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A School of Their Own
Fed up with her job and marriage, a mother walks out on her life and enrolls at her daughter’s college. when an unexpected threat arises, she will have to summon the power to stand up and fight the man.
SHARON SNOW was nearly 50 years old and a mother of three when she dropped off her youngest daughter, Elizabeth, at Texas Woman’s University in the fall of 1993. As she looked out across the rolling green campus in north Texas, with its famous redbud tree-lined walkways and red-brick buildings, she couldn’t help but note the difference between TWU and the other (co-ed) schools her older daughters had decided to attend. The tour guides remembered her name, the folks in the administration building, she thought, treated her like an actual person and not just another number. And it seemed like women…. Well, they were just everywhere.
In the classrooms (both as students and professors), in the residence halls, in the gym: everywhere you looked there were women doing what they wanted, unapologetically, and without a man behind them telling them what to do.
Women had never been the authority in Sharon’s family. A good, Christian girl from Fort Worth, she did what was expected of her after high school, marrying and starting a family. Though she reveled in being a mother, being a wife never suited her. Her husband was strict and urged her into a boring corporate desk job that she hated. Now, after 30 years, she stepped foot on campus and realized she wanted more—she wanted this.
A volunteer gig made her think she could be a good social worker, so she quietly investigated the program at TWU. Could she actually go back to school? It had been years since she’d been in a classroom. And what about Elizabeth? Sharon was “scared to death” of what her daughter might think. As much as she ached for this new beginning, she didn’t want to jeopardize Elizbeth’s experience.
It was Elizabeth, however, who encouraged her to take the leap and start her new journey. “She kept calling me and telling me what an amazing time she was having,” Sharon says. And so she finally admitted to her daughter what she had been thinking about: how she wanted to do some good, how she wanted to help people and be free from the suffocating life in the suburbs. Elizabeth was ecstatic.
In the Summer of 1994, right before Elizabeth’s sophomore year began, Sharon left the ’burbs, her husband and her job—all of them for good—and moved into a tiny one bedroom apartment across the street from campus. It smelled like mold, but she didn’t care. It felt like she was finally home, in a place where she could be the silly, passionate and outrageous Texas woman she knew she was.
It was like a plot straight from a fish-out-of-water Hollywood movie: Elizabeth, the cool 19-year-old sophomore volleyball player, and her mom Sharon, the 47-year-old freshman social work student rediscovering herself. Sharon was Elizabeth’s number-one fan, attending all of her volleyball games, cheering her on side-by-side with friends who were twenty years her junior. She discovered a passion for poetry and performed regularly at open mic nights. Her new young friends were in awe of her, and she became a de facto maternal figure, shooting the shit and talking about sex and relationships while everyone passed around a joint.
“I was just out of a 30 year marriage, and for the first time in my life I could sleep with anyone I chose to, and I was very open about it,” she says. “It was a marvel to me. Sex could be just for sex. It could be fun. It was fun. I could be sexy and flirtatious.” Gone was the shy, scared housewife. “It was totally a rebirth.”
That rebirth came complete with a new mentor: Dawn Tawater, a graduate social work student in her late 20s, a mother of three, and a certified badass.
Once a teenage “dropout derelict” who gave birth to her first child at 16, Dawn had sicced Greenpeace on local governments, worked with civil rights leaders at the Dallas Peace Center, and thrown banners off interstates to protest the Gulf War. “I got thrown out of city hall so many times.” Fierce as hell and cuddly as a bag of nails, she had founded the Denton chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) while at TWU, where the group organized Take Back the Night marches, fought for a free speech area on campus, and worked with the NAACP to protest a prison where young black men were dying at alarming rates.
The university was an oasis. Initially conceived by the state as a place to produce the perfect wives and mothers, by the 60s it had become a haven for women like Sharon and Dawn who wanted more out of life and had a lot more to give. In the late 80s, TWU won a hard-fought battle against budget-conscious lawmakers who proposed the school might be merged with the larger co-ed school across town. In the afterglow, students like Dawn and Sharon thrived, thrilled to be surrounded by women who were eager to learn and break free from their strict conservative pasts. Sharon’s fears of feeling out of place melted away in the classroom where young mothers brought their infants to class without issue and listened intently when she raised her hand to speak. Dawn, meanwhile, continued her work, bolstering the ranks of NOW to fight injustices on and off campus. They had all found this place, the last public women’s university in the country, where women were encouraged to meet their true potential.
Then one day a rumor began to circulate. Sharon shook her head when she heard, confused. She thought: Why would a man sue to get into TWU?
STEVEN SERLING didn’t think it was fair. Not one bit. Why would TWU’s courses be closed to simply on the basis of his gender?
The 35-year-old airline mechanic had been accepted as a nursing student, but when Serling was told he wouldn’t be able to change his major or take classes in the liberal arts programs, he balked. Invoking a recent Supreme Court case in which a woman successfully sued for admittance into the Citadel, a public military college in South Carolina, Serling began to press his case. How was it OK for Shannon Faulkner to demand acceptance to an all-men’s school and yet he couldn’t do the same at a women’s school? Steven wrote to state officials, including then-Governor Ann Richards, alleging TWU’s women-only admissions policy was akin to reverse sexism, funded by taxpayers.
Serling seemed to be itching for a fight, and he came out in the press swinging.
“Everyone has special needs,” he said in a newspaper interview. “Women who feel the need for a special environment because they lack self-esteem need to get professional help.” In a Houston Chronicle story, he compared his woes to that of racial segregation. “Separate but equal wasn’t appropriate in the South in the 1950s and it shouldn’t be in Texas in the 1990s.”
Steven’s letter-writing campaign caught the attention of state lawmakers, who not only vowed to bring up the issue at the next legislative session but also contacted the TWU Board of Regents directly to let them know the school was swimming in legal hot water and that the legislature would be forced to act. By December, with the next session only one month away, the TWU Board of Regents was feeling the heat.
Sharon was walking out of her women’s studies class when her favorite professor pulled her aside and told her about a Board of Regents meeting being held that night. “You need to go to that meeting,” her professor insisted, “and get as many people there as you can.” Ordinarily the agenda for Board of Regents meetings was distributed to students well in advance. However, the editor of the school paper recalls the agenda was faxed to her office after the final issue of the semester had been sent to the press. “I got the gut feeling that they just didn’t want a large crowd at that meeting,” she’d later tell the Dallas Observer.
Dawn and Sharon feared men would trample all over TWU, taking precious resources that previously were exclusive to women, a rarity in society. Every student leadership position was held by a woman, every sports team was for women–hell, every scholarship was given to a woman. Men dominated all of these opportunities at practically every single Texas state school at the time. Why, students thought, did they need to take TWU’s?
It wasn’t just the school’s identity, however, that was at risk. The threat of shutting down the school entirely was very real. Why would the state support two co-ed schools in one small college town? TWU had just fought off a campaign to merge with the University of North Texas by saying it was unique and special because it was a single sex institution. If that distinction went away, what would keep lawmakers from again recommending to shut it down to save money?
Sharon, tipped off by her professor, ran to her tiny apartment across the street from campus, opened up her phone book, and called everyone she knew. Once Dawn got word of the mystery meeting, she lit up her phone tree, full of NOW members, passing along word that something big was going down. That evening, on December 9, 1994, through the efforts of Sharon, Dawn and good-old-fashioned landlines, 200 students packed the ground floor of the Administrative Clock Tower. Upstairs, on the top floor, the Board of Regents gathered for its meeting.
Students began to trickle upstairs where they finally understood the gravity of the situation. With only a week left of classes in the semester, and with no input or debate, the Board of Regents was about to vote on one of the most consequential parts of TWU’s identity.
Friends sent the message back downstairs, and the packed ocean of students, sitting body-to-body, holding hands, burst into tears. “Hell no, we won’t go!” they began to chant. Others began to sing, flabbergasted that the rumors they had heard all semester were now becoming reality. Upstairs, students did their best to convince the Regents to keep the school single sex.
They didn’t know it, but that ocean of students, rallied by Sharon and Dawn, were part of the gravitational pull that was creating the third-wave feminist movement. The movement built on the civil rights advances for women in the 60s and 70s but sought to be more intersectional, lifting up the voices of not only white, elite women, but also women of color and women from all economic backgrounds. TWU was the working woman’s university, the students argued, the last public women’s university in the country, which offered affordable tuition to women across the country. Tuition at TWU in 1994 was around $1,200 a semester for an in-state, undergraduate student. Meanwhile, tuition at an elite, private women’s college like Wellesley cost up to $9,000 a semester.
It didn’t matter. The meeting was a formality. The public portion ended, and the crowd eventually dispersed. Sharon, Dawn and a handful of other students walked the five minutes to Dawn’s house, just off campus, to commiserate. The phone rang later that night with the official news: it wasn’t even close. By a vote of 6-1, the school would officially begin accepting male students in all programs effective the fall of 1995.
A crushing weight settled on Sharon. It was a betrayal. A lesson from her women’s studies class echoed in her mind. Perpetrators groom their targets by making them feel safe. They wait until no one is around to attack. It was happening right now, she thought. Had TWU groomed her? This was supposed to be her safe place, where her voice mattered, but now she wasn’t so sure. All she knew was she had never been angrier. And now she felt she had the tools to do something about it.
DAWN’S PLACE, a three-bedroom house, nestled right behind a TWU high-rise full of classrooms, was old, its white paint cracked and peeling. Its most distinguishing feature was a large concrete porch out front that connected to the living room via handsome French doors. It was the perfect place to hang out, smoke, listen to music, and maybe start a movement. “Everybody who was anybody in feminism, the second wave of the hippie movement, we all knew it all started and stopped at Dawn’s house,” says Tracey Elliott, a TWU and NOW alumna who described Dawn as a mix of Bob Dylan and the Black Panther party.
Shell-shocked at the Regent’s decision, Dawn, Sharon, Tracey and the other few women lit up their phone trees again. They weren’t done fighting. The next evening, students overflowed from inside Dawn’s home out onto her porch and front yard. They were starting a protest group, she said, and Protesting 101 with Professor Dawn was officially in session. They went over goals, what to wear to a protest, what your rights were if law enforcement harassed you, how to handle the media, and the basic strategies to keep the public pressure on the administration.
The students, many of whom had grown up in conservative households and had never been to a protest before, listened intently as Dawn spoke. “There I was,” Tracey says, “this girl who went to a redneck high school where everyone was wearing ropers and jeans, with the belt to match and all that, and suddenly I’m in this world where I’m surrounded by people listening to the Indigo Girls all day long and talking about all these issues, women’s issues, and how we needed to be part of making a world a better place.”
A sheet of paper circulated as Dawn spoke. She told the group to write their names down if they’d be willing, if it ever got to that point, to be arrested. “I explained what civil disobedience was and that these people would have to be willing to go to jail,” she says. About 20 women signed up, including Sharon.
Dawn kept the sheet of names to herself and looked up at the crowd. The group would need a name and a mission to be their north star. After a quick vote, the Texas Woman’s University Preservation Society was officially born. Their mission? To preserve, uphold, and progress women’s equality in all facets of society. Their first challenge? Saving their school.
FINALS were only a week away with the holiday break not far behind. Keeping up their momentum was critical. Like army ants at their colony, TWUPS members came and went through Dawn’s house at all hours of the day—the front door always unlocked for easy access. Members laid in the grass in the front yard painting signs for rallies. Inside, Dawn’s kitchen table was turned into a sewing station where sheets found at Goodwill were stitched together into 20-foot banners. Elsewhere, members talked strategy, did radio interviews with morning talk show hosts, and socialized while lounging on the front porch hammock. Two members even got on the phone second-wave feminist icon Gloria Stienem, who wished them luck with the fight.
When Dawn was home, it was a full house. She had just separated from her husband, a police officer in Dallas, and was the primary caregiver for her three kids, all under the age of 10. Gillian Williams, a TWU alumni and friend of Dawn’s, recalls playing with the youngsters, sipping on lemonade, and going over the group’s plans. She had spent her time at TWU protesting the lack of women of color in their women’s studies program, so she had her own experience getting the attention of the administration.
The night before the first rally, Dawn called Sharon and told her she’d be the one to speak to the crowd. Sharon demurred, unsure of her abilities as a public speaker, but Dawn insisted. It was part of her plan to decentralize the power in the group. “I didn’t want any of that patriarchal, hierarchical shit,” she says.
It was a complete 180 from the years of being silenced by her husband. She was in awe of Dawn, this woman with so much raw power inside of her. Dawn was unafraid. So unafraid, in fact, that she’d cede her power to Sharon. What did Dawn see in her? Could she see it in herself? She knew she had a voice, and no matter how terrifying the prospect, it was time to use it.
The next day, clad in a custom-made white long-sleeve shirt with their name and logo (the female gender symbol) on the front and their slogan (“Texas Woman’s University - Keep it That Way!”) on the back, Sharon stood up in front of around 400 students and local media. She had stayed up all night working on her speech. In the front row she noticed her daughter Elizabeth. Breathing deeply, she opened her mouth and heard the words tumble out. Gone was the meek housewife. Sharon Snow had something important to say. When she was done, she looked at her daughter in the front row, who was crying. Sharon felt a wave of purpose and energy coursing through her. “This is power,” she thought.
Courtesy of Rebeca Vanderburg
For a week the group held rallies, sit-ins and candlelight vigils across campus, giving speeches, waving their homemade signs, and chanting for the Board of Regents to reverse the vote. The Preservation Society organized a “girl-cott” of the bookstore, dressed up “Minerva,” a 15-foot-tall Pioneer Woman statue on campus, in a mourning black hood and cape, and sported their own matching black armbands.
But as the rallies continued, the crowds began to shrink, with fewer new faces showing up each time. Dawn and Sharon recognized the group wasn’t growing and needed a new way to get their message out. “I remember thinking we needed more allies and more voices,” another TWUPS member told me. It was time for some civil disobedience.
Memories are hazy, but members recall surreptitiously creeping through campus at night, dressed in black, with flashlights, rope and banners in hand. Supportive faculty and buildings with unminded locks gained them access to rooftops and various landings on campus where TWUPS members tied enormous 20-foot banners with messages of resistance to coeducation. BETRAYED screamed one dangling from a 21-story residence tower. REVERSE THE VOTE read another one, successfully unfurled off a classroom building after a 70-year-old visiting professor caught the students trying to use a credit card to jimmy a door and let them in with his own key. For the young women, all of the undercover operations and sneaking around was exhilarating. Rebeca Vanderbug, one of the younger students in the group, remembers exactly how it felt to her: “It was like ‘Mission Impossible.’”
ROBIN DEISHER and Amy Nickum, two young Preservation Society members, pressed their bodies to the floor, frozen, as a TWU police cruiser slowly passed beneath them. The pedestrian bridge arching over the main artery of campus had for years greeted students and visitors with its stately letters spelling out the name of the university. Tonight, if they weren’t caught, that would change.
Amy had no fear. She knew she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She had never been a bad kid, never stolen anything or defaced property before, especially not at TWU. The school was like a second home to her. As a kid she’d spend hours at the chapel on campus and at the library while her mother completed her PhD. Later, when her mother returned as a professor, it was a no-brainer where Amy would attend college. And so, when the Board of Regents and the likes of Steven Serling were threatening to take her home away, Amy knew what she had to do. “I was going to push back,” she told me. “Hard.”
When the coast was clear, Robin and Amy got back to work. They reached down, their arms and heads poking out on either side between the guardrails, and pried off what they had come for. Around the corner, Sharon’s daughter, Elizabeth, waited in the getaway car.
Students and faculty the next morning were left agog when they spotted the duo’s handiwork. “It was all over campus, all anyone could talk about!” says Dr. Linda Marshall, Amy’s mother. “Everyone woke up and saw the bridge and said ‘The W and the O are missing! It says Texas Man’s University!’”
Deborah Bono/Courtesy of the Denton Public Library
THE OLD GUARD was not pleased. The mostly traditional and conservative members of the TWU Alumni Association generally believed in the Preservation Society and their mission but were horrified by the escalating tactics. They thought fighting the Regents in the courtroom and out of the eyes of the press was the more appropriate channel to enact change. The banners, bridge prank and slogans written in shoe polish all over campus windows rankled the older women. To them, the Preservation Society was embarrassing and making their school ugly.
Excoriating the increasing militancy of the protests, the alumni formed a group with straight and narrow student leaders and faculty members who together filed a lawsuit against the Board of Regents in an effort to reverse the vote. Even Sharon, who could operate both as a rebel and as a level-headed student, was invited to sign on the lawsuit. Though she maintained her allegiance to TWUPS, she also joined the alumni-led group, signing onto the lawsuit to work the “proper channels” and keep tabs on their efforts. The group argued the Board had violated the Texas Open Meetings Act by not giving the community sufficient notice for a meeting that should have been open to the public. The group also argued that since TWU was chartered by the state legislature as a women’s university, only the legislature, and not the Board, had the authority to change its founding mission of being a school for women.
Dawn, through her experience as a radical protestor, knew that asking politely rarely effected change.
“The alumni basically had that old-school mindset that we have to be all please-and-thank-you route with this thing,” says Tracey. “Dawn basically said, no, we’re going to take the ‘fuck-you’ route, and that was never going to jive with women who went to TWU in the ‘70s. We were really fighting, and they were not. They were handbag clutchers, and we were not.” Just as they had suspected, winter break killed a lot of momentum for the Preservation Society. The rallies had flamed out and the banners never flew for longer than a day, ripped up and dumped in the free speech area Dawn had procured for the school in years prior. The group needed to change course. “If they’re not gonna let us maintain a symbolic presence,” she asked Sharon, “what do we do?”
Dawn knew they needed something big and splashy, something that would look great on the evening news and in the papers.
Sharon poured some coffee while Dawn explained. “Do you remember that Kevin Costner movie?” Dawn asked, not quite recalling 1989’s “Field of Dreams.” “If you build it,” she said, reciting the famous line, “they will come.”
A sign at tent city. Courtesy of Rebecca Vanderburg.
“What if we build a tent city?” Dawn asked. It would be their biggest and boldest act of civil disobedience yet. They would literally set up a village of tents on campus and live out of them for as long as they needed, talking to curious lookie-loos, answering questions from students and the media, and, most importantly, applying pressure on the University. Sharon’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Oh my God,” she said. “I love you!”
With a new project at hand, the group sprung back to life as students returned from winter break. Flyers with the ominous Kevin Costner phrase covered the school and downtown area, piquing the interest of community members. “The next day people were saying ‘Well what are you going to build? What’s going on?’” Sharon recalls. “It was very cinematic.” The group rounded up all the tents they could find, even pilfering through their families’ camping gear to gather what they needed and got ready to set up their tent city.
At 6:30 a.m. in late January 1995, members gathered at Dawn’s house, their cars packed with tents. They talked over their strategy: first, park the cars in the visitors lot, close to the target. Hubbard Lawn was the center of campus and stretched from the library to the student union, the perfect location for maximum exposure. Next, scramble out and set up the tents as fast as possible. Finally, make a scene when administrators and Public Safety show up to try and shut them down.
A view of tent city. Courtesy of Rebecca Vanderburg.
The drive to campus only took one minute, but it was indelible for Sharon, the most profound moment of her life. As they drove past quiet houses and empty streets, she thought, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. My momma didn’t raise me to do this.” She was a church-going little kid, not a revolutionary. But as the car pulled up to the center of campus, she thought of herself as something more. A person who believed in women. Someone who could get up in front of hundreds of people and give an impassioned speech. A person with a voice and a cause that mattered. She was at a crossroads. Would she be the little kid in the white patent leather shoes? Or would she be the woman who stood up for what she believed in?
She opened the car door and, as her feet hit the ground, she knew.
The members flew out of the cars, their tents and other supplies in hand. Tents went up quickly along with handmade signs and a makeshift flagpole, proclaiming their territory and mission. About 15 tents in total were erected. Then…nothing.
“We sat around all day,” recalls Dawn. “Like, where are the cops? Where are the pigs? Where’s the fuzz?”
The women had assumed once the school awoke DPS would be immediately alerted and Preservation Nation would be stormed and taken down. Instead, administrators let the scene play out. “They’d send pizza out,” Robin says, “and Dawn would say ‘Don’t eat it! They’re trying to win your affection!’ We didn’t accept anything.”
Music from Tracy Chapman and Janis Ian filled the air as members painted tents with peace signs and the female symbol. A large white walk-in tent was dubbed “The White House.” Members brought their dogs and kids to play hacky sack, kick ball, dance, and read together. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” was one of Dawn’s favorites.
For many of the members, tent city was their new home. “I would wake up at tent city, go home to eat, go to class, and then just come back,” remembers Jennifer Foreman. “My life didn’t stop, it was just like, OK, now I live in a tent.” Not every member slept at tent city, but for those who did, the freezing nights were the hardest to endure. They set up a trash can fire to keep warm, but DPS, who frequently patrolled the area, quickly took it down. With no electrical outlets, campers turned to propane heaters for warmth.
Beyond students who would visit for questions, the group fielded media from all over, including a young Scott Pelley, who at the time was assigned in Dallas for CBS. The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the local NPR affiliate KERA all wanted access. “The Battle of the Sexes,” as one headline put it, now had a headquarters.
Perhaps the most endearing of their visitors was a group of elderly women who had driven across the state in an Oldsmobile to drop off cookies and chat, along with an employee over at the local art house theater, who brought leftover popcorn every night.
Other visitors, however, were less kind. One night, the women were jolted awake after a car parked nearby turned on their high beams and blasted Pink Floyd’s “Dirty Woman.” On another occassion, someone else drove by, yelled a homophobic slur, and threw a bottle at one of the few male Preservation Society members—a husband whose wife was a student at TWU and TWUPS member. “I had never been called a dyke before!” he recalled years later.
Men piled into pickup trucks and mooned the group while shouting they were a bunch of cunts and whores. Sharon and her friends laughed the assaults off, even more sure of their mission to keep men like these out of TWU. “What did they think they were going to do?” Sharon says. “We had just built a city out of tents in the middle of the campus. Were they going to scare us by calling us cunts? Not likely.”
TWELVE DAYS after Preservation Nation was erected, the few students who had braved the 25 degree weather woke up with a start. The smell of smoke wafted through the quiet, frigid night.
A fire was burning.
A 14-year-old boy, the son of a member who was a single mother, had kicked over a space heater while doing his homework, starting a small fire that burned through the plastic roof of his tent. There were only 3 or 4 people at tent city on this night because of the cold. Rebeca Vanderburg was one of the students there. “It was like, everybody up and out of their tents,” she says, “and oh my God, oh my God.”
Dawn and Sharon had questioned whether they should allow kids to spend the night at tent city, especially on school nights, but decided they didn’t want to alienate members who were single mothers. Fearing the ire of his mother more than a potential blaze, the boy used his hands to pat out the fire, burning himself in the process.
Dawn knew they had been rankling administrators and members of the alumni-led lawsuit group. The chairwoman of the alumni group, Dr. Bettye Myers, had been by tent city earlier in the week and had a confrontation with Dawn, yelling at her to tell everyone to take down tent city and leave. Dawn refused.
In the hours after the fire, administrators finally made their move and demanded tent city be shut down. They said it was no longer a safe environment. The Preservation Society was told they could either take their things and go or tent city would be taken by force. “Bettye stomped out of here and had them do this to us,” Dawn told the Denton Record Chronicle in 1995. “This has nothing to do with safety. The fire was put out with a fire extinguisher. The boy was taken to a doctor and he only suffered minor burns.” It didn’t matter.
Everything was coming to a head.
Word spread from tent city about the news, and a small group retreated to Dawn’s house. Dawn pulled out the list of the 20 students who said they were willing to get arrested back when the group was formed. Six were standing in front of her. “This is the moment,” Dawn said. Sharon’s daughter Elizabeth, and her roommate Jennifer, wiped the tears from their eyes and found their conviction. Rebecca, sitting on the driveway, worried what her mom and stepdad were going to think when she told them she was arrested. Amy, who had helped snatch the “WO” off the campus bridge, was scared, but her conscience was clear. If she was going to have something on her record, this is what she wanted it for. They decided to get into Robin’s tent, “The White House,” since it was the largest, and not move. Six young women, all between the ages of 18 and 20, would take the final stand for the Preservation Society.
Afraid her ex-husband might take her kids away, Dawn couldn’t join them. Instead, she got on the phone and contacted a lawyer to help free the girls after the conflict.
For Elizabeth, before any arrests were made, she knew she had to call her mom.
SHARON HUNG UP the phone at the NordicTrack store where she worked with fellow TWUPS member Robin. “They’re getting arrested in your tent!” she yelled to her.
Robin perked up as Sharon raced out of the store. “Good, get in there!”
Back at TWU, the six young women made it to “The White House” and held hands in a circle as day made way to evening. They could hear DPS and campus custodial crews tearing down Preservation Nation around them, throwing out the tents they had collected and tearing down their flagpole. Finally, the White House was the only tent left. Time slowed down as the voices of DPS officers began getting louder and louder, telling them to come out. Jennifer remembers their condescending voices well. “Do you girls really want to get in trouble for this?” “We know you’re good girls and just want to come out.”
Rebecca remembers DPS finally threatening the group with pepper spray. “My memory is [they said] you can either come out of this tent or we’re gonna pepper spray you. And so we’re like, ‘I think we’re not going to get pepper sprayed’ and then they told us we were under arrest and for us to sit down.”
Preservation Nation had fallen. The six students hooked arms and walked together as DPS escorted them to the campus station, a mix of uncertainty and dread running through them all. This was Texas in 1995, and not Dallas or Houston, but a small speck of a college town closer to Oklahoma than Austin. Before their time at TWU, before they were inspired by Dawn and all of her fuck-the-man bravado, they would never have dreamed of putting themselves in a situation where they could be arrested. For them, they might as well have been TWU’s Most Wanted.
They were put at ease when they found Dawn and a lawyer at the station, ready to fight. “There were no handcuffs or bars or anything,” Elizabeth says. “The lawyer came in and was like, don’t freak out,” Jennifer says. “They’re full of shit, this is not a big deal, don’t be scared by these assholes.” In the end, DPS scolded the group and said they’d be reprimanded by the administration at a later date.
By the time Sharon arrived, the young women were free, crying and hugging each other. The shy conservative girls who’d never even considered talking back to authority were long gone. Even though the school was still on track for coeducation, they had at least tried to do something and let administrators know how important it was that there was a school in Texas that let women fight back. “It felt like we had done something big in at least fighting until the last second and feeling some celebration in that,” Jennifer says. “We felt like we won because we didn’t give up.”
IN THE END the administration got its way — but not without an embarrassing fight with a motivated cross section of its student body.
The alumni lawsuit also bore no fruit. In 1996, a judge finally ruled that the Board of Regents was within its powers when it voted to make the school co-ed. That same year, however, Lenni Lissberger, the editor of the student newspaper at the time, won a battle to legally make the school more transparent about its business operations. Still fuming that the school had gotten away with the short notice about the regents meeting, she worked with lawyers and lawmakers to draft a bill that requires universities to post notice of their meetings in the county where said meetings will take place, not just in Austin, as the law had previously stated. The bill passed unanimously and is still Texas state law, impacting the entire spectrum of issues at state-funded universities, including those that impact women on campus.
Ironically, and perhaps aided by the powerful showing of the group Dawn and Sharon helped lead, opening its doors to men indirectly led to the creation of TWU’s master’s degree program in women’s studies, the first of its kind in the state. Long in gestation, the passion for keeping TWU a place “primarily for women” was the fuel administrators needed to make the program a reality. The same year the school became co-ed, it also began requiring all students to take a women’s studies course, a requirement students must still fulfill before graduating.
Steven Serling, the would-be nursing student who had cried reverse sexism, was no doubt aware of the frenzy he inspired. Any preliminary exuberance might well have turned to panic as the dedication of the resistance intensified. Despite technically winning his campaign, Serling never showed up for his first class and was never seen on campus again.
In the Fall of 1994, when the Preservation Society was formed, TWU had just over 10,000 students. Today, it has over 16,000, an all-time high. The school still only has women’s sports teams, and the male population has never risen over 10 percent of the student body. I graduated from TWU in 2010, and, as a cisgendered man, I am keenly aware of how complicated my membership is in the long history of an institution created as a space for women.
So why go to a women’s college today, especially one that isn’t even exclusively for women? Preservation Society member Christina Krause Marks told me in anticipation of our conversation that she thought about the people she works with as a therapist who don’t fit so neatly into the male/female construct. “The whole nonbinary perspective has really turned this all on its ear.” She says it’s more important to focus on questioning power structures rather than centralizing the conversation around a she-versus-he scenario, which excludes students that don’t fit that categorization. Back in 1995, she says, “Trans women were not part of the conversation, you know? There are parts of pro-women history that I’m not proud of the more I learn about it.”
For most of the Preservation Society members I spoke to, TWU is a happy memory to revisit. I spoke over the phone with Elizabeth, now a teacher and musician living just outside Austin, with her children popping in occasionally, wondering what was keeping their mom from the dinner table. Sharon pursued her dream of influencing large groups of people and became a professor, first at Virginia Tech and later at the University of Vermont. “I’ve told my students over and over again, you can take over the administration building. Just do it. Just go do it!” Dawn, meanwhile, teaches sociology at Austin Community College, the inkwell of her TWU memories a mix of pride and sadness. “I have to tell you my impression is that I’m sort of the Voldemort of TWU,” she told me the first time we spoke back in 2019, hurt that the school hadn’t ever celebrated the work of the Preservation Society. She presumes it is because she’d been (and still is) critical of the school and is unwilling to dull her edge. “They want to keep things nice, sweet and civil,” she says, a wry smile on her face. “I’m not for the purge or anything like that, but there’s a time and a place.”
It’s easy to see what Dawn sees—a battle lost and a group largely forgotten by a university now only primarily for women. But if you look closer, it’s also easy to see the threads of the Preservation Society’s legacy that have stitched together a thriving university.
In May 2021, TWU celebrated as the Texas Legislature passed legislation establishing TWU as its very own university system, not unlike other state schools who have a main campus and numerous satellites. In addition to the expansion of operations across their three campuses, perhaps this new system cements TWU’s status as a school whose existence isn’t up for debate any longer. The TWU system is the nation’s first and only university system with a focus on women.
For a new generation of bright minds and powerful voices, Texas Woman’s University, once again, has been reborn.
LUIS RENDON Originally from South Texas, Luis G. Rendon is a journalist living in New York City. He writes about Tejano food and culture for Texas Monthly and Texas Highways.
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