"Playboy: Girls/ Women Of The Ivy League Revealed" September 1979
$150
[286] pp.
1979
11" x 8 1/2"
VG
At the Dartmouth College library, Playboy magazine was in such demand this week that the librarians lent it out for only two hours at a time and checked carefully each time it was returned, to see whether any pages were missing.
Students lined up at Harvard Square to buy the September issue of the magazine, and it sold out at Princeton. At Brown, fraternity members reserved copies ahead of time. At Yale, one newsstand reported first‐day sales were seven times the average — and Yale is closed for summer recess.
Some professors joined the rush while others frowned on it, but no one maintained that he was reading the articles. Most turned quickly to page 159, the beginning of an 11‐page, full‐color feature on Ivy League women.
It contains 30 pictures of women from that high‐pressure academic world, where the emphasis is on preparation for, and promise of, a bright career.
With Phi Beta Kappa Key
The centerfold, a three‐page fold‐out distinct from the Ivy feature, features a University of California law student wearing only a sweater and cap. She has worked as a volunteer for the National Women's Political Caucus and wore her Phi Beta Kappa key to her first session with a Playboy photographer.
Being part of Playboy's monthly ration of flesh‐filled pictures did pose problems for some of the students who were photographed. One problem was the protests of campus feminists, who shad contended that the magazine degraded women, and whose anger was rekindled when the feature came out this week.
As they did last winter, when a Playboy photographer toured Ivy League campuses and advertised in student newspapers for women to pose for the feature, college feminists raised the issue of free speech versus perceived pornography. But they have not scheduled any feminist demonstrations since the magazine came out.
Various Explanations
“I don't think Playboy should exist at all,” said Naomi Cahn of Princeton's Women's Center. “I don't think It, should have been able to advertise to interview women for their pictorial, because their profits are built on a basis of exploitation of women.”
Most of the Ivy League women who posed maintained that the pictures would be forgotten by the time school opened next month. Their explanations for posing ranged from the idea that presented a challenge, to the concept that it was art. They were paid fees ranging from $100 fully clothed to $400 for unclothed poses.
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“It was not a moral issue and it was just a challenge I couldn't resist,” said a Brown student, who posed using the pseudonym, Angela Ray.
“To me, posing for Playboy was no big deal,” said Carrie Margolin, a doctoral candidate in educational psychology at Dartmouth. “There must be a lot of people who feel that Ivy League women are sacred or something.”
“This was for Brown, and that's why I did it,” said Hillary Clayson, a 19year‐old sophomore, who called the feminists at Brown “extremely annoying.”
But, Miss Clayson continued, “I'm afraid of being asked about the maga‐. zine and what it does to women. I wonder if I haven't made a mistake.” She also said that she was glad the issue came out in August “because all the attention makes me nervous.”
The attention has created other problems for some of the women. Lisa Bennett Fedors, a Princeton graduate student, said she had received a few obscene telephone calls since the magazine went on sale. Others are worried that they might be recognized on the street.
Effect on Careers
And some are concerned that their career prospects might be endangered. But Vicki McCarty, the Berkeley graduate pictured in the centerfold, said that she had changed her mind—Playboy would probably be “a career advantage, instead of a disadvantage.”
Of the Ivy League women, one said she wants to be a biomedical engineer. Another owns a solar‐energy consulting concern with her husband. Another, whose $400 payment for being photographed went toward a trip to Leningrad, said she wanted to be a foreign correspondent for a newspaper.
Playboy made some converts among Ivy League women who had never expected to see themselves near a centerfold. Debbie K. Solomon, a Cornell art history major, turned down summer job offers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington to work in Playboy's promotion department in Chicago. In the magazine she was pictured fully clothed.
“Too many people see an Ivy League education as career vocational training,” she said, “and your education should never be directed that way.”
Four others posed for Playboy but insisted on using pseudonyms, including Miss Ray, the only woman at Brown who lived in a fraternity. She said she insisted on the false name because she had not told her parents that she was posing and was afraid of what they would say.
Playboy spokesmen say the magazine ventured into the Ivy League expecting to find very bright women who were not very pretty. “You tend to think of Emily Dickinson types,” said David Salyers of Playboy. “Horsey women in tweeds.”
In the process, Playboy says, its own consciousness was raised. In previous features on college students the magazine referred to them as “girls.” After the anti‐Playboy demonstrations last winter, Playboy decided to refer to the Ivy Leaguers as “women.”