Low ratio of male to female students at Eastern Carolina Teachers' College
Here, Henderson explains what it was like to be one of the first students at East Carolina Teachers' College, where there were approximately seventy-five male students to the college's nine hundred female students. Although Henderson does not discuss what effect, if any, this gender ratio had on curriculum or academics, he mentions that it made it easier for men in terms of courtship. His comments here are illuminating because they go against the grain in that gender ratios were typically inverted in coeducational institutions of learning in the 1930s.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Thomas Henderson, October 28, 1999. Interview K-0228. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Well I came to East
Carolina Teachers' College.
- CHARLES THOMPSON:
-
Oh you did.
- THOMAS HENDERSON:
-
I was there the first year they had any students.
- CHARLES THOMPSON:
-
And which year was that?
- THOMAS HENDERSON:
-
Nineteen and thirty-two.
- CHARLES THOMPSON:
-
Okay. First year they had students.
- THOMAS HENDERSON:
-
First year they had any men students to amount to anything. There were
about seventy-five boys and nine hundred girls. And I had a beautiful
girl. Somebody said, "How in the world did you get a pretty
girl like that as scrawny and as skinny as you are?" I said,
"Well, I was one of seventy-five and there were nine hundred to
pick from." And I picked this girl. And that's the only reason
I got her is because I had on pants. [Laughter]
