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“Blank Stares and Open Mouths”
Q&A with Lawrie Mifflin ’73
September 8, 2009
Lawrie Mifflin '73 grew up grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, attended a public high school, and had no Yale family background. After graduating, she became one of the first female sportswriters in the country, and is now a senior editor at the the New York Times.
Y: Why did you choose Yale?
M: I was applying to top-end academic schools. Radcliffe was my top choice. Yale didn’t decide to go coed until the fall of my senior year in high school. I think the guidance counselor said, “You might as well apply there too.” I basically didn’t give it much thought, because the odds were I wasn’t going to get in. Probably the pioneering-adventure aspect of it tipped my choice. If they’re all great schools, why not go with the one where you’re going to be in the first class with women?
Y: How well did Yale prepare and support you?
M: In general, Yale supported us pretty well. Vanderbilt hall was all refurbished. When I saw some of the boys' dorms freshman year, they were pretty horrible.
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“No one at the Yale Daily News wanted to lower himself to covering girls' sports.”
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The one thing that Yale clearly had not prepared for was women who wanted to play competitive intercollegiate sports. I don’t think it was mean-spirited or deliberate. I think it just didn’t occur to them. They had prepared for women to use the gym, and they may have assumed that some of us would run on the running track, swim in the swimming pool. But when I went to ask where I could sign up for the field hockey team, I was met with blank stares and open mouths.
Another girl, Jane Curtis ['73, now a doctor in New York City], had brought her stick. We put up notices in Vanderbilt asking for volunteers to play hockey with us. I never thought, I must do this to strike a blow for women. I just thought, Damn it, I’m not going to let them stop me—I want to play. We asked the athletic department to give us a coach and a field for the following season [fall of 1970], and they did. Our coach was the mother of a Yale student from the New Haven area. We organized almost everything for the first season ourselves, including writing to nearby colleges to ask them to play us. We played that first season in t-shirts and cutoff jeans. By the time we reached our senior year, we had proper clothing and proper equipment and proper uniforms. We were the first varsity women’s sport at Yale.
When we started a field hockey team I went to the Yale Daily News and said, “You should be covering our games.” They said, “Um, uh, well, you’re not a varsity sport.” I just had the feeling that there was no one on the sports staff of the Yale Daily News who wanted to lower himself to covering girls' sports. One of the first things I did when we became a varsity sport was to go back there and say, “We are now a varsity sport. You must cover us.” So they assigned a reporter who knew nothing about sports. I thought, This is really not right. After the field hockey season I went into the office of the Yale Daily News and said, “I will cover all the other women’s sports for you.” Because it’s not fair to have someone covering them who doesn’t know anything about it and doesn’t care.
Yale was very much a part of the protests in the Vietnam era and the black power era. I didn’t make a connection between coeducation at Yale and these bigger issues. I was very naïve. I just thought, This is a big adventure. I didn’t think of my being at Yale as part of the larger social change.
Y: How did the experience affect you in your later life and career?
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“I am eternally grateful to the professors I had.”
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M: It’s very hard to separate what sort of person you already are from how Yale shaped you. What I can say without a doubt is that I got a great education at Yale, and that would stand anyone in good stead in future life. I am eternally grateful to the professors I had—especially the history professors who taught about writing, about how to express yourself, about fairness.
I basically had a great time. I’m sure there were guys who were rude, I’m sure there were professors who were condescending. But I didn’t notice. As far as the coed aspect, perhaps it made me a little bit tougher, a little more able to stand my ground—but maybe that came with me to Yale. It’s hard to know.  |
