The SpectatHER The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper
Volume 109 No. 17
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
“The Pulse of the Student Body”
Matt Melucci/ The Spectator
stuyspec.com
THE PIONEERS
The Original 13 / Photo Courtesy of the Indicator
ALICE de RIVERA
DR. EVELYN HORN
KATHY PARKS
By TALIA KAHAN
By AHMED HUSSEIN
By CLARA SHAPIRO
Alice de Rivera made headlines in the spring of 1969 for spearheading a case against Stuyvesant High School. At that time, Stuyvesant was all-boys and did not admit girls, even if they scored above the cut-off on the SHSAT. De Rivera sued the Board of Education (BOE) on the basis that the maintenance of a public all-boys school was not in compliance with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. But before this all occurred, de Rivera attended John Jay High School. Her experience there was unusual: the teachers went on strike for a large portion of the school year (consequently, students were not in attendance for weeks at a time), and once they returned from their strike, the schedule had to be changed to make sure that all the material would be taught on time. She initiated the case during the fall of her freshman year at John Jay, and it was not resolved until the spring of that same year. In some senses, de Rivera was disappointed with the result of the trial because the BOE voluntarily repealed Stuyvesant’s sex restriction. This prevented the case from creating an important precedent. Unfortunately, de Rivera was never able to attend Stuyvesant because her family moved to upstate New York at the start of her sophomore year. Today, de Rivera is a practicing doctor at a free clinic in Lewiston, Maine. She finds this work very meaningful because she is able to form relationships with each of her patients.
Fifty years ago, Dr. Evelyn Horn (’72) was faced with a dilemma. She had just been accepted to the Bronx High School of Science but also had the opportunity to go to a bigger and better school: Stuyvesant. Dr. Horn decided to challenge herself by entering Stuyvesant as a sophomore in the fall of 1969. As one of the 13 female students, Dr. Horn struggled at first with teachers who “were used to only having guys in their classes [and walked] around in a T-shirt and shorts, cracking lewd jokes,” she recalled. Nonetheless, Dr. Horn eventually adjusted to Stuyvesant when she discovered her passion for math. Interestingly, she found that most of the spectacular math teachers were women, all of whom were role models for her. What really struck her, though, was the level of achievement her peers attained in her English classes, and she realized that “these students were also spectacular non-math students as well,” she said. “This is something I have noticed with current students, and this phenomenon seems to have been ingrained in the Stuyvesant community for decades.” Despite Stuyvesant’s reputation for being cut-throat, Dr. Horn received constant support from her peers. She advised, “Work hard and make sure you still find the things you love to do”—and challenge the precedent that society has set for girls. Indeed, one of the most important lessons Stuyvesant taught her is perseverance. She learned not to let male-dominated fields intimidate her. She is a cardiologist now (a field largely dominated by men), and after going to a school with just 13 girls for a year, she was not afraid to challenge the status quo again.
It was 1969, the year of Woodstock and Apollo 13, when Kathy Parks (’72) first came to Stuyvesant along with 12 other New York City girls. “We knew we were smart girls and deserved to go there,” Parks recounted. But in a school then saturated with sexism, many found the idea of a girl deserving to go to a school like Stuyvesant laughable. “Many teachers, especially the older men, made it clear they didn’t think that girls belonged at Stuyvesant. For instance, one of my biology teachers said, referring to the groin area, ‘Your body is sensitive to hot and cold. If you put hot water on your body and then cold water, you can see the difference. Except for women. You, Ms. Parks, won’t be able to do that experiment,’” Parks recalled. “I was the only girl in that class. That was one of my most humiliating moments.” This teacher was not the only person resentful that Stuyvesant’s all-male glory days had come to a close. Parks recounts packs of boys crowding at windows to hoot and ogle at a nearby female. “I would see boys hoisting themselves up to look through these little rectangular windows in the staircases and hallways. They’d look through and they’d say, ‘Oh look, there goes one of them,’” Parks said. Growing up a “tomboy” in Stuy Town, Parks had been conditioned from a young age to ignore these gender-based slights. “It never bothered me to be the only girl among boys, or only woman among men,” she said. “The first time I experienced that was when I was seven years old. I used to play baseball in a park, at the diamond right nearby. My older brother went to Little League. I was a pretty good baseball player, too, so I thought I would go to play Little League with my brother. But when I got there, they said, ‘Little girls don’t play Little League.’ I said, ‘I don’t understand why not. I’m a better ball player than my brother!’ In the end, I got to go and watch, but I couldn’t hide my resentment. Still, I made sure I was always there.” Parks’s rebellion against the gender stereotypes of the athletic world continued during her years at Stuyvesant. “The football coach— he made it clear he didn’t think girls belonged at Stuyvesant. So I used to go to football games just to watch him squirm,” Parks recalled, chuckling. But not every teacher at Stuyvesant was a staunch defender of sexism. Fifty years later, Parks can still rattle off a list of her most beloved teachers: “I adored Mr. Kane, my biology teacher, and my English teacher, Mr. Frank McCourt. His brother, Malachy, used to come into the class quite a bit. He was a radio talk show personality. Then there was Mr. [Sterling] Jensen—he was the drama teacher. And Mrs. Mertz, our homeroom teacher,” she said. These teachers supported Parks and her friends up to the day Parks remembers feeling the proudest: graduation day. “I felt like we had exerted our rights as women to show that we were every bit as capable as the men,” she said. “We had to be better and smarter than all the boys, because it’s still a man’s world. It’s true for women back in 1969, and it’s true for women in 2019.” But Parks stands as a testament to women’s ability to thrive in an environment set against them. “Be so good that you figuratively kick their butts at everything,” she said. “Do the best you can and don’t let anyone intimidate you.”
July 1848 The first women’s rights convention organized by women is held in New York.
December 1869 Wyoming gives women the right to vote and hold office.
DR. PAULA MARCUS By BRIAN ZHANG
During her time at Stuyvesant, Dr. Paula Marcus (’72) described herself as being a radical activist in a time of immense political change. She argued against the Vietnam War and was an active participant of the women’s movement in New York City—a series of campaigns that demanded reform on women’s social rights - even managing to discover a group of peers at Stuyvesant that supported similar ambitions. Unfortunately, as a conservative institution, Stuyvesant did not approve of such political activity coming from a female student; Dr. Marcus received her fair share of “‘[You] must not do this’” and “meetings at the principal’s office,” she said. But it was more of the subtle comments that “made her feel very out of place at times,” she described. For instance, she still vividly recalls the moment that her math teacher asked her—the only girl in the class—to straighten his desk because in his eyes, such tasks would train her to be an adequate housewife in the future. Dr. Marcus, though extremely upset, chose not to cause a scene by arguing; instead, she took a more indirect approach to advocate for her beliefs, such as disproving stereotypes that girls should have little say in the education system by having the Board of Education accept an academic curriculum that she had helped to design. Following graduation, Dr. Marcus continued to focus on her political pursuits at Antioch University and ultimately became an assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Montefiore Medical Center. “Just have fun,” she advised. “You all work very hard, but remember to de-stress. Sometimes, due to the challenges that we face, we forget all that life has to offer us.”
1872 Victoria Claflin Woodhull becomes the first female presidential candidate in the United States, nominated by the National Radical Reformers.
1890 Wisconsin becomes the first state in the U.S. to allow women the right to vote.
1903 Marie Curie becomes the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.