Showdown
This is a serialized longform essay about two pivotal issues of Playboy magazine in the late 1970s. Click here to read the introduction to the series; here to read last week’s issue about the 25th Anniversary issue.
In December 1978, the same month that Playboy announced Candy Loving as winner of the Great Playmate Hunt, the magazine also announced its intention to publish a specialty feature the following year and began seeking models for the pictorial, “Girls of the Ivy League.” David Chan, the extremely mild-mannered photographer who’d led the search for the Silver Anniversary Playmate, began at Harvard, bringing along the usual cameras and light meters and questionnaires. And also, it turned out, a fair amount of controversy.
Even before any models were set to be interviewed, a debate erupted when Mr. Chan tried to place an ad in Harvard’s student paper. These were essentially the same ads Playboy had been running for years at places like the Big Eight and the Pacific Conference, yet The Harvard Crimson refused Playboy and that denial in itself made headlines in papers across the country as it brought the First Amendment into the fold. Against claims of censorship, editors at The Crimson remained steadfast, asserting the magazine degraded women and was therefore offensive. This was coming from Harvard, a coed Ivy that at the time still maintained a secret society along with their socially competitive final clubs—environments rich with old-money connections and instrumental in upper echelon post-graduation employment—that were all exclusive to men.
As the search moved on, the student-run papers at the remaining seven schools were confronted with similar dilemmas. At Brown, Playboy’s ad in The Herald immediately drew protests from Brown Educated Women Against Rape and Exploitation, Women of Brown United, and Gay Women of Brown, who co-signed a letter to The Herald’s editor accusing the student paper of “perpetuating violence against women”—simply by running the ad.
From the onset, the controversy was marked as noteworthy, finding its way into The New York Times by December 10, 1978—the first of two articles to appear in the Times on the Ivy League issue.
Media covering all eight of the Ivies fanned out beyond the East Coast. Articles in student journals and pieces by staff reporters at local papers were supplemented by syndicated columns bringing the debate to places like Abilene, Kansas, Owensboro, Kentucky and Longview, Washington. Some with their on-point, sure-to-be-read headlines, “Ivy League Editors Split on Ad for Nude Models.” Others were terse, relying on bold font and typeset to impart the gravity of a controversy demanding national attention.
In the end, all the student papers, with the exception of The Crimson, conceded to Playboy. Years later, when President Barack Obama, himself an Ivy League graduate, nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, the attendant review by the Senate Judiciary Committee included all of Justice Kagan’s public writing. The full record went back to Justice Kagan’s days at The Daily Princetonian and her reporting, published on February 6, 1979, explaining the editorial decision to run Playboy’s advertisement which had turned on “freedom of the press rather than feminism.”
As with the other schools, the editors of The Daily Princetonian equated feminism with quashing the ad. It was Playboy representatives who made the argument in favor of a woman’s right to make her own decisions, pointing out that a school refusing the ad was effectively refusing agency to their female students. Many on campus agreed with Playboy. Their views were pushed aside by administrators like Archie C. Epps III, then Harvard’s dean of students, who meant to cut down any debate about Playboy’s search for models with his statement on behalf of the school; “[C]ommon sense should tell people it’s most unwise to participate in such a scheme.”
The storm over whether student newspapers should run Playboy’s advertisements expanded into nine months of more general protests over the magazine.
Nationwide coverage continued. A syndicated piece (from UPI) running the same day as the San Diego State University Valentine’s Day contest, quoted angry Princeton students who claimed, “Society has become inured to the degradation of women.” David Chan appeared on the Phil Donahue Show along with some of the young woman he’d recruited for a debate.
The ongoing demonstrations were not confined to student activists. Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, hosted a forum of over 200 women, where the Women’s Studies Center faculty uniformly condemned Playboy and its recruitment of women from what they regarded as their off-limit school. Speakers included Hester Eisenstein, coordinator of Barnard’s Experimental College along with professors and editors of the Barnard Bulletin. They were angered, dropping the c-word in a quote to reporters with the suggestion that was how the magazine viewed women, even Ivy League women. They called Playboy’s presence on campus a move to “divide and conquer.”1
On the other side of the argument were the young women at Barnard (reportedly over 100) who’d shown up to meet with Playboy representatives. Young women who denied they were being exploited. While identifying as feminists, they had “transgressive” opinions. “I don’t think Playboy is evil.” “I don’t think it’s demeaning to be in Playboy. A woman can be both beautiful and smart.” “They’re looking at real women… with real intelligence.”2
Their comments echoed David Chan who’d called the opposing views a healthy debate.
The 1979 protests accused Playboy of violence, exploitation, and the degrading treatment of women, although Harvard’s library carried the magazine and preserved the back issues in bound volumes. The wrath appeared narrowly centered on recruitment—specifically the recruitment of Ivy League students. Why those students? Why those schools when, at San Diego State University, with the appearance of a Playmate and the contest to “win” her as a date, there was no feminist outrage. Online video shows students, sardine-like on the lawn, eager to see and hopefully meet Ms. Loving and no sign of a demonstration anywhere. None was mentioned by the reporter. Similar coverage of a Playboy casting call at San Diego State the year earlier offered no suggestion of any student protest, mirroring the National Organization of Women’s picketing attempts against recruitment for the 25th Anniversary centerfold which had failed to draw the slightest interest.
Arguably, some schools are more politically charged, more inclined to activism. No dispute that feminists issues were more the norm on liberal campuses, particularly those with a larger female presence. But it’s hard to make the case that the Ivy League protests were solely driven by their on-campus demographics and that their students were more politically aware, more in tune with feminist discourse.
San Diego State University was solidly coed in 1979. Also, and quite significantly, the school was a recognized leader in the field of Women’s Studies with its undergraduate department begun in 1969 and a graduate studies program added a year later. Those departments, acknowledged as the oldest in the country, started years before Barnard, which did not have a formal Women’s Studies major until 1977.
Yet a pictorial featuring models from Harvard and Dartmouth and UPenn and Brown and Cornell and Yale and Columbia and Princeton erupted into a controversy worthy of national attention. The September 1979 issue, originally to be titled “Girls of the Ivy League” then changed with the printed word “Girls” crossed out and replaced with the handwritten word “Women,” is still one of Playboy’s most controversial covers of all time, though it was far less explicit than the “Girls of the Big Ten!” cover of September 1977.
Decades later, it was the Ivy League issue that continued to pique curiosity.
The academic paper, “Ivy League Bunnies: When Playboy Came to Brown,” published in 2013, explored the decision of female students to pose, placing a singular focus on the fact that they were from Brown. Around 2020, a Yale student researching “The Girls of the Ivy League” features (run in 1979, 1986 and 1995) tracked down a Dartmouth graduate who’d posed for Playboy in 1979, prompting the alumna to write:
What really makes me cringe about Playboy’s Ivy League issues is that they featured young women who were working hard to achieve an academic and professional equality that had eluded previous generations, despite heroic efforts. Without wishing to exaggerate the impact, I would say that those three Playboy issues did a certain amount of damage to the cause.3
Young women breaking through male-centric barriers into high levels of academia was no small achievement. But by focusing solely on the Ivy League women who posed, these academic papers avoid considering whether the other women who posed for the magazine were as promising and hard working as anyone attending a school like Harvard or Yale or Princeton.
The off-kilter focus showed what the Ivy League protests really came down to; two opposing narratives suddenly, and without much warning, facing off, as if in High Noon.
On the topic of the Ivy League, Jeff Cohen, then Playboy’s associate photo editor had been clear. If he hadn’t been able to recruit women at Harvard, the project would have been dropped.4 That’s the first narrative. Harvard, boasting eight United States presidents as graduates, along with Nobel laureates, billionaires, and winners of Academy Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and Olympic medals, was more than just a college. Long the marker of the cultural elite. These days, Harvard is mostly seen as a school with tiny admission rates, requiring oboe lessons and perfect SAT scores. In the late 1970s, Harvard, woven into the words, “Ivy League,” was on its way to becoming something of a brand.
Paul Fusell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, a 1979 publication and perennial best-seller defining the lifestyle of each social tier, uses a Harvard sticker in a car’s review window as a stellar example of high standing. Of class itself. And then there were the clothes.
On season three of Articles of Interest, a podcast devoted to the history of fashion, I learned that the “American Ivy” aesthetic began at Princeton. Khakis and loafers and Lacoste shirts (collar up) and blazers with elbow patches easily distinguished the wearer. It was a look that eventually became immensely popular off East Coast campuses, particularly as the 1970s brought Ralph Lauren.
On the heels of the exquisitely photographed Polo ads, came The Official Preppy Handbook, released in 1980. Meant as satirical with its cheeky tagline (“Look Muffy, a book for us”), it quickly took hold as a guide to more than clothes. It was country club living and how to brunch like Caroline Kennedy who, as it happens, was still an undergraduate at Harvard when David Chan was interviewing her fellow students. Her brother was then at Andover, soon to enter Brown.
When asked his opinion of the September issue on its release, a Harvard alum offered that even without the text, he’d have known the women were “Ivy League and not Big 10 women. There’s more Eastern breeding and reserve in these faces.”
So while protests of the inaugural Ivy League issue used words like female exploitation, that didn’t feel like the whole story.
When Dartmouth President, John G. Kemeny, issued a statement in response to David Chan’s ad, his concern was “‘the danger of serious negative impact’ on the college” (emphasis added).5 A letter to The Yale Daily published on the February 1, 1979, signed by two members of the Undergraduate Women’s Caucus, used the classic debate tactic of answering an anticipated critique to strengthen their argument and claimed that their problem with Playboy wasn’t “because we as Ivy League women are any ‘better’ than other women…” In an opposing letter published on the same page, two female students who found the entire controversy puritanical, wondered if some at Yale were “horrified at the prospect of being subjected to the same Playboy treatment previously confined to the likes of UCLA, Berkeley, Bigg State College and lesser institutions[.]”
A reporter in Red Bank, New Jersey was equally direct when she stated what was so obvious. “Almost every issue of Playboy contains pictures of college women posing in the nude—why then all the brouhaha over Ivy Leaguers who take it off?” In the next paragraph, a Dartmouth sophomore supplied the answer. “Ivy League girls are supposed to be the crème de la crème,… and there’s a lot of stigma attached to girls who pose nude.”6
Playboy’s Silver Anniversary centerfold meant to take on those labels as part of her public relation efforts. “There’s a stigma attached to Playmates. Everyone thinks they’re not too bright.”7
That was the second narrative. Stigma. The contrast between the media coverage of the Ivy League recruiting (“the brouhaha”) and the overall, positive response to Playboy’s Silver Anniversary issue shines a pretty sharp lens on what was at stake.
This was about class and prestige. What was so inflammatory – sparking instant controversy – was the threat to a cherished narrative about what The Official Preppy Handbook deemed “socially acceptable colleges” coming squarely into conflict with the narrative long spun about the young women who “typically” posed in Playboy. Those women had been unfairly stereotyped as bimbos and dumb blondes and cardboard cutouts.
In an aspirational society, it was a heavy branding.
Continue Reading
After its release, the Ivy League issue continues to live rent-free in the collective mind of second wave feminists and opinion writers of the day lay it all out. Click here to read the next issue in this series.
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“I Owe It All to Community College” by Tom Hanks
This Week’s Music
"September Gurls (Single Version)" by Big Star (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments welcome, but here’s a thought. Who do you think was stirring up the Ivy League controversy? The media? Mainstream feminists? Students? A combination?
Columbia Daily Spectator, February 1, 1979.
Columbia Daily Spectator, January 29, 1979.
“Full Disclosure,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (March-April 2020).
The Boston Globe, January 10, 1979.
Valley News, January 18, 1979.
The Daily Register, August 12, 1979.
Washington Post, January 10, 1979.
So well researched and interesting Melanie. Thank you.
Really interesting history on this. It all feels like it tracks in a way given what I know of academia now but fascinating it took on this form over Playboy and the intersection of feminism in the late 70’s.