Dinner of the Golden Bowl
Women-centric event held at SU celebrating female friendship… or disciplining women?
This event, owned and operated by the women of Southwestern’s campus from 1925 to 1950, was highly unique in its proceedings and practices. Unlike the other events planned by Dean of Women Laura Kuykendall, this event was entirely produced by and for women. It was held inside the Woman’s Building, in private, with exclusively female students and women from the Georgetown community. Apart from being a celebration of femininity, it dually acted as an annual recommitment to uphold the “innate” qualities of womanhood and be a “model” Southwestern woman.
Having morphed through many different iterations, the Dinner of the Golden Bowl was an annual event occurring in October, planned and directed by Laura Kuykendall, with the primary purpose of celebrating womanhood. The Megaphone from 1929 cites that the annual event “is given for SU women.”
The event began in 1925, under the name of the “Melting Pot Dinner,” which referenced the melding of friendships among female students and women within the larger community, not the melting of races and ethnicities usually connoted by that term. At the event, “special guests were outstanding TX women, SU brides of the past year, and mothers to senior girls.” Additionally, as quoted in the October 1st, 1929 Megaphone, “all of the town girls and women of the town who were connected with Southwestern were guests of the occasion, along with a host of friends.” So, differently than Kuykendall’s May Fete and Christmas Service, this event exclusively included, featured, and celebrated, womanhood.
After being renamed “Friendship Dinner” for a short time, the event was then called the “Rainbow Dinner” for many years, as the melting pot image was thought to represent the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. With this change came an expansion of the programming, and in true Kuykendall fashion, the event surged in pageantry and theatrics. A script for the ceremony was written by alumnae Annie Edward Barcus Minga, daughter of future Southwestern President, Sam Barcus, and a celebrated public speaker in her own right. Within the ceremony, Margaret Mood McKennon provided a Rainbow Poem to be read, and a brass music service (symbolic of a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow) was dedicated to the event in 1929.
Each year, seven notable women served as the “rainbow guests,” “who were chosen as representatives of the best of Southwestern women.” Each of these guests dressed up in a color of the rainbow, all of which was assigned immense symbolic significance: red for valor, orange for brilliance and wit, yellow for riches, green for freshness of youth, blue for royal truth, purple for power, and lavender for grace. Taken together, the color-coded attributes represented the womanly values the female educators who led the event encouraged all Southwestern women to aspire to. Eventually, a Rainbow Queen was also added to the event’s practices, and the queen “graciously received the gifts of Courage, Plenty, Brilliance, Youth, Honor, Grace, and Power.” The Rainbow Queen was chosen because she embodied ideal womanhood itself and presided over the service.
After making a grand entrance into the event, the “rainbow guests” were wrapped together in fabric displaying the colors of the rainbow, “signifying their relations in the Southwestern family of friendship.” Then, “the girls acted out in pantomime the rite which made them ‘true Southwestern girls.’ Golden coins were poured into a huge urn to represent the rainbow treasure as the Southwestern group pledged ‘the best I have and am’ to the school.”
Following all these ceremonial practices, the guests continued the celebration of friendship by sharing a meal in each other’s company. These practices are highly reminiscent of what has continued today within Greek Sorority ceremonial practices, which also focus on elaborate rituals and traditions that reinforce sisterhood and friendship. The event was renamed a final time, to “Dinner of the Golden Bowl,” or “Golden Bowl Dinner,” to re-represent the pot of gold associated with rainbows.
This event, owned and operated by the women of Southwestern’s campus, was highly unique in its proceedings and practices. As such, it provides us with the clearest articulation of what was expected of Southwestern women when the campus was still segregated by gender. Apart from being a celebration of femininity, it dually acted as an annual recommitment to uphold the “innate” qualities of womanhood and be a “model” Southwestern woman. Moreover, it required that “Southwestern girls… pledge their loyalty and faith to the school.” So, as an act of celebration, this event also served as an act of discipline, provoking the women of Southwestern to place value on certain qualities and to practice these qualities in hopes of being celebrated as an ideal Southwestern woman.
To my knowledge, there was no similar celebration for the male community of Southwestern, thus further emphasizing the gendered differences between male and female student practices.
The lives of all students were surveilled in multiple ways for most of Southwestern’s early history, but the lives of Southwestern’s women were even more extensively surveilled. Although the event allowed an official space to acknowledge Southwestern women and regard the community with love and friendship, the lack of a similar male-celebrating event shifts the meaning of the Dinner of the Golden Bowl. Today, it can be viewed as both a practice of friendship and a practice of discipline that reinforced in very concrete ways what a Southwestern woman should be, although the latter was certainly not recognized as surveillance at the time.
