeds” needed to stay
in order to be subdued and kept on the
domestic and bridal tracks. In a way,
these buildings typified gender repres-
sion and ensured educated women
were always reminded of their place in
society. As residents of Martha Cook,
women typically aspired to be cul-
tured housewives, and these aspira-
tions were encouraged by invitations to
dances, teas and other socials and “baby
days” where they would practice tak-
ing care of faculty members’ children.
The norms and environment of Martha
Cook thus promoted their social status
as second-class citizens and as domes-
tic, inferior beings only deserving cer-
tain types of education.
Other than exemplifying the stereo-
typical roles of women, classism was
ingrained in William Cook’s beliefs and
practices when it came to his patronage
of Martha Cook, despite his intentions
to keep room and board accessible to
less privileged women. Decades after
the dormitory first opened its doors,
Cook reversed his original belief and
promoted his building as an exclusive
space only meant for women of high
class. In addition, he expressed his dis-
taste for “blue stocking” women, who
were known to have a “taste for lit-
erature and scholarship” according to
Yanni.
Many current Martha Cook residents
acknowledge the contrast of its original
benefactor’s values to those of its pres-
ent residents.
“(Cook) thought that women should
go to finishing school, but then he was
like, ‘Well I guess if you’re going to go
to college, we are going to let you be in a
place that looks like a finishing school,’”
said Engineering junior Jenny Jasperse,
house board president.
Even though the building still looks
like a finishing school — a place where
women went to be prepared to enter
high society as housewives — Friday
afternoon tea no longer suggests this.
The girls I saw sitting in the Gold Room
were typical University students talk-
ing about the Shapiro Undergraduate
Library and complaining about their
computer science or business classes.
As LSA junior Jillian Hurst said it,
“What is important is that the build-
ing evolves their curriculum and their
space to be inclusive of other walks of
life and to adapt to the modernization
of feminism and the female experi-
ence.”
T
hough all three all-womens’
dorms on campus — includ-
ing
Betsy
Barbour
and
Helen Newberry — origi-
nated in the same decade, only Martha
Cook retains such a distinctive reputa-
tion. Since its establishment, Martha
Cook has operated autonomously from
the rest of the residence halls on cam-
pus. Amassing its own alumni associa-
tion, board of governors and detailed
instructions from William Cook’s will,
the building has imposed traditions,
like Friday afternoon tea, that can’t
be found elsewhere on campus. This
autonomy has allowed the dormitory to
function on the periphery of University
Housing, serving a largely homogenous
cohort of self-selecting girls living in a
unique situation.
Residents, or “Cookies,” as they refer
to themselves, reside in a limbo between
the modern campus and the old-fash-
ioned traditions that regulate their
home. They are modern, intelligent and
diverse women who have chosen — or,
in the case of legacy women, have been
prompted by their families — to live in a
place that still upholds the traditional-
ist values of a man who lived a century
ago. The surface Martha Cook experi-
ence, as exemplified by formal dinners,
dress codes and century-old traditions,
is being challenged every day by its resi-
dents.
Residential life in Martha Cook, like
everything else on campus, has changed
throughout the years. Today, women
can freely use all campus facilities with-
out second thought. For the most part,
women are treated equally by profes-
sors, advisers and University staff. Teas
are only once a week instead of every
day, and women are now allowed to
wear pants in the Gold Room. In addi-
tion, the women attending Friday after-
noon tea today are not preoccupied with
marriage or entertaining their male
counterparts.
The Alumni Association of Martha
Cook has instituted the “gap” scholar-
ship which subsidizes the difference in
the cost of housing between other Uni-
versity housing and the significantly
more expensive Martha Cook dormito-
ry. In this way, a woman from any class
who wants to live in Martha Cook, and
demonstrates financial need, is able to
do so if awarded this scholarship.
Even though traditions have evolved
since its inauguration, Martha Cook’s
preservation of traditional values and
gendered experiences poses many ques-
tions about its design and purpose. Its
regulations still include “boy hours”
— limiting the hours when members of
the opposite sex could be present, and
only if escorted by a resident — and a
restricted meal plan that, except for
Saturday evenings and lunch on North
Campus, requires residents to have all
of their meals in the Martha Cook din-
ing hall.
This
old-fashioned
and
mostly
homogenous space stands in stark con-
trast to the experiences of other women
on campus who are not residents of
Martha Cook.
Women not originally intended or
allowed to live in the building by Wil-
liam Cook now enjoy the perks and
experience the challenges of being a
Cookie. Hurst, who only happened to
be at afternoon tea because she was ful-
filling her required “tea service” hours,
expressed her indifference toward the
building’s history.
“There are a lot of institutions on this
campus that have roots in things that
don’t benefit me as a woman of color, but
I have to fight my fight elsewhere,” she
said. “I think that the way I overcome
that is just by living in this building and
getting my education and working my
way out.”
As I interviewed modern day Cook-
ies, I learned this indifference is wide-
spread. Cookies are not fully aware of,
or at least are not preoccupied with,
the history of their residence hall. They
occupy its rooms and follow its tradi-
tions without thinking about the impli-
cations of its history. By overlooking
this history, Cookies uphold Martha
Cook’s image of a residence hall peopled
by, as expressed by Hurst, “predomi-
nantly upper middle-class women with
values and interests I can only describe
as traditional.”
As for me, visiting Martha Cook was
an eye-opening experience. As a self-
proclaimed feminist, the persistence of
this building on our campus was ini-
tially alarming, but when I walked out
and said my last goodbye to the Venus
of Milo, I was more understanding of
the value given to the building by its
residents. I realized that the residents
and staff didn’t dwell on its history, and
instead viewed the dorm as their home
and a place to be proud of.
William Cook’s beliefs still permeate
the environment in the dorm; however,
they seem to be set aside by the mem-
bers of the Martha Cook community.
Modern Cookies are a part of the every-
day campus, but at night, when they
retire to their rooms that stand mostly
untouched, they are living an alterna-
tive reality and in some ways, upholding
old-fashioned values that contrast our
modern campus.
Amelia Cacchione/Daily
A resident serves tea in Martha Cook’s Gold Room at the weekly tea time Friday.
by Andrea Perez, Daily Arts Writer
Amelia Cacchione/Daily
The entryway in Martha Cook.