I teach geography at UNC.

In one of my courses, I take students on a tour.  I focus on the long struggle for women to gain access to UNC.  Spencer Hall, on Franklin Street, is part of my tour. When it was built in 1925, the building gave female students a “place of their own.”

I ask students to think about the location, and reflect on historic campus maps.

“It’s a long way from campus,” students say. And “it’s right next to the President’s home.”

Observing these spaces helps students imagine the campus landscape of the time. They’re animated when I ask them if they’ve ever been in a space where they didn’t feel welcome. They giggle when I ask if there might’ve been any sex or sexuality on campus when it was an exclusively male place. But they’re hooked.

We examine arguments that female students were “a distraction” from the supposedly purely intellectual space of campus.

The idea of panoptical spaces comes alive and it’s easy for students to see that such spaces allow for control, and encourage self-censorship. Students talk to each other about this as a space designed for regulating sexuality.  Students understand that a century ago, female bodies were seen as the bodies possessing sexuality.

Female bodies were quite literally placed under the watchful eye of the university president, the ultimate authority, the patriarch. If a woman’s ‘honor’ was in question, she was forced to leave UNC and leave the town of Chapel Hill within 24 hours!

Title IX in 1972 marked the end of a long struggle for gender equity for students on our campus.

Fast forward to 2016. President Margaret Spellings is in the yellow house on Franklin Street.

Whose bodies in North Carolina today are described as sexualized?

Whose safety does Margaret Spellings refuse to acknowledge?

Transgender students.

You can’t hide behind Hate Bill 2, Margaret Spellings.

Will you stand with our transgender students? Will you respect Title IX and federal law?

— Altha Cravey

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