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It’s Not about Home Economics
Q&A with Avi Soifer ’69, ’72MUrbS, ’72JD
September 8, 2009
During the late 1960s, a number of male undergraduates pressured Yale to go coed. Avi Soifer '69, '72MUrbS, '72JD, chaired Coeducation Week—a student-run project that brought women from other schools to attend classes and show that coeducation could work. Soifer is now dean of the law school at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
Y: Why did you decide to organize Coeducation Week?
S: It was a combination of things. In part it was a product of the times, but the more direct link was that I had been active on the Yale Daily News, and I covered the press conference when [Yale president] Kingman Brewster announced his plan for a partnership with Vassar. In the course of that press conference, he said that women have special educational needs, such as home economics. And even to me [laughs], a Yale undergraduate, that didn’t seem quite right. That seemed a narrower view than, at least, what I knew from many of my women friends and peers, my sisters and mother—their view of higher education for women. Kingman Brewster in many ways is the hero of this story. But that particular trigger was one of the things that led to Coeducation Week.
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“We did get cooperation from the people who did all the real work—the custodial staff and so on.”
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Also, I had started, paid for by the News, something called Friday, which was to be an intercollege magazine. We were distributed in 20-some college newspapers once a month, and through that I had a network of friends—journalists at all these different schools. And I’d been involved with the student government. And in personal terms, my then-girlfriend, now wife, Marlene Booth ['75MFA], was off on a junior year abroad, so I had time that fall.
The idea was to try to convince Kingman Brewster, and the powers that were, that coeducation should take place; should take place quickly; and should take place in the right way. The story we told was that we would bring in women from many different schools and that they would participate in what was going on at Yale—but they would also help us figure out what the right form, the best form, of coeducation might be. I say “story we told”—it really was what we had in mind, but also, many of us were activists, and we were trying to push Yale. Coeducation had been talked about at Yale [without results] for a long while. We didn’t know that Brewster was further ahead than we then thought. [Coeducation Week was barely over when the Yale faculty approved Brewster’s plan for coeducation.—Eds.]
Y: How did it go?
S: There was leadership in each of the colleges, and Herb Cahoon, the head of Dwight Hall for a long, long time, was good enough to give us space to pull it together. We had a lot of help from within, as it were—there were professors, there were deans, and some college masters, who were very helpful. There were also some who were very much opposed; some people in the central administration as well. We had to push some.
But I must say that Brewster was a brilliant, flexible co-opter, on the one hand—but also willing to move. In the end, he and his wife were willing to be serenaded by the band during Coeducation Week. And it went much more smoothly, and was not confrontational, because we did get cooperation from the dining hall staff and the people who did all the real work—the custodial staff and so on. That wouldn’t have happened, I’m sure, without Brewster’s cooperation.
There were so many people who signed up that we did two sessions. There were stories in the New York Times. I was the Quote of the Week, saying the following radical thing: “Women are people too.”
Y: What were the motivations of the students who supported coeducation?
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“My class was the first class that had a majority from public schools—coed high schools.”
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S: There’s no denying that some of the people just wanted girlfriends. But many of them already had girlfriends. And I think [the student activism] can’t be separated from the times, which were remarkably fluid as to the coalitions that came together—in, for instance, the antiwar movement and civil rights. People were beginning to wake up to the important civil rights aspects of what became the feminist movement. It was slow in coming, and people were remarkably obtuse about many of those issues. But it was already within consciousness. There was openness, even among males, to some of the equity claims that were being made.
And my class was the first class that had a majority from public schools—coed high schools. The Yale we discovered in the fall of 1965 was of course intimidating, and all those things a new school would be. But it was also very strange to find the rules as they were and the customs as they were. If someone brought an attractive date into Commons, people would “spoon”—everyone would start hitting their glasses. We were taken aback by some of the traditions and the sexism of those traditions.  |
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