Yale woman hits 30: where does she fit in?

NINA FLETCHER/YH COURTESY OFFICE OF INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH (From top to bottom) Lecture hall in 1973, women's soccer team before achieving varsity status, sining group with two female members in the early '70s, Yale Co-op ad from first year of coeducation, and yearbook photo of graduation seniors from early '70s.

We are on the cusp of a new millennium, as everything from computer crash scares to M&M commercials keep reminding us. In 2001, Yale College will celebrate its 300th anniversary; this year marks the 30th anniversary of the college's move to coeducation. Anniversaries give us a chance to look back on the time that has passed, to remember the way things were, and to take stock of what has—and has not—changed. In reflecting on the 30 years of coeducation at Yale College, it is only fitting to remember a time not long ago that is now foreign to those of us currently enrolled. For many of us, the idea of Yale being anything other than coeducational is unthinkable. Of course women are here at Yale; of course they participate in every aspect of college life; of course they are a valuable and valued part of the Yale community. But just three decades ago, these assumptions were not so self-evident.

In the beginning...

"In the late '60s, coeducation was in the air," Elga Wasserman, LAW '76, said. "People were less and less interested in attending an all-male school." Wasserman, a leading force in the move toward coeducation and assistant dean of the graduate school, was appointed chair of the planning committee on coeducation in 1968 before becoming special assistant to the President on coeducation.

A number of the other Ivy League schools had admitted women for some time: Harvard had Radcliffe, Penn had a coordinate women's school, Brown had Pembroke. The pressure to go coed was mounting. Then, in 1968, Princeton anounced a move toward coeducation. Soon after, the Administration decided women would be coming to Yale. They just weren't quite sure how.

Trial and error

The first possibility the Administration considered was a merger with Vassar that would transplant the women's school to New Haven, and establish it as a coordinate college. In response to the suggestion, the Yale Precision Marching Band responded as only they could, pulling a stunt on the football field involving a merger of the Y of Yale with the V of Vassar. But the plan fell through when Vassar decided to go it on its own, and turned the Elis down.

Yale undergraduates began taking matters into their own hands. Aviam Soifer, TC '69, LAW '72, MUS '72, Daniel Yergin, SM '68, and Wasserman organized Coed Week, which brought 750 women from 22 women's schools to Yale. Students emptied out rooms and entryways for the visiting women to stay in while they spent the week attending class and showing the Administration that Yale could handle women, and that women could handle Yale.

Four days after Coed Week ended, then-President Kingman Brewster, TD '41, submitted his coeducation plan to the faculty. To hell with Vassar: Yale would admit 500 women directly, half transfer students to be housed off-campus, half freshmen who would live in Trumbull. Yale resolved to continue to graduate "a thousand male leaders" each year, despite going coed. The plan was passed by the faculty at a vote of 200-1, and smooth sailing seemed imminent.

(continued on page seven) But the course of coeducation never did run smooth.

When Brewster told Trumbull College that it would have to evacuate its happy gothic home to make way for the freshman women, all hell broke loose. They would not leave their college, they told Brewster, and moreover, women should be integrated into the residential college system, not isolated within it.

So Brewster edited the plan, and decided the freshman women would live in Vanderbilt Hall, while the transfers would be placed in one entryway in each of the colleges.

The students were happy. The faculty was happy. And the applications poured in.

Three ring Yale

"It was a circus when they announced Yale was going coed," Ruth Jarmul, MC '71, said. "It was as if no college in the U.S. had ever been coed before. There were articles about women applying who gave their measurements, and about how Yale was admitting girls only if they were pretty."

"We received an enormous number of applications," Wasserman—who was on the admissions committee for the first class of women—said. "We picked a very select group of students with certain survival instincts. In the first years, Yale was not the kind of place where a shy, all-girls school graduate would feel comfortable."

"We were all looking forward to this new adventure," said Nina Glickson, DC '73, special assistant to current University President Richard Levin, GRD '74,"But we did often feel like we were in a fishbowl. The press made a big deal about it, and the alumni made a big deal about it, sometimes in a less than complimentary fashion. We all lived in Vanderbilt, so if the men wanted to come and gawk or look us up they knew where to do it."

Though they were excited, and, for the most part, felt welcome, their low numbers—combined with their housing situation—often made the women feel uncomfortable.

"In Morse, we all lived in one entryway, on a few floors in the tower," Jarmul said. "I always thought that was sort of odd: all the women, up in the tower."

"It all felt very tentative at first," Sally Birdsall, JE '72, said. "Each college had only a handful of women. In JE there weren't even 20 of us, and I didn't see a lot of the other women from other colleges. The social environment was really hard. I think we really needed a bigger cohort of women to feel comfortable. Thinking back on it I'm shocked there were so few."

"In those days, they put all the freshman women into Vanderbilt, and they stationed a guard in the archway. If you came to visit a woman, you had to stop at the guard's desk, and be allowed in," Barbara Kelly, BR '75, said. "It was the only dorm on Old Campus that had a guard, so that set us apart from the other freshmen. The other perceptible offering they made to the freshman women was they painted the bathrooms bright colors. Spiffing up the bathrooms and putting a guard at Vanderbilt; those were the physical manifestations of coeducating Yale for freshman women."

The Few, the proud

But security measures and renovations were not all that was needed to integrate women fully into undergraduate life. "I think there's no question that the environment would have been easier had there been more women." Glickson said. "I felt that Yale as a school and the Administration was trying to be very welcoming, and I didn't feel unwelcome in the classroom particularly. But I think the activities were not as integrated as they are now. There weren't provisions for women to participate."

While most women felt comfortable and welcome in the classroom, social interactions were often rather awkward. In addition to the lack of extracurricular opportunities, some particularly upsetting practices from the all-male days lingered. Among them was the habit Yale men had of busing in women from other schools for "mixers."

"On Fridays, a lot of `imports' from women's colleges would come and bring their American Tourister suitcases for their weekend at Yale," Kelly said. "They were always perfectly coiffed and very nicely dressed. And the Yale women would be hanging around in blue jeans doing their reading on the Old Campus, watching these decked out young ladies arriving for their Yale weekend. We felt like, `Hey! But we have women here now!'"

"The guys used to have busloads of women come down from Smith and Vassar, and I swear these women brought more in clothing and luggage for a weekend than I had for the entire semester," Bobbi Mark, DC '76, said. "The fact that the ratio was three to one or four to one, male to female, made for social oddities. I happened to be very good friends with the four guys who lived upstairs from me, and if you looked at the ratio, I was their one allotted female friend."

Taking stock and moving forward

Thirty years have passed though. So where are we now? The undergraduate population is equalized. The athletics department boasts 17 varsity programs for women, complete with full-time coaches and assistants, vastly improved facilities, recruiting and scheduling.

"Today, we're committed to providing the women of Yale the best opportunity to compete in the nation," Barbara Chesler, associate director of varsity sports, said.

No longer relegated to their isolated entryways or vigilantly guarded Vanderbilt, women are fully integrated into the greater Yale machine.

"In the years that I've been here, I've seen a marked increase in the number of women undergraduates admitted to Yale," Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg said. "I see women as leaders in their organizations; they've made a lot of progress."

Women have also progressed in the Administration. "The prominence of women at Yale in various capacities is strikingly different today than when I set foot on campus in 1974," Linda Lorimer, LAW '77, University Secretary, said. "Three out of the seven officers of the University are women. When I was a student [at the Law School in 1974], there was no woman officer. Out of 16 members of the Corporation, five are women. In 1969, none were."

But the same positive trend has not continued in all areas. The slow rate at which the number of senior female faculty has changed relative to the meteoric leap female undergraduates and administrators have made in the past three decades is striking. "Yale has always ranked low among the Ivies in terms of women in tenure track positions," Deputy Provost Charles Long said. "In recent years we've done much better, but Yale has a disadvantage in hiring senior faculty because we are so far from other major research institutions. If both members of a couple are academics, Harvard and even Princeton have a much easier time attracting them because of their proximity to other institutions."

Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, agreed that gender distribution in the tenure ranks has always been an issue. "Year by year its something that we work at," Brodhead said. "When I was first Dean the number of tenured women faculty was in the low 30s. Now it's one person short of 50. You don't appoint a whole new tenure faculty every two years so it takes time to work through the changes. But obviously we still have a considerable distance to go."

For many, however, these efforts are simply not enough. "I look at my daughter and her friends, [currently juniors,] at how bright and talented they are, and I wonder why an issue that first came up before they were even born is still pretty much the same issue now," Carrie Wingate, MC '77, said. "For the 5,000 undergraduates, a disproportionately male faculty sends a message that men are more likely to succeed, and there's no reason for that. Especially after 30 years."

"It seems bizarre that the faculty doesn't reflect the student body," Megan Heuer, BR '00, editor of the feminist magazine Aurora said. "I feel I can't envision myself going into things like science when I don't see any female role models in any science class. And when I see the women professors who are here struggle and worry about tenure, it makes me think, `Why would I go into academia at all?'"

Still, in considering the position of women at the college, tenure is not the only issue. "I think that the University could be doing more to follow up on coeducation in issues like sexual assault, eating disorders, and discrimination against women," Rachel Deutsch, ES '00, a women's center coordinator, said. "We're at a point in society where people like to think the women's movement is over and we have this equality, and a lot of the pressing issues are shoved under the rug."

Ultimately, the 30th anniversary should remind Yale of what it is striving for, and of where it has come from. "If you talk about the full coeducation of the University, the opening of every aspect of the University to talent, and the creation of truly equal opportunity, there are some places where we have had for many years quite a thorough success," Brodhead said. "There are other areas in which we still have a good deal of progress to make. Maybe the day will come when the point of these anniversaries is to celebrate something in which there are no remaining issues or challenges. I don't think we're there yet."

Photos courtesy Yale Banner. Advertisement courtesy Yale Co-op.

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