User:TanneC/FirstWomenSandbox

"They are just like us!"

In November 1968, Yale University President Kingman Brewster announced that after 268 years of educating young men, Yale College would admit undergraduate women in the fall of 1969.

OR

In a surprise announcement in November 1968, Yale College was the first all-male Ivy League college to offer admission to women as undergraduate students on the same basis as men. The experiences of the First Women of Yale underscore the wisdom of the admission committee’s decision to seek applicants who were not only academically qualified but very resilient.

Before

Except for Cornell, which had been coeducational from its beginning, Ivy League colleges were all-male institutions until the late 1960s, when the Second Wave of feminism began to make inroads into sex-defined jobs, educational opportunities, and government positions. Yale was the first to take the leap of admitting women as full-fledged students.

Yale University had admitted women to its graduate schools since the mid-1800s, but the undergraduate experience of Yale College remained all-male. Exceptions were made for wives of Yale College students, who could take courses at Yale but would receive their degree from their “home school.”

Ivy League students were accustomed to meeting “girls” through mixers, which were arranged at single-sex schools for Saturday nights. Busloads of men would travel to a “girls’ school” or busloads of female students would travel to a “men’s college” for an evening of [need description].

There are many ways to learn about the atmosphere of Yale College in 1968. The recruiting(?) Film, “To Be A Man,” showcased …

The world-renowned Yale undergraduate singing group, the Whiffenpoofs, performed a number of sexist songs in their standard repertoire. Some of them put women on a pedestal; others were demeaning or made fun of girls. [examples]

The country at large embraced sexist lyrics in many popular songs. For example, the 1963 hit, “Surf City” by Jan & Dean, extolled the lopsided demographics, “Two girls for every boy.” Commodification of women and a worldview through a male-centric lens were standard and nearly universally acceptable.

Change in the air

A significant development on the Yale campus was the arrival of R. Inslee “Inky” Clark as Director of Undergraduate Admissions in 1965. With Yale University President Kingman Brewster supporting the move, Clark began accepting more students outside the traditional WASP all-male prep school pool of applicants. Successful applicants now had to demonstrate strong academic credentials, and more were drawn from public schools. Most of the public school matriculants had been in classes with girls and saw no reason why they should not be admitted to Yale.

Pressure from other societal changes was also bearing down on Ivy League schools. Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique (1963) challenged the widely held view that American women were happy in their roles as housewife and mother. Friedan, a graduate of Smith College herself, argued that women should have more opportunities to be part of all aspects of society.

Yale College’s Path to Coeducation

After Connecticut College for Women (now the coeducational Connecticut College) trustees turned down an offer to merge with Yale, Kingman Brewster started courting Vassar (at the time, an elite, all-female Seven Sisters school) as a potential mate. Reactions to the potential marriage, which would entail Vassar students abandoning their Poughkeepsie campus, were mixed, but in the end, the relationship ended abruptly.
 * 1) Princeton study
 * 2) Student-initiated Coed Week at Yale
 * 3) YDN outside articles NYT Life Look?
 * 4) Article in Life Nov 22, 1968 about both Coeducation Week and Yale announcing coeducation
 * 5) Avi Soifer
 * 6) Ramifications
 * 7) Brewster sudden decision
 * 8) Reason(s) to go coed: marketing
 * 9) Wasserman to be Master/”Mistress” at all-female Trumbull College (nixed)
 * 10) Student response
 * 11) Faculty response
 * 12) Alumni response
 * 13) Admission process
 * 14) Quota: 500?
 * 15) Wasserman and Chauncey
 * 16) What they were looking for: resilience
 * 17) So many highly qualified women
 * 18) During
 * 19) Campus life
 * 20) Housing/living arrangements
 * 21) Campus activities
 * 22) Sports
 * 23) Music
 * 24) Newspaper
 * 25) Other extracurriculars?
 * 26) Theatre
 * 27) Societies
 * 28) Social life / sex
 * 29) Housing [see above - choose one or rename]
 * 30) Russ Meyer "king of the nudies" film festival at law school
 * 31) Sarrell course on sex
 * 32) Mixers
 * 33) Relations with women (weekend dates) from other colleges
 * 34) Intersectionality of race and sex
 * 35) Academics
 * 36) Faculty response to coeducation
 * 37) Student experiences
 * 38) Context
 * 39) Vietnam War
 * 40) Spring / May Day 1970
 * 41) Freshman (First year) experience
 * 42) Expectations coming to a coeducated college; finding themselves at male college with women being seen as an amenity
 * 43) Reality
 * 44) No upper-class guidance, role models (other females)
 * 45) Predatory upper-class males
 * 46) Perceptions of first year males
 * 47) Female students, most just out of high school, were bunched in one dorm (Vanderbilt) but without support, guidance, social or athletic or academic groups that had any upper-class women who weren't themselves new to the campus.
 * 48) “Thrown into the deep end”
 * 49) Transfer experience
 * 50) Male student reactions
 * 51) Brewster statements
 * 52) 1972 Time Magazine article on Yale coeducation. Concludes Brewster: "Once we overcome the lopsided ratio, I don't think there will be any drawbacks to coeducation at Yale. People have a much more human relationship with each other now. They're more considerate. Educationally, socially, and even morally Yale is a much better place than it was before."


 * 1) After
 * 2) Evolution of coeducation at Yale
 * 3) Careers
 * 4) Domestic worlds
 * 5) Statistics?
 * 6) 50Women150
 * 7) Fifty years after Yale College welcomed its first female matriculants, those women had never come together en masse to celebrate their status or even just to get to know one another. An event was planned at the university to celebrate 50 years of Yale College coeducation and 150 years of women as graduate students on campus. Over XXX First Women alumnae attended the weekend event.
 * 8) Plaque in Old Campus by Phelps Gate [photo]
 * 9) ?Written history
 * 10) Notable First Women [not all have Wikipedia articles now]
 * 11) Joan Abramson
 * 12) Frances Beinecke
 * 13) Diana Dwyer Brooks
 * 14) Andrea DaRif
 * 15) Virginia Rosa Dominguez
 * 16) Robin A Ely
 * 17) Cai Emmons
 * 18) Shelley Fisher Fishkin
 * 19) Geraldine Gennet
 * 20) Alexis Krasilovsky
 * 21) Karen Rosenblum Lawrence
 * 22) Sheila Jackson Lee
 * 23) Anna Lowenhaupt
 * 24) Kit McClure
 * 25) Lawrie Mifflin
 * 26) Mary Pearl
 * 27) Julia Drury Preston
 * 28) Catherine Ross
 * 29) Constance Royster
 * 30) Annita Sawyer
 * 31) Billie Tsien
 * 32) Diane Straus Tucker
 * 33) Margaret Warner
 * 34) Merideth Wright

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 * 1) Sources
 * 2) [Anne Gardiner Perkins ]
 * 1) Pepper Schwartz
 * 2) Yale Daily News
 * 3) New York Times
 * 4) Elga Wasserman
 * 5) Sam Chauncey
 * 6) Other Yale documents
 * 7) Yale Alumni Magazine?
 * 8) First Women essays?
 * 9) Life Magazine
 * 10) Time Magazine
 * 11) Schlesinger Library - Radcliffe
 * 12) Yale archives