![]() ![]() “I don’t think you can say that the work is too strenuous for most females,” Bruce Flynn told a Dailyreporter. Four guys threw up right there on the field.” Do you know more about how the marching band’s gender line was broken? Tell us in a comment below!Other men were ready for the change. On the first day of practice, the guys couldn’t even take it. “They’d never be able to lift their legs as high as we do for any period of time. “A girl would just never make it,” one said. 16, when the Wolverines would face Northwestern.Īs the band prepared in late-summer heat, some men in the ranks were dubious. He forbade members to talk with reporters about it, at least not until after the first half-time show of 1972, scheduled for Sept. Perhaps so, but the director still wanted no publicity about the change. “Cavender definitely did not want girls in the band,” a male member told The Daily, “but now that they’re in, he’s trying to make the best of it.” So, in the summer of ’72, a number of women did try out, and 10 were accepted. “It was pretty common among the rest of the leaders, too.” “In my group, we gave a big rap encouraging women to try out ,” one of the leaders, Mary Griffin, told a reporter. This logic was allowed to carry the day until the following summer, when student leaders at Freshman Orientation took the matter into their own hands. Why should they stay with a marching band?” “Trying to make the best of it” They join Girl Scouts and nobody makes them quit. After all, most girls play with dolls when they’re young and nobody makes them stop doing it. It would be too hard - we couldn’t excuse a woman from rehearsals if she had ‘female problems.’ I certainly don’t excuse any of my boys from practice.”Ī girl may have enjoyed marching with her high school band, he conceded, but “now there are other activities which should be her main interest. When The Daily pressed Cavender about it, he said: “It’s more violent physical activity than would be proper for a lady. And the tradition bit is his way of saying he doesn’t want girls.” ![]() “I’ve marched in a band for about six years. “Guys can’t necessarily walk better than me,” she told the paper. (Image: Records of the University of Michigan Marching Band, U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)Īccording to The Daily: “Cavender said band work would be too strenuous for, and that the band had traditionally consisted of men.” He didn’t recruit women and he didn’t tell counselors about the change in policy - “I saw no reason to have done that,” he told The Michigan Daily - so few students learned about it, and no women tried out for the 1971-72 band.Īt least one freshman woman, Gail Peters, asked about it, but she was told: “No spaces are open.” Excuses, excuses The rule had changed, but George Cavender’s mind had not. The reason, said Allen Britton, dean of music, was “just life and times, and in doing what had to be done after so much pressure.” So the men-only rule was officially dropped. This came at a time when women on campus had been pressing for inclusion in many domains reserved for males. Then, in the wake of Revelli’s retirement in 1971, Cavender was appointed as the maestro’s successor. ![]() But the marching band stayed all-male, a bragging point at the time.) (The specter of women invading the marching band arose only once, during World War II, when the number of men on campus plunged. The idea of admitting women was barely even discussed during the long reign of Cavender’s predecessor, William Revelli, the legendary professor of music who, from 1935 to 1971, built Michigan’s program into the best in the nation, if not the world. George Cavender (Image: Records of the University of Michigan Marching Band, U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.) ![]()
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