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Looking Back
Interviews with four women who entered Yale College in the fall of 1969

Frances Beinecke '71, '74MFS

“I had a great time. It was a very rich experience. I remember just sitting for hours in the dining hall, where people would be sweeping in and out and you really felt part of a community. Most of the people I hung around with were the boys—because there were so many of them.

 

“Yale is completely different from what it was in the first half of the 20th century.”

“Coeducation was part of a series of decisions that Brewster and the Corporation [Yale’s governing body] were making to modernize the university. The whole nation was moving in that direction, and if Yale hadn’t, it would have been left seriously behind. Yale now is a completely different place from what it was in the first half of the twentieth century. People almost don’t recognize it, but I think they are excited by the energy. Yale has done an amazing job of continuing to look ahead: what do you need to do to succeed in the world that you’re going to be part of? It’s not that there weren’t always talents in these sectors. But society wasn’t ready for more diverse leadership.”

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Lawrie Mifflin '73

“The one thing that Yale clearly had not prepared for was women who wanted to play competitive intercollegiate sports. When I went to ask where I could sign up for the field hockey team, I was met with blank stares and open mouths.

 

“I never thought, I must do this to strike a blow for women.”

“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. Another girl, Jane Curtis ['73], and I 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 season in t-shirts and cutoff jeans. My senior year was a great triumph. We had proper coaching and proper equipment and proper uniforms. We were the first varsity women’s sport at Yale.”

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Vera Wells '71

 

“I didn’t see any black women who were professors.”

“At Yale, the guys tripped over themselves to accommodate women: 'What is the female opinion on this? Are you comfortable with this?' But I realized what was missing was that I didn’t see any black women who were professors. So, even though I didn’t consider myself an activist, another student and I proposed a college seminar on black women. They recruited Sylvia Ardyn Boone from Hunter College. She taught two sections, and the classes were oversubscribed. It was right at the beginning of Afro-American Studies.

“It was my mother’s aim in life that I get an education. The only occupation I thought of for women at that time was being a public-school teacher, or maybe a librarian. Yale opened up a whole new framework of possibilities for what I might be able to do with my life.”

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Diane “Cookie” Polan '73, '80JD

“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 coed schools. I remember Kingman Brewster saying that they were still going to produce 'a thousand male leaders' every year. As a woman, I felt like an add-on.

 

“You definitely felt that it wasn’t about you and your education.”

“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. Becoming a part of the feminist movement when I was barely 19—that was definitely a consequence of being in that class.

“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. The experience was what made me think I could be a political activist and a lawyer—that this was actually a way to work for social change.”  the end

 
 

 

 

Related

introduction

charts

Three Who Worked for Coeducation

What the Yale Daily News & Yale Alumni Magazine Said Then

interview texts and 1968-70 coverage

Old Yale: The First Female Students at Yale

 
 
 
 
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