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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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“A Thousand Male Leaders” Plus a Handful of Women Cookie Polan grew up in suburban New Jersey and attended public school. She planned to go to college in California, but “then I saw this little article” about Yale going coed. She had an older cousin who'd gone to Yale. Polan is now an attorney in private law practice in New Haven, specializing in criminal defense. Y: What was it like to be in the first class of women at Yale? P: I think Yale felt it was at a competitive disadvantage. It wasn’t that they wanted to educate women; but that they felt they were losing male students to other co-educational Ivy league schools. I remember Kingman Brewster saying that they were still going to produce “a thousand male leaders” a year. As a woman, I felt like an add-on. I don’t think I gave much thought to what it would be like to be one of a small group of women. In retrospect, I think it was a really bad idea to divide all the women among the 12 colleges. It was an administrative decision, but I don’t think it was beneficial to the female students. I had a very hard time finding friends among the small number of women undergraduates assigned to my residential college. At the same time, a lot of the upperclassmen had never been in classes with girls because they had gone to all-boys' prep schools. They were uncomfortable. In my freshman year, Yale was still sponsoring mixers and importing Vassar women. “Why are we here—just so you don’t have to go to Vassar to meet girls?” That’s how a lot of us felt. It’s hard to be the people who are the pioneers. That was true for the black students too. I don’t think Yale set things up intentionally to make it miserable for these young women. But you definitely felt that it wasn’t about you and your education. Rather, it was about making the undergraduate men happier. Academically, it wasn’t a struggle. I didn’t feel like I couldn’t talk in classes, and I got good grades. But at times I felt like a fraud; I felt like I wasn’t smart enough to be at Yale. The New York Times Magazine profiled some of the first women admitted—all super-achievers. My reaction was: “Oh my God, why would that girl want to talk to me?” I spent my whole first semester in the library. I didn’t really feel confident in myself intellectually until I went out in the world after college and began working. Y: Did Yale influence your later life? P: I was very tuned into civil rights and social justice issues before I started college, but I had never given any thought to feminism before I arrived at Yale in the fall of 1969. It was a very radicalizing year. In the spring of my freshman year, some of us sat in at Woodbridge Hall during a Yale Corporation meeting and presented a list of demands. We were demanding real coeducation, not a bone to be thrown to 250 women. Becoming a part of the feminist movement when I was barely 19—that was definitely a consequence of being in the first class of women at Yale. Despite my difficulties, I’m nonetheless glad that I went to Yale and came to New Haven, which is a city I love. After graduation, I got a VISTA job and then became a paralegal for a radical law office. Catherine Roraback ['48LLB] was one of the lawyers I worked for. [Roraback was part of the legal team on the Griswold v. Connecticut case, which established the right of married couples to receive birth control counseling from their doctors.—Eds.] I had watched Katie Roraback when she was trying the Black Panther case in New Haven; she was my idol and became my role model. Our law office was the liaison with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Center—which meant that I was the liaison. When I started there, I had no interest in being a lawyer at all. But eventually, I went to law school so that I could sign the papers I was writing. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have gone to Berkeley. But I am happy with how my life in New Haven has turned out. I have continued to work for social justice as an attorney and I have two fabulous daughters, who are now juniors in college. At my 30th college reunion, I went to a panel on work-life balance. There were lots of high-powered women there, and every one of them had gone the same route that I have, which is being self-employed. That seems to be the only way to manage career and family. Women are still making choices that men don’t have to make. |
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