"Girls don't become student body president"
Cathy Sterling recalls some of the challenges she faced as the first female student body president and the general student reaction to increased female student enrollment at NC State.
Interview on 2010-11-02 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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There's some times now, particularly with the elections that are going on and the ads that are being run and there's just times when I
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look at how people become elected officials
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and how things happen at a state level and a national level that I'm sometimes sitting there going,
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this is so oddly familiar.
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Maybe the language is a little upgraded but this is like the same battles that happened back at State over student government.
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Don't we ever evolve? [Laughs]
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and there were of course a group of people that were really hostile to me for the athletics.
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I was really naive about hostility.
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I was raised in a religion that was very gentle and very loving and very positive
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so it was like a bath in cold water to look at somebody and go but you don't like me just because of the opinion I hold?
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I mean you really, really don't like me? [Laughs] You're really angry at me?
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And I remember after I was elected Chancellor Caldwell had a dinner at his house for just the start of the year
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and he put me at a table with a bunch of student athletes.
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And they were very well behaved, but I remember going in going, I'm being fed to the lions. [Laughs]
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But they weren't--. I don't know whether--. Casey was the athletic director then
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and he was such a gentleman.
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Any hostility that came towards me never came because he told anybody to be,
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or encouraged it or supported it, and I was always very clear about that.
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He was an amazing man, and he got what I said. He got it.
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He didn't necessarily agree but he got it, he understood it.
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But that level of hostility was really shocking,
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and then there were other people that were just, this is State. Girls don't become student body president.
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And there were people who outside of the university,
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in fact there may be some letters in those letters I gave you.
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I got a lot of nasty letters from out in the state.
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Yeah, and just like, what? [Laughs] Whoa.
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And then when I was elected that happened too,
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but because being student body president could be seen as building that resume to go on to leadership within the state,
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and you know, for me, I mean women weren't going anywhere, right? I was going to get married, make babies, and stay at home.
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Why would I do such a--? It was perceived as a taking away of something that by right belonged to some guy.
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ut not me, not me. This was State. Maybe UNC,
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nd if you go back in that time and look at the issues with UNC,
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I remember Jesse Helms could say it in a way that I could never be able to say it: liberal. [Sounds like "libral"]
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It's "libral". There were all these battles going on at UNC about free speech and things like that that just didn't touch State,
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not until we got liberal arts, and that was, I think,
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the big wakeup call for State in terms of joining that larger community of universities.
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By making this choice they were going to experience the same things at the same time, but they did it at a time that was just at the beginning of this incredible time
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in universities and student activists
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on campus, so it's not like they even got ten years of quiet time-- [Laughs]
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--so they could kind of get used to girls being here, or women being here.
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But it was just like boom, boom, boom. [All at once.] All at once.
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So they went through quite a process, a baptismal. [Laughs]
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
