Forty years have passed since women were first included in the undergraduate program at Hopkins in 1970. In that first year, 90 undergraduate women were accepted and for this year’s Women’s History Month, The News-Letter will be profiling a few of these women and their experiences at Hopkins.
Marjorie Olds, class of ‘72, applied to Hopkins because it was close to the DC area where she had grown up and because she had heard that Reverend Chester Wickwire, a person who took a major part in the anti-Vietnam movement, was a chaplain at the university.
“When I went to [apply to] Hopkins, I didn’t know how people applied to college,” she said. “I just drove there and asked if I could be interviewed. I figured they would want to meet me if they were thinking about taking me. It was very lovely. The [associate] director of admissions interviewed me. His name was Glen Thomas. He was a very engaging guy, very lovely,” Olds said.
When she received her acceptance letter in the mail, she was surprised. “I got a letter that said you’d been accepted as our first female graduate,” she said. “I was shocked because I didn’t know Hopkins was a men’s school.”
She called her dad, who had encouraged her to apply to Hopkins. “I have some good news and some bad news,” she told him. “The good news is that I got into Hopkins. The bad news is that it’s a men’s school. He responded, ‘Well, it was a men’s school.’”
Once she got over her surprise, she was excited to start a new stage of her education. “I was grateful that Hopkins had gambled on me since I had had sort of an unusual educational background,” she said.
Olds grew up in a communal house in the DC area, and though she went to a regular high school, she rarely attended it. “My parents had always had interesting work,” she said. My father was a presidential appointee twice, and my mother ran a shoestring budget agency called the National Consumers League.”
The building where her mother worked was the east coast headquarters for the efforts against the Vietnam War, which got her very interested in activism.
“This little old historic creaky rundown building was the headquarters for the mobilization against the war,” she said.
Some days, instead of going to class, she would volunteer there. “In high school, I found that I could go to school a couple a times a week and get good enough grades because it wasn’t a very demanding program.”
When she did go to school, she would try to make teachers and students more aware of what was going on in the war.
“I tried to engage my various teachers and convince them to talk about the war in Vietnam, that some of the young men that they looked out upon when they lectured . . . would come home maimed and not come home alive, [that it was] important that we’d talk about it.
“They would always say, ‘Oh, Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie, it’s not on the syllabus,’” she said.
Eventually she missed too much school and the administration told her that she would have to repeat the year. She refused.
“Since it hadn’t been that stimulating, I said no, ‘I’m never going to repeat this year,’” Olds said. “I felt very confident at the time that I’d go out and work and also be very involved in the efforts to end the war in Vietnam.”
After dropping out her junior year in high school, Olds continued to work on Vietnam War efforts and took college classes in DC. “High school is good, but so is the real world,” she said. “During life, I realized I missed lots of things . . . I’m sure there are gaps, but there always are gaps [in education]. I felt really fortunate that I had all kinds of off-beat jobs before I went to Hopkins,” Olds said.
By the time she enrolled at Hopkins, Olds had become pretty independent, a quality that she also saw in the school.
“Hopkins was set up so that if a person [was] independent, they could do things a little bit their own way,” she said. “The women that came that year were a pretty independent group. I had been living on my own since I was 17, I had had a life outside of school, I had worked and Hopkins was one of the more independent programs.”
Olds entered Hopkins as a junior english major. The school had to accommodate for her and the other women entering that year. Olds remembers receiving a letter from the school telling her what classes she needed to take.
“[The note] mentioned weight training and crew. I didn’t know what either of them were, but I’m pretty athletic, so I thought that would be fine,” she said. “Before classes started, I got a different note that [said] they didn’t have locker room facilities. They ended up waiving the gym requirement, so I don’t think I took gym at all.”
She acknowledges that the administration must have had to find places for women to live, but the thought of living in a dorm had never crossed her mind. She borrowed a van from a friend, and drove up to Baltimore to look for a place to live.
“I found a sign outside of somebody’s apartment that said ‘Room For Rent.’ I think my rent was 50 dollars a month, some tiny amount that I could easily pay after a couple of nights of waitressing,” Olds said. “It was very convenient.”
During her time at Hopkins, among other odd jobs, Olds worked as a waitress in Jen’s Restaurant near campus, which later became the inspiration for Anne Tyler’s novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
“I had many part-time jobs for financial reasons,” she said. “I also ran an independent film series in the Chaplain’s Office. The student union put on this really funny foreign film series with films that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.”
She really enjoyed living in Baltimore as well. “It was a very interesting community. The harbor was undeveloped [and] it was a fun place to hang out,” she said. “It had rough bars [as well]. I found it all very interesting, and I never felt worried, coming from another city. I love the ethnic neighborhoods that Baltimore has [and] the little rowhouses behind Hopkins for the poor white working class.
“I thought Baltimore was a very lovely east coast city. I liked the museums, movie houses, bars and coffee shops,” she said. As for the Hopkins campus itself, she especially liked Levering Hall. “I liked [its] sort of rundown comfortableness,” she said.
Throughout her two years at Hopkins, Olds continued protesting against the war and participated in city activism.
“It was a great time in my life. I met lots of interesting people who were putting their political ideals into actual action, that were trying to feed the hungry, help kids that are underserved get a good education, mobilize against the war in Vietnam,” she said. “Large groups of us would go to DC for political actions [as well]. “In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, it was a very political city. There was a lot going on [with] anti-war movements, school desegregation and civil rights.”
She worked with Wickwire on an inner-city tutoring program, which was one of her motivations to apply to the school in the first place. She also studied with John Walton, who was a Hopkins professor and the head of the Baltimore school board. She got teaching credentials, tutored and worked in the city schools.
“Through that experience, I got to know lots of kids who lived in institutional settings and that sort of launched me into my career to work with incarcerated kids,” Olds said.
She also noted the amount of outstanding faculty she encountered at Hopkins. Even though it was the first year for women students, there were two women professors that she remembers, one of whom was an art history professor whose name she unfortunately couldn’t recall.
“I’ve been very interested in art history since I took that class,” she said. “Whenever I traveled for work, I’ve always visited art museums. She was very spontaneous and wonderful. There were [definitely] more male faculty [in 1970], but I’m sure that’s dramatically changed.”
The other woman professor she had was Sherry Olson who taught regional planning.
She also remembers a Dean of Students who helped her out once. “I can remember talking to him at one point for some dire need. He was just great. He figured out right away how to handle some administrative thing I needed to do,” she said. “No matter how independent we are, it really does help to have receptive administrators and faculty who know how to demand the best we can give, but also be flexible about the important details. Hopkins had that.”
Overall, Olds felt that she had a great experience at Hopkins. “Hopkins gave me a foundation, where my life led me. Your college years are very formative, it was the right place to express ideas and hear other people’s thoughts, move forward and go with it. The people that I was drawn to at Hopkins were really terrific role models,” she said.
“The size of Hopkins was very comfortable, large enough to be interesting and small enough that you could get to where you [needed] to go. I thought the time I spent at Hopkins was really valuable.”
After Hopkins, Olds went to Cornell Law School. Though there were only seven women in her class, this did not stop her from succeeding.
“The fact that there were no women faculty, very few women students, especially very few women students with kids, the fact that there were no top administrators that were female — it didn’t deter me at all,” Olds said.
After graduating from law school, she went on to become the first female district attorney in the area and started a unit to prosecute crimes of violence on women and children. She opened up New York state’s first office of Law Guardian.
“[It] represents all the kids who had been abused, neglected, [dealing with] juvenile delinquency and foster care,” Olds said.
She has also worked for the New York State legislature and did two terms in court. She also worked with people trying to overcome addiction.
“I’ve had really all public service jobs, to lend whatever extra strength I had to [people] to see if they can have a chance to have some of that opportunity that I had,” Olds said.
Her acceptance to Hopkins also gave her entire family opportunities. “My brothers, through me, were introduced to Baltimore. One still lives there and has worked in the state facility for 30 years. My other brother went on to became a very well-known radiologist,” she said. “We have a special love for Hopkins because it opened up the world of Baltimore to the whole family.”
She was even able to eventually receive her actual high school diploma later in life, though it was after she had become a lawyer and had children.
She now has six children, grandchildren and has had many foster children over the years whose lives she is still involved in. She has only been able to make it back to Hopkins once for a reunion 15 years ago, but she’s thankful for where the school has gotten her and the people she’s been able to meet.
“If you’re very engaged in your life, you maybe don’t go to reunions so much, but that doesn’t change how positive I feel about Hopkins and how glad I am that it’s coeducational,” Olds said.
“I met lots of people from different walks of life. It’s really important that before we settle down somewhere to do a few offbeat things and not just feel that we have to follow a certain path. There’s lots of ways to be successful, and lots of ways to measure success. Hopkins really gave me a chance; really gave me an opportunity to become the person I was meant to be [because] they didn’t try to push me into a mold. What I gained at Hopkins stayed with me, and it’s really put me in good stead for the kind of life I want to have.”
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