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“Admitting Women to a College on the Moon”
Q&A with Elga Wasserman ’76JD
September 8, 2009
In 1968, Yale president Kingman Brewster '41, appointed Wasserman chair of the planning committee on coeducation at the college; at the time, Wasserman, who had a PhD from Harvard in organic chemistry, was assistant dean of the Graduate School. Later, she became special assistant to the president on coeducation and spent four years overseeing the first four coeducational classes.
Y: Why did Yale go coed?
W: The public line was that Yale was going coed for women’s sake. The real impetus was, I think, twofold. Until the late '60s, Yale’s freshman class came mainly from all-male private schools. Yale realized they were going to lose some of the brightest young men if they remained all-male when other schools were going coed.
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“We took women who we thought were sturdy.”
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Also—and this was never stated—when a school expands, the motive is frequently financial. If they expanded with all men, they knew they would have to lower their standards, because they were already taking the best-qualified men. But I would say the overriding motive for going coed in November 1968 was that Princeton had done it, and Harvard and Brown had women’s schools. Brewster was smart enough to see where the country was heading and wanted to keep up with the times.
Y: How did the transition go?
W: I was ever so grateful that we had a short time frame for planning. I worked directly with Brewster, and there was no time for long committee consultations. We consulted with people at other schools, including Harvard/Radcliffe and Brown, and we got a lot of advice.
I think it went extremely well. The two major problems early on were very obvious very quickly. One was that the ratio of women to men was so small that it was very difficult for the women. The other was that they had almost no women on the senior faculty, and very few on the nontenured faculty.
In addition, the media were all over campus. You would think we were admitting women to a college on the moon. There were many other coed schools by that time; Yale was seen as the last holdout of the male elite bastion. They wanted to televise classes. They were always asking the women, 'What’s it like to be a woman at Yale?' We had admitted women knowing they would be in a fishbowl, and we took women who we thought were sturdy.
Y: Looking back, with 40 years' hindsight, what are the biggest consequences of coeducation?
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“Men can see women as more than wives and mothers.”
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W: I think it has opened many doors for women. But the doors were opening anyhow. Women could go to Berkeley, or the University of Michigan—top schools—and get a great education. But one thing it has done: because women are teaching at Yale, men can see that women can hold positions of power even at the most elite institutions. If they were taught only by men, they did not think of women as equals. It’s sort of like what’s happening to African Americans with Obama being elected president. Seeing women as more than wives and mothers was certainly a benefit of coeducation at the elite schools. Yale still needs more senior women in the sciences.
Y: What do you think of the situation at Yale today?
W: Some major problems, in my view, have not been solved—and they’re not strictly the university’s problems. You have to restructure employment and child care. Most of these women married equally high-powered men. To have two demanding careers and a family—it’s an incredible overload. I’m worried by the number of professional women in their 30s who drop out to have and raise children. They say they’re going to go back, but it’s very difficult to get back into the job market. Some employers are very family-friendly and others are not. That’s true in universities as well as elsewhere. But I’m very concerned about employers' lack of flexibility and the lack of affordable, on-site child care.  |
