The William G. Bowen Series

The Struggle for Coeducation

Nancy Weiss Malkiel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400882885
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men.In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male.Drawing on unprecedented archival research, "Keep the Damned Women Out" is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject.

1

Setting the Stage: The Turbulent 1960s

The decisions to embrace coeducation at elite private colleges and universities by no means represent the beginning of coeducation in institutions of higher education in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it is important to start here with the earlier history.

Early Experiments with Coeducation

At Oberlin, the first private college in the United States to become coeducational (in 1837), women students took on sex-segregated roles for the college community that mirrored their eventual familial responsibilities, like laundry, sewing, and dishwashing.¹ Coeducation was the norm at the many state universities founded in the mid- to late nineteenth century.² But the initial enthusiasm for it at some of the leading universities, like Berkeley, Cornell, and Michigan, waned in the face of experience. Too many women students were enrolling, and they were doing too well academically; the fear was that they might feminize, even overrun, their universities. In response, the institutions separated men and women in many spheres of campus life, a separation finally reversed only in the 1960s.³

There was also an impulse for separation at private universities. In the 1930s, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania established women's colleges that persisted as separate entities until the 1970s. Although small numbers of women had been enrolled earlier at Duke, the women's college was founded in 1930 as a coordinate college occupying a geographically distinct campus. Initially, classes for freshmen and sophomores were segregated by sex, a practice that ended by the 1960s. In 1972 the university merged the men's and women's colleges.⁴ At the University of Pennsylvania, the college of liberal arts for women was founded in 1933, when the university first offered a four-year liberal arts degree program to women. In 1954 Penn opened the undergraduate programs of the school of engineering and applied science and the Wharton school to women, the last programs at the university to exclude them. In 1975 the college of liberal arts for women merged with the college of arts and sciences for men.⁵

At Chicago, founded as a coeducational university in 1892, the impulse for separation resulted from the success of the first cohorts of women students. In 1892 women comprised 24 percent of the enrollment in the college. By 1900 that number had increased to 52 percent, and in the decade 1892–1902 women accounted for more than 56 percent of elections to Phi Beta Kappa. President William Rainey Harper feared that being identified as a predominantly female institution would alienate the benefactors on whom the new university depended. His solution was to introduce sex-segregated instruction in required introductory courses in the university's junior college for freshmen and sophomores. Despite protests from college alumnae, educators elsewhere, and representatives of national women's organizations, the policy went into effect in the winter of 1903. But the planned separation was only partially effective, affecting just half of the students in the junior college by 1906–7. After that, the scheme disappeared. Harper died in 1906, and his successor, Harry Pratt Judson, had a mandate from the trustees to bring the budget under control. Separate instruction had been extremely expensive, with duplication of faculty effort and increased instructional costs. The sex-segregation plan may have been abandoned in the interest of saving money.⁶

Typically, decisions to limit opportunities for women students were made by men. Stanford was different. The university was established by Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate, U.S. senator, and former California governor, and his wife, Jane, as a memorial to their son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid fever in 1884 at the age of fifteen. The founding grant from the Stanfords, dating to 1885, specified that the university, which opened in 1891, would be coeducational, with “equal facilities” and “equal advantages” for both sexes. Initially, women accounted for 25 percent of the students, but that number grew quickly, reaching 40 percent by 1899. Jane Stanford feared that women would overrun the university, making it less attractive to male students and no longer a fitting memorial to her son. In 1899, after Leland Stanford's death, Jane Stanford added to the founding grant the legal requirement that “the number of women attending the University as students shall at no time ever exceed five hundred.” The cap on women remained in effect until 1933, when enrollments were low because of the Great Depression. The Stanford trustees then reinterpreted the quota to mean an undergraduate male-female ratio of 3 to 2, which remained in place until 1973.⁷

The most extreme reaction came at Wesleyan, founded in 1831, which had embarked on coeducation as an experiment beginning in 1872. With too many women enrolling and women succeeding too well in their academic work, male graduates feared that the college's masculine image was threatened. Worried, too, that women graduates would not be generous donors, the trustees decided in 1909 to make Wesleyan a college for men beginning in 1912. Wesleyan alumnae responded by spearheading the effort that led to the founding of Connecticut College for Women in 1911. Wesleyan resumed coeducation in 1970.⁸

Just as coeducation was instituted over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at many public and private institutions in the United States, the same was true in Canada. Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, admitted women in 1880; McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto followed suit in 1884. Women were enrolled at the University of British Columbia from its earliest years on its new campus in Vancouver, which opened in 1915.⁹ And in the United Kingdom, by the mid-twentieth century, coeducation was the established mode at virtually every institution except Cambridge and Oxford.

But at the most elite, most prestigious private colleges and universities on both sides of the Atlantic, the norm was single-sex education. Understanding why those institutions embraced coeducation is the focus of this book. Before we turn to the individual college and university experiences, however, we need to understand the political and social changes in the 1960s that created the context for such important institutional transformation.

A Context for Change: Political and Social Movements

In politics and society, the world of 1960 was profoundly different from the world of 1970 in both the United States and the United Kingdom. By 1970, transformative social and political movements had challenged and reshaped the basic processes that had governed political discourse and mechanisms for effecting social change. The civil rights movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement set an important context for the flood of decisions for coeducation.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS AND STUDENT MOVEMENTS

In the face of deeply entrenched racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans, the civil rights movement in the United States focused both on changing the law to guarantee the same rights to all citizens and on the mobilization of civil disobedience to ensure that the new laws were enforced. After decades of suits by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and others, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Staunch white southern resistance to the court's decision led to nonviolent direct-action protests throughout the South to secure equal access for black Americans to public accommodations, employment, education, and voting rights. Bus boycotts, sit-ins, and Freedom Rides challenged the established order in local communities; massive nonviolent demonstrations in the southern cities of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma met with extreme violence on the part of whites, including local authorities.

Responding to violence perpetrated on nonviolent protesters seeking their fundamental rights, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pressed the U.S. Congress to pass civil rights bills of major consequence. Thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law of the land now protected black voting rights and promised black Americans equal access to employment and to places of public accommodation. Under the sustained pressure of nonviolent direct action, white Americans in communities across the South began slowly to change longstanding practices of segregation and discrimination.¹⁰

College students, male and female, black and white, northern and southern, participated actively in the direct-action movement, an experience that profoundly affected their views about one another, about their universities, and about the society in which they lived. The engine for the student movement of the 1960s was the “New Left” organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960 in New York in association with the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Striking out on its own, SDS held a national convention in the summer of 1962 at Port Huron, Michigan. The Port Huron Statement, a manifesto drafted by Tom Hayden, former editor of the University of Michigan Daily, offered an “agenda for a generation” of student activists “looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” American society was replete with “complicated and disturbing paradoxes”: racial inequality, poverty amidst plenty, the role of U.S. economic and military investments in perpetuating the Cold War, the threat of nuclear destruction, the “sapping of the earth's physical resources,” and the many “isms” that imperiled the world order, such as colonialism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. SDS was committed to “the search for truly democratic alternatives” and to “social experimentation with them.”

The universities were implicated in the paradoxes and stasis of the old order: “Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic.” In the main, the college campus was “a place of private people … a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool … a place of … mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance,” a place characterized by pointless rules, intransigent bureaucracy, and irrelevant scholarship. Students were passive and disengaged from the public issues of the day; there were no big goals, no moral commitments of consequence, no engagement in the key challenges of the times.¹¹ Hayden's solution: “participatory democracy” whereby students would take control of their own lives in the academic communities in which they lived and, together with faculty members, “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy.” Students could then act as agents of more comprehensive change by joining in a broad-based, transformative movement to reconstruct American democracy.¹²

SDS made its first big splash in the biggest of all university contexts: the 27,000-student University of California at Berkeley. Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California (UC) system and a former chancellor of Berkeley, identified the seedbed for protest at Berkeley as the changing relationship between faculty and students. Senior faculty members, increasingly engaged in research, were less attentive to and engaged with undergraduates than had been the case historically and thus were no longer well placed to play interpretive, mediating roles between students and the university.

If the retreat of the research-driven faculty from undergraduate life laid the groundwork, the flashpoint for the emergence of protest was the move to restrict student political activity on the twenty-six-foot strip of brick sidewalk outside the university's main gate on Bancroft Way at the intersection of Telegraph Avenue, where student organizations displayed their literature, recruited supporters, and solicited funds. In the face of increasingly aggressive student political activity in the fall of 1964, the university announced that it was closing the Bancroft–Telegraph strip to groups engaged in activities involving off-campus issues, a policy then modified so that students could set up their tables but could not engage in any fund-raising, recruitment, or advocacy.

Students quickly began flouting the new regulation, and on September 30, five students were called to the dean's office for disciplinary action. One of them, a graduate student in philosophy named Mario Savio, brought along a group of five hundred students who claimed that they ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Setting the Stage: The Turbulent 1960s
• Part I: The Ivy League: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
• Part II: The Seven Sisters: Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley
• Part III: Revisiting the Ivies: Dartmouth
• Part IV: The United Kingdom: Cambridge and Oxford
• Part V: Taking Stock
• Manuscript Collections and Oral History Transcripts: Abbreviations
• Interviews
• Index