“You can be anything you want, but you have to be ladylike,” Professor of Communication Mary Dalton’s mother used to say to her.
Dalton wears vibrant, self-knit ponchos and shawls. Her mind is expansive and her words are powerful—more reminiscent of streams of consciousness than of complete thoughts. She is a professor who appears sure of her identity, but when I sat in my COM 320 class and listened to her, it became evident how the notion of the “ladylike” had shaped her during her formative years.
On her birthday, Dalton walked into my class with two cookies for each student.
“I bake cookies for students,” Dalton said. “This is part of who I am.”
She views herself as “maternal” towards students and “traditionally feminine,” but says she’s unsure whether these specific traits have to do with her upbringing in the South.
Although she deems herself to be outwardly feminine, Dalton has always considered one of her greatest attributes to be her fiercely competitive nature—a trait often associated with masculinity—particularly in her professional career.
“It’s intrinsic, it’s not related to being a certain type of woman,” Dalton said she realized as she aged. “It’s related to trying to be as authentic as a human being as I can be. And not… [to] put myself in, or feel like anybody else puts me in any of those boxes. But the first step is you have to see that they are boxes.”
During her time as a student at Wake Forest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dalton’s ambition led her to find ways to inhabit and deconstruct these boxes in Strings, a “non-conformist,” “anti-establishment” social society. Strings prided themselves on breaking the mold and being independent, while still ensuring their members were in the rooms where decisions were made.
Despite Strings being a forward-thinking group, Dalton felt herself conform to the expectations of her male counterparts in Greek life. During a Sigma Chi fundraiser known as Derby Days, which still occurs annually, she was asked to perform menial tasks on behalf of the fraternity, such as household chores.
It wasn’t until she served as a Greek life advisor on a Panhellenic Caucus that a lightbulb went off in Dalton’s head: these tasks were degrading.
Women have assumed a subservient role in Greek life for decades, seeking men’s approval. And they still are.
“And I’ve heard that now it’s, what, ‘Beach Weekend’?” Dalton asked me.
It baffled me that Dalton knew about the “Beach Weekend” tradition in which the brothers of a fraternity invite a date of their choosing to go to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for the weekend.
After accepting an invitation, dates are expected to paint a cooler for their first Beach Weekend. Young women rationalize the implied requirement by reminding themselves that the fraternity brother is paying for the trip.
But, for most, these dates are last-minute setups or casual relationships. Either way, each man ends up with a date, whether it’s one girl or another. This begs the question: Does shelling out money warrant women spending countless hours painting? And to Dalton’s point, “What kind of equal partnership is that?”
Dalton is an advocate for equality, whether in the films we study in class, be on screen like we study, or in the relationships she’s experienced firsthand.
What is truly special about Dalton is that she can bridge this gap between what she’s studied and her real-life experience, meshing the two in and outside of the classroom. Out of the seven questions I asked her, this article is the result of two. A conversation that was supposed to last 15-20 minutes lasted an hour. To sum up, Professor Dalton, in her own words from class: “My subconscious is way more intelligent than my conscious.”
