Ivy League women react to 'Playboy' spread

College sophomore Valerie Schneider will go down in history as a "Woman of the Ivy League." But she did not pose nude in Playboy magazine. Schneider submitted an essay to a literary magazine entitled Women of the Ivy League, which was created in response to the Playboy pictorial of the same name that appeared in the October issue. Forty-five Ivy League women worked together to produce the 32- page booklet, which contains pictures, poems and stories by women about women dealing with issues such as homosexual and heterosexual relationships, rape and body image. Yale sophomore and co-editor Sarah Russell said the magazine was modeled after a similar booklet that was released in 1986 by female Yale students after Playboy published a "Women of the Ivy League" pictorial that year. Russell said the magazine is not a protest of Playboy, but rather a response. "We liked the idea behind it because it was a positive way of responding instead of making the women feel bad who posed," Russell said. "We wanted to do something positive, that would make people think and would give women more of a chance to express themselves the way they wanted to be seen." In compiling submissions for the booklet, Russell called the women's centers of all of the Ivy League schools. Thirty-five students submitted work. Yale sophomore and co-editor Kyla Carrigan said every Ivy except Princeton and Columbia was represented. "We tried to be as inclusive as possible and we tried to put stuff in the magazine -- at least one piece of work from everyone who submitted work to us," she said. Although they were invited to, no women who posed in Playboy submitted work. Ten Yale students put together the issue, but when it was time to print the 5,000 copies, the editors ran into funding problems. "We had a little bit of trouble raising money," Carrigan said. "Sarah had written to a lot of feminist organizations and none of them responded. It was kind of a problem." In desperation, Carrigan and Russell wrote to the 1986 Yale alumnae who wrote the original magazine. These women agreed to fund the production and publication of the current magazine. Once it was published, Carrigan and Russell sent out copies of the magazine to each university, where students distributed them. Schneider, who received the magazine, asked representatives of the Penn chapter of the National Organization of Women to pass them out on Locust Walk a few weeks ago. "Women should be able to express themselves in whatever way they want, and this a good way for them to do so," said NOW President Alisha Berry, a College senior. Russell said that there are currently no plans to produce additional issues. "I don't think I have the energy to do this whole magazine again," she said. "But it would be nice to see more magazines of this type come out."

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.