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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. |
Comment on this article “On the Advisability and Feasibility of Women at Yale” “Yale may admit women,” read a headline in the New York Times. “Nothing Stands in the Way But Lack of Funds.” That was in 1891. A Miss Irene W. Coit had passed the Yale College entrance exam. It was a purely academic exercise, but President Timothy Dwight was nevertheless interested in opening a “woman’s annex.” There was no question, the Times stressed, of men and women taking classes together. In fact, men and women had been taking classes together at Yale since 1869, the year the art school opened. (See Old Yale.) The graduate school began admitting women in 1892. By the late 1960s, nearly 1,000 women enrolled at Yale every year. But in 1891, “Yale” to the Times (and most of the campus) meant Yale College. And almost 80 years would elapse between Miss Coit’s successful exam and the admission of the first female undergraduates at Yale. Yale started thinking seriously about college coeducation in 1966, when Yale and Vassar decided to explore “coordinate coeducation.” The idea was for Vassar, which was then a women’s college, to sell its campus and relocate its students to Prospect Hill. Vassar would become Yale’s Radcliffe. This plan for a simple add-on—a twentieth-century “woman’s annex” -- had decided political attractions. President Kingman Brewster '41, according to his then-assistant, Henry Chauncey Jr. '57, lived in “fear and trembling” about how college alumni would react to coeducation if their sons couldn’t get into Yale. Yale College was more than an exclusively male school; it was a school that cultivated and cherished a particular ideal of maleness. “The word 'Yale' has taken on a meaning of its own in which the element of masculinity is clearly dominant,” wrote an alumnus of '26 in a 1969 letter to this magazine. “The turtleneck sweater, the curved pipe, the bulldog shoes may bring a laugh, but underneath it all lies a pride that every Yale man understands.” But as the alumni resisted, the students pushed. Chauncey remembers that Lanny Davis '67, '70LLB, a pro-coeducation Daily News editor (and later White House counsel in the Clinton administration), “beat the drums day in and day out and, in a wonderfully positive way, harassed the hell out of us.” Davis was just one of many. Undergraduates held rallies, wrote imperious opinion pieces for the News, even organized “Coeducation Week” as a kind of pilot project. Brewster himself had unwittingly set up this conflict between the alumni and the alumni-to-be, by starting to admit college applicants based more on academic performance than on Yale family connections and where they had prepped. (For the definitive account, see “The Birth of a New Institution.”) Yale was admitting ever-larger numbers of public school students, and most of them had never experienced sex-segregated schooling, let alone thought of it as a matter of honor. Then, in November 1967, Vassar’s board turned down the merger. The move left Yale with no plan and little time. All the other Ivies except Dartmouth were by now either coeducational or preparing to become so, putting Yale at a disadvantage in the competition for academically outstanding college applicants. “Yale realized,” says Elga Wasserman '76JD, the assistant dean whom Brewster eventually appointed to oversee the planning committee on coeducation, that “they were going to lose some of the brightest young men if they remained all-male.” On November 9, 1968, the Corporation, Yale’s board of trustees, approved Brewster’s plan to admit 250 female freshmen and 250 female transfer students to Yale College the following September. Coeducation Week had only just ended —but, the Yale Alumni Magazine assured its readers, that was a coincidence: behind the Corporation’s decision “was a considerable period of discussion on the advisability and feasibility of women at Yale.” There were rocky patches in the first few years. The lopsided gender ratio left some women feeling isolated, some overwhelmed by excessive male attention. Facilities were overcrowded. Brewster tried to appease furious alumni with the promise that Yale College would continue to produce “a thousand male leaders” every year. But in the end, coeducation succeeded, settled in, and became the norm. In the pages that follow, we excerpt passages from publications of the time and recent interviews with participants in the transformation. Reading your article and set of quotes and vignettes about the fortieth anniversary of the advent of women at Yale brought back memories of my graduate career at Yale (1967-71). I was there during “the transition,” wondering in 1967 when I arrived whether there was any possibility of meeting women when the ratio was so skewed, reading “The Road Tripper” carefully and internalizing its suggestions, and finally realizing that many generations of males had survived the Yale environment before me, so I had better “suck it up.” And anyway, it was significantly better than being up in Dartmouth’s woods! Then, in 1969, the first phalanx of undergraduate women arrived, and I caught myself wondering whether any other change could have been more momentous. At the time, I was attached to Branford College as a graduate fellow and would eventually become a Branford freshman counselor living in Welch Hall on the old campus. It was immediately obvious that this group of female freshman and transfers was special and spectacular in almost every way. Elga Wasserman’s description of them as “women we thought were sturdy” understated their quality and resilience. Intellectually they were superior, but interpersonally they excelled. They were, at the same time, confident, mature, and assertive. In short, they were fully capable of surviving in the cauldron of the “particular ideal of maleness” that Yale represented. But, most importantly, those first groups of women who traveled an undeveloped coeducational road accelerated the acceptance of the equality of women in every aspect of university life, as well as in U.S. society. In some cases, those women changed the attitudes of their male student counterparts including my own. In other cases, their experiences caused them to choose careers which emphasized women’s rights and gender equality, and vaulted them into the national spotlight. And, finally, their presence and their achievements caused changes in the attitudes of the Yale faculty who influenced succeeding generations of Yale students. Yale’s transition to coeducation was courageous and well executed in spite of President Brewster’s misgivings. Yale’s leadership in this endeavor is yet another reason for alumni pride in a great institution.
Yale’s loss The extensive article on “When the college went co-ed” had especial interest for me, because I was almost involved. Early in 1965 when my daughter was shopping for a college, I contacted President Brewster and asked for information, since we had heard that Yale might be getting ready to admit women as undergraduates. He promptly responded that the subject was indeed under consideration, but that “Yale would not be admitting women for at least five years, and possibly not for twenty-five.” As it happened, events moved more quickly than he anticipated. My daughter went on to graduate as valedictorian in her class at New Rochelle High School, got three 800s in her SATs, was offered and turned down a prestigious Westinghouse full scholarship to Carnegie Tech, entered Radcliffe, and graduated in the last class which had a graduation separate from Harvard's. From there she went to Columbia University, where she received her PhD in physics. When I later told this saga to President Brewster, he graciously responded with congratulations, adding that Yale’s loss was Harvard’s gain.
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Related Three Who Worked for Coeducation What the Yale Daily News & Yale Alumni Magazine Said Then Four Women Who Entered Yale College in the Fall of 1969 interview texts and 1968-70 coverage |
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