Two unidentified women from one of the Seven Sisters colleges waved off Yale’s football team in 1968. The university admitted its first female undergraduates in the fall of 1969, as did Princeton. Other elite colleges followed suit over the next few years. AP Photo
In January 1969, the Yale admissions office was busy reading applications from women seeking to join the class that would matriculate that fall, the first that would include female undergraduates. At Princeton University, the board of trustees voted in principle to approve undergraduate coeducation, an intention made concrete in April, when the board decided that the university’s first female undergraduates would enroll that September.
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Two unidentified women from one of the Seven Sisters colleges waved off Yale’s football team in 1968. The university admitted its first female undergraduates in the fall of 1969, as did Princeton. Other elite colleges followed suit over the next few years. AP Photo
In January 1969, the Yale admissions office was busy reading applications from women seeking to join the class that would matriculate that fall, the first that would include female undergraduates. At Princeton University, the board of trustees voted in principle to approve undergraduate coeducation, an intention made concrete in April, when the board decided that the university’s first female undergraduates would enroll that September.
The actions by Yale and Princeton triggered a flood of decisions by many elite colleges to go coed, beginning in 1969 and mainly ending in 1974. Deciding to admit female undergraduates was in no way inevitable. It was not an act of altruism. Rather, it was an act of strategic self-interest. By the late 1960s, elite colleges were beginning to see their applications decline, along with their yields. The “best boys” no longer wanted to attend all-male institutions, and attracting those “best boys” was the key factor in deciding to go coed. (It was around this time that Harvard, which had Radcliffe up the street, began to pull ahead of Princeton and Yale in the competition for the best students.)
The 50th anniversary of coeducational comes amid a national reckoning about sexual harassment.
Coeducation was a means to shore up a first-rate student body. It was not the result of a high-minded moral commitment to educate women. It was about what women could do for previously all-male colleges — how women could help elite universities renew their hold on the “best boys.” Women, in short, were there to improve the experience of men.
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While changes in application patterns were the immediate trigger for going coed, the political currents of the 1960s set the stage. The civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, the student movement, the women’s movement — by the end of the 1960s, colleges looked quite different than they had at the beginning of the decade. A large number of public-school students and students from less advantaged families were admitted, as well as Catholics and Jews, and eventually African-Americans. Admitting women followed logically. Men and women demonstrated together, protested together, registered black voters together. Not attending college together seemed outmoded.
Yale and Princeton were the prime movers in this process; everyone else was taking cues from them. And they were acting in direct competition with one another. Neither university could abide the possibility that the other would steal a march by going coed first. That competition accounted for the particular timing of each institution’s decision; without it, there is no certainty that 1969 would have been the moment when undergraduate coeducation began to spread so widely through elite higher education.
And spread it did. Kenyon and Trinity, in Connecticut, began admitting women in 1969; Williams, Wesleyan, the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, and Colgate in 1970; Brown, Bowdoin, and Rutgers in 1971; Dartmouth and Davidson in 1972; Amherst in 1975. The same thing happened at Catholic universities: Georgetown went coed in 1969, Boston College in 1970, Notre Dame and Holy Cross in 1972. The military academies admitted women in 1976. Only three men’s colleges remain in the United States: Hampden-Sydney, Morehouse, and Wabash.
Some graduates wore women’s-liberation signs to Harvard’s 1972 commencement. Ted Dully, The Boston Globe via Getty Images
No matter which institution we’re talking about, it would be difficult to overestimate how tough it was to make coeducation happen. There was fierce opposition from alumni, as well as significant resistance from many faculty and students. As for alumni, consider a 1970 letter by a Dartmouth graduate to the chair of the Dartmouth board of trustees: “For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out.”
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When the Yale Corporation first opined publicly on the education of undergraduate women, one alumnus responded this way:
“There is a glory to tradition. I think of the girl-filled weekend — the cocktail party, the dances, the plays … the big football game. Then there is the adventure of … journeying to the girls’ colleges. … And gentlemen — let’s face it — charming as women are — they get to be a drag if you are forced to associate with them each and every day. Think of the poor student who has a steady date — he wants to concentrate on the basic principles of thermodynamics, but she keeps trying to gossip about the idiotic trivia all women try to impose on men.”
At Princeton, an alumnus wondered, “Why this death wish on the part of Princeton?” If women were admitted, “no doubt a very fine school would emerge, but Princeton University would be lost forever.” Coeducation, another alumnus said, would dilute “Princeton’s sturdy masculinity with disconcerting, mini-skirted young things cavorting on its playing fields.” Still another alumnus put it this way: “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient, and much, much cheaper.”
Among faculty, some were supportive, others were opposed, but virtually everyone put the newly admitted women on the spot by asking for “the woman’s point of view,” whether the course was in literature or psychology, where such a view might have been relevant, or in math or physics, where it clearly wasn’t. I put that behavior in the category of bumbling but relatively innocent.
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Another kind of faculty response is best characterized as thoughtless. A male professor at Yale was graceless enough to remind women that they were responsible for the fact that men could no longer walk naked in Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Some — maybe many — faculty members were assertively unwelcoming; some were guilty of harassment. An art-history professor at Dartmouth posted slides of nudes on the screen, running his hand up and down their thighs. An organic-chemistry professor at Yale, at the first class, placed course materials on the desks of every man and pointedly skipped women, whose copies he left on the desk in front of the room to pick up after class. The chair of the history department at Yale was asked if it might soon offer a course in women’s history. “That would be like teaching the history of dogs,” he replied. A female English major at Princeton in the 1970s told her adviser that she wanted to focus her independent work on female writers; he responded, “I’m interested in auto mechanics, but I don’t try to bring that into the curriculum.”
Male students were not always more welcoming. There was a lot of casual misogyny. The benign version: “It’s a girl! It talks!” Men often made plain their discomfort at the presence of women on campus. A Yale upperclassman told a woman studying in the college library that her “presence was too distracting for him to concentrate on his reading.” Women were told that they did not belong — and should go back to wherever they had come from.
Dartmouth offers the most striking examples of bad behavior. Men hung banners from dormitory windows: “No Coeds”; “Coeds Go Home.” They shouted out numbers to rate the attractiveness of women as they entered the dining hall. Fraternities delighted in — and got away with — drunken, degrading, and scurrilous behavior. The winning entry in an annual intrafraternity competition was a song titled “Our Cohogs,” 10 verses of outrageously insulting, sexualized attacks on women sung to the tune of “This Old Man.” (“Cohog” was a derogatory nickname for a female student.) Five of the verses went as follows:
Our cohogs, they play one, They’re all here to spoil our fun.
Chorus: With a knick-knack, paddywhack, Send the bitches home, Our cohogs go to bed alone.
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Our cohogs, they play three, They all have to squat to pee. [chorus]
Our cohogs, they play four, They are all a bunch of whores. [chorus]
Our cohogs, they play six, They all love those Tri Kapp dicks. [chorus]
Our cohogs, they play seven, They have ruined our masculine heaven. [chorus]
The judge of the competition, the dean of the college, chose “Our Cohogs” as the year’s most original submission. He then joined the fraternity members in an exuberant public rendition.
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Fifty years later, what has coeducation accomplished? To state the obvious, it opened opportunities for women that had not previously existed. And despite serious challenges, women seized those opportunities and quickly excelled — in the classroom, on the playing field, and in leadership roles of all kinds. They took on the challenges of being pioneers with courage, ambition, a sense of humor, and a robust spirit of adventure. Being the first women was often as painful and difficult as it was joyful and exhilarating. But they, and generations of their successors, have made places like Yale and Princeton better and stronger in every way.
For all the gains, however, it’s important to be clear about what coeducation has not done — and should not have been expected to do.
Coeducation has not, of course, resolved longstanding complexities in relations between men and women. Colleges struggle with sexual harassment and assault, problems no more under control now than when men and women first started going to college together. Is sexual assault more prevalent now than it was 50 years ago? I don’t know, but those of us who were on campuses in 1969 (I joined the Princeton faculty in the fall of that year) can’t help but be surprised and disappointed that the 50th anniversary of elite undergraduate coeducation comes amid a national reckoning about sexual harassment.
What else would have surprised us in 1969? Certainly the perplexingly gendered behaviors and aspirations of female students. Consider studies undertaken at Duke in 2002-3 and Princeton in 2010-11 — at Duke to assess the overall climate for women at the university, and at Princeton to understand patterns of engagement, leadership, and achievement by female undergraduates. That female students do not experience these institutions in the same ways as men is the overriding theme of both studies. The experiences of women are not only different but less fully realized, constrained by gendered expectations about appropriate roles and behaviors.
Colleges changed with the coming of coeducation, but not as much as they might have.
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We might have been surprised, too, that 50 years on, more men than women would be excelling at the very highest levels of academic achievement. We might have been surprised by the persistence of gendered fields of study, with the continued underrepresentation of women in such fields as mathematics, physics, and economics. We might have been surprised that women remain significantly underrepresented among the ranks of tenured professors. Moreover, the number of female graduate students continues to lag, especially in economics, the physical sciences, and engineering.
Finally, we might have been surprised that women still struggle to achieve professional careers that parallel those of men. Despite the ample supply of women with prestigious degrees, women continue to face challenges when it comes to finding leadership positions commensurate with their talents.
Coeducation at elite colleges did not solve, and should not have been expected to solve, such persistently challenging personal and social issues. Colleges changed with the coming of coeducation, but not as much as they might have. And societal norms, assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices also changed, but — again — not as much as they might have. Educating men and women together does not mean that their experiences have become identical. Nor does it mean that gender has become irrelevant, neutral, or less consequential as a determinant of choices made or opportunities taken.
Those of us entering the academy in 1969 would not have imagined that women would, by the 21st century, be equally represented in the undergraduate student bodies of these previously all-male institutions. We would not have imagined that in the 21st century, women would hold the presidencies of Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton. We would not have imagined that women would account for 21 of the 32 Americans chosen as Rhodes Scholars for 2019.
So much has been accomplished in the past half-century. But so much clearly remains to be done.
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Nancy Weiss Malkiel, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, is the author of ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2016).