Yale Was a Boys’ Club for Centuries. Then the First Women Came Along.

M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle

For 268 years, Yale was a boys’ club.

That changed in the fall of 1969, when the first women undergraduates — 575 of them — arrived on campus. They joined a university that prided itself on educating the nation’s leaders, and it had gone without saying that those leaders should be men. When Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, announced that the university would admit women, the decision was heralded as an important and long overdue step toward gender equity.

But the story doesn’t end there, as Anne Gardiner Perkins explains in her forthcoming book, Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant (Sourcebooks). Those women had to cope with a culture that tended to view them less as fellow leaders-to-be and more as campus curiosities. “Institutions do not slough off their history so easily,” she writes.

Perkins, who graduated from Yale in 1981 and was the first woman to serve as editor in chief of the Yale Daily News, interviewed 42 women admitted to the university in ’69, weaving their experiences into a narrative that offers insight into the transformation of one elite institution and the challenges faced by women on college campuses before Title IX and before the term “sexual harassment” was widely known.

Perkins spoke with The Chronicle about what those first woman at Yale went through, how it compares to her own experience, and the work that’s left to be done.

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That first class of women was outnumbered by men seven to one. What sort of problems did that disparity lead to?

They had this twin thing of being both highly visible and invisible. When they would walk into the dining room, they often told stories about how all the men would turn to stare at them. There was one woman who told me a story about how when she was a freshman, she and her roommate would always walk up together if one of them needed a cup of coffee or a glass of milk, because that way it wasn’t so awful that the men were staring at them.

They were isolated. So even though the overall number of women, 575, seems large, to a one they would tell me, “Well, we didn’t know many of the other women,” because Yale had scattered them across all 12 of its residential colleges so that each would have its own small cluster of girls.

And then that invisibility — Yale was a place that emphasized leadership, and what it saw as the paths to leadership, more than academics. And so those paths to leadership, be it at the Yale Daily News or the secret societies or the varsity sports teams or the marching band, all excluded women. And so they weren’t part of what made Yale, Yale.

How did male students at Yale view the admission of women?

Some had pushed for coeducation because they wanted a girlfriend and they were tired of having to drive to the schools that were thought to produce suitable Yale wives, like Vassar or Mount Holyoke or Smith, to get a girlfriend. And so this was going to bring them appropriate women on their campus that they could then date just like their friends at Harvard, who were able to date the Radcliffe girls who lived a couple blocks away. There were also some guys who were advocates for coeducation who had come from a coed school and who really felt deeply about the injustice of turning down women students.

Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president then, is on record saying that he found discrimination against Jews and African-Americans “repugnant.” But his views on women weren’t as progressive, were they?

Brewster is a real hero to many of the students at the time. He speaks out openly and consistently against the Vietnam War. He ends the practice in Yale’s admissions office of turning down students because they’re Jewish. He actively begins recruiting African-American students. But he has this real blind spot when it comes to women, and a big part of it is that he thinks men are leaders and women are not. And you should not waste any spots on students who don’t have the ability to become leaders.

How were women treated in the classroom?

Many of them found themselves treated as oddities. There’s a quote that I have never forgotten where a woman wrote that when she raised her hand to speak in class, the guys would all turn to stare at her as if the furniture itself had offered an opinion.

Many of them found their views ignored. The other thing that would happen is they would get up the nerve to say something in class, and jump into this dialogue, and the conversation would move right past them. And then 10 minutes later a guy would say the exact same comment, and everyone would act like it was the most intelligent thing that had ever been said.

It is worth noting that the women did better academically than the men.

You arrived at Yale eight years later. How was your experience different from theirs?

Nobody ever talked about those first women when we were students at Yale, even though coeducation was so recent. And I never asked. I still felt like I was a girl in a men’s school. My class was the first class where you see women start to move into the leadership positions at the most prestigious organizations at Yale like the Yale Daily News. My class had the first woman president of the Yale Political Union, which is the largest student group.

But I think I had two professors the whole time I was there who were women. One was a French teacher, who I’m certain was the wife of a faculty member at Yale, and one was an adjunct professor. So the sense of being in a male institution where the administrators and the faculty were men had not changed. Here’s what had changed: My class was 40-percent women. So I didn’t really have a sense of being outnumbered. And I think that’s huge.

Has Yale achieved what those women back then hoped it would?

What I would say is that Yale now, as then, is an extreme but not an aberration. So Yale has never had a woman or a person of color as president, since 1701. But only 26 percent of U.S. colleges today have a woman as president. Only a quarter of Yale’s tenured full professors are women, but nationally only a third of tenured full professors are women. So as a nation we have dropped the ball on this question of equity for women on college campuses. And you know the numbers on sexual harassment are appalling. So there’s work to do.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.