It’s 8 p.m. on a Saturday night in November 1967 and a busload of young women from Vassar College pulls up in front of one of the 12 residence colleges at Yale University. The women, in brightly colored dresses and short skirts, hair just combed, lipstick freshened, file off the bus and walk by the group of Yale men waiting at the curb and on into a hall filled with more young men. The men have already been drinking beer and they start choosing women to lead to the dance floor and later perhaps to their rooms. At midnight the imported women get back on the bus to return to New York.
This is a scene at Yale, before coeducation, that opens Anne Gardiner Perkins’ new book, “Why Yale Needs Women” (Sourcebooks, 384 pages) with the subtitle “How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant,” scheduled for release Sept. 10. Perkins and her husband live in Harvard, and Anne—or “Andy” as she used to be known—was active in town and served on the School Committee. Now, with the children grown, they spend most of their time in Boston. Perkins was an undergrad and graduate student at Yale and received her doctorate in higher education history from the University of Massachusetts Boston. As a historian and activist in higher education (who says she got her start as a writer through the Harvard Post), she was the perfect person to write this book.
Anne Gardiner Perkins. (Courtesy photo)
I was fortunate to spend time with Perkins at the Harvard General Store while she was in town briefly before heading to book signings in many different places (including here on Oct. 24). She said she first started looking into Yale coeducation when she was in her fall semester of post-grad school at UMass Boston and chose it as a topic for a final paper in a required course on the history of higher education. Having gone to Yale, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, she started to wonder what it was like for the first women to enter the formerly all-male school in 1969. She said she knew nothing about the first women undergraduates; no one ever talked about them. Digging into the Yale archives, she found records of the admission of women, but she said the record stopped there—no one had ever talked to the women about their experiences. After more time in the archives, Perkins knew she needed to interview the women.
How past shapes present
“I needed to tell the story,” said Perkins, “I felt I could bring something to it.” She wanted to document what had gone on for those women who, in 1969, were 575 freshmen, sophomores, and juniors struggling to come into their own with 4,000 men. “As a historian, I see how the stories of the past shape the present and how we see the future,” said Perkins. “At the root of culture is history,” she added. “[Women] still don’t have equity,” and the reasons go back to the inequity for women of the past.
Perkins told me she searched the database of admissions in 1969. She wanted to interview what she called a “purposeful sample” of women. She looked for diversity, sexuality, both leaders and more typical women, athletes, and women interested in the arts. She wanted women from each of the 12 residential colleges, since each has its own culture. It’s clear from the book that there was one factor she did not have to select for: academic performance. Every one of the women admitted in 1969 was chosen for her outstanding academic record. They were what The New York Times called “Superwomen.”
But they weren’t superwomen, and the book shows that their assimilation into the formerly all-male undergraduate school had not been unremarkable (as the absence of any documentation might imply). Rather, it had been somewhat of a nightmare, and their time at Yale was distinguished by fighting to get more women accepted so that the discrimination could end. It wasn’t the getting in that was difficult for them; it was the fight to make a Yale education fair for women that was the real battle.
Five unique experiences
What makes the book especially readable is that the broader ideas of the book are conveyed through the first-hand experiences of five girls admitted to Yale in 1969, two black and three white. We follow them as their experiences are played out against the tumultuous political and social changes happening at the time. Perkins shows the discrimination these young women faced and their individual successes despite it, their efforts, along with those of many others, to have Yale accept more women, and the important changes they effected over a three-year period at the university.
We meet the young women early on, as they are applying to Yale and then getting their acceptance letters in different parts of the country and in different circumstances. Kit McClure, 17, who played the trombone despite her parents’ objections that girls play flute, violin, and piano—not trombone, lived in New Jersey. She wanted Yale for its renowned music programs and its numerous science labs. Shirley Daniels wanted to transfer from Simmons in Boston because Yale was beginning an Afro-American studies major. Already living in New Haven, Connie Royster knew about the arts and humanities resources at Yale, and she wanted to stay close to her family who were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Betty Spahn had aced her freshman year at The George Washington University and was happy to transfer to Yale, and Laurie Mifflin from Pennsylvania was an avid field hockey player and planned to play the sport at Yale.
A contentious arrival
With the extensive research Perkins had done before her interviews, she describes the contentious lead up to the arrival of these first women undergraduates. As the book’s opening scene shows, Yale was caught up in the cycle of weekday studying at a same-gender university and going to mixers on the weekends. By 1968 the majority of the students wanted coeducation; students argued single sex was unnatural. And they wanted to find girlfriends. “Coeducation should now be beyond argument,” the editor had written in the Yale Daily News as early as 1966. (Years later, Perkins would be the first woman editor-in-chief.)
Yale President Kingman Brewster may have opposed allowing women to apply, but many of Yale’s male students disagreed. In 1968, recent graduate Derek Shearer papered the campus with this poster, which featured a picture of his sister Brooke. This replica of the original poster includes the photo of Brooke and the question to which Kingman Brewster had no good answer: “Please Mr. Brewster, Why Can’t I Come to Yale?”
(Photo courtesy of Strobe Talbott and Ginny Perkins Photography)
When Kingman Brewster became president of Yale in 1968, he promised change, but Perkins reveals that he was the real obstacle to accepting women into Yale and then to increasing their numbers and giving them equality. Behind Brewster at that time were 268 years of tradition as an all-male university, with a corporation and alumni that prided themselves on turning out “a thousand male leaders” with every graduating class. Brewster had progressive views on race, religion, and class (he made a shift to admitting qualified young men from public high schools, not just from elite prep schools). But not on gender. For Brewster, a prestigious education required an all-male education. And he believed firmly that Yale must turn out leaders, and women were not leaders. The book shows how Brewster continued to ignore the increasing pressure from numerous sources—students, the Yale Daily News, some of his colleagues, and the admissions department.
It was Brewster’s spirit of competitiveness and determination to keep Yale on top that finally changed his mind about admitting girls. In 1968, 40% of boys accepted to Yale declined in favor of a coed school or a university like Harvard with its sister school, Radcliffe. Princeton had announced that it was going coed, declaring women were vital to the university’s future. In 1969 the Yale faculty voted 200-1 in favor of admitting women. With these threats to retaining top status, Brewster relented, but he said there must be minimum disruption in the current patterns of education. Some changes were made for the fall, but there was no real plan for the women who would be arriving.
A cruel double standard
Perkins writes that Yale’s policy of a gender quota resulted in “a crueler double standard than the simple exclusion of women ever did.” She follows these women as they navigate their way in a school that wasn’t really ready for them, that had built no housing for them and spread them among 12 residence colleges, isolating them from one another. In the classroom they were demeaned by professors, and there were no sports teams and few extracurricular spots open to them. Women were outnumbered 7 to 1, and they became sexual targets. There was little protection for the girls, no outdoor lights and no locks on bathroom doors, and the school was slow to acknowledge the safety problems. The girls did not talk about sexual assaults they experienced. There were no laws against discrimination against women at universities. The women’s movement had not arrived in New Haven.
Still, the women did have individual successes. Kit becomes the only woman in the marching band and soon joins a consciousness-raising group. Lawrie, discovering there are no competitive sports for women, starts a rag-tag field hockey club. (Two years later, after the girls show up for a game in kilts borrowed from Princeton, they become a varsity team.) Connie finds acceptance in the theater group, Betty becomes an activist for women’s job security, and Shirley finds a small black community within the university.
But to make women successful at Yale, there had to be more of them. Perkins describes individuals and groups that get momentum going to present Brewster with proof of the increasing will for Yale to accept more women. And each time Brewster refuses to budge.
Brewster resists
By January 1970 a graduate women’s group had been formed, and a women’s consciousness raising group outside the university. A group of 40 freshman girls attended a big alumni gathering, distributing leaflets that described the challenges caused by their small numbers. They wanted the Class of 1974 to comprise not 1,000 men with some women add-ons, but a total of 1,000 with 700 men and 300 women. Brewster held firm on his insistence that Yale admit 1,000 men a year.
Betty and Kit form The Yale Sisterhood for undergraduates. They exchanged stories of sexual assaults, of demeaning comments by professors who singled them out for “the woman’s view,” inappropriate advances by faculty, their resentment at the busloads of women still arriving on weekends. They knew the only way things would improve was for Yale to increase the number of women it admitted. While the women made individual protests, it wasn’t until they joined together and shared their experiences that they became a force for change. Momentum was peaking when it got diverted by protests against the Vietnam War, the trial in New Haven of the murder of a Black Panther member, and the Kent State killings.
Over the next two years, more groups pressured Brewster to drop the gender quota. Admissions pointed out that qualified women were being turned away in favor of less qualified men; the response was, “We are not producing intellectuals, we are producing leaders.” Women and Men for a Better Yale presented the corporation with a petition of 1,900 signatures asking for sex-blind admissions and was met with a resounding no. But, on the positive side, there were changes in the faculty, trustees, and admissions committee that, along with legislative decisions, pointed to more equity for women.
Elga Wasserman, who was an assistant provost, aspiring to be assistant to the president, became an advocate for women undergrads and more women professors, and time and again, Brewster ignored her and passed her over for a higher position. She persisted in barraging Brewster with memos, to her own detriment.
Finally, in December of 1972, Brewster presented a choice, and the Yale Corporation voted to abolish the gender quota that had shaped the first four years of coeducation at Yale.
Important not to be too judgy
In speaking more about the writing of the book, Perkins told me that it was a wonderful experience to meet these women and to have them trust her. To my surprise, she said they did not express anger over their experience, seeming to accept it as part of the times. Betty Spahn told Perkins, “It’s important not to be too judgy about what went on.”
Perkins said it was eye-opening to learn that at the time, the women had no idea it was President Brewster who was the holdout against increasing the number of women. They thought it was the alumni who were so opposed.
In explaining their misconception, Perkins told me that Brewster was a very personable man, very supportive of the students, and an advocate of civil rights and Vietnam protests. It seemed natural that the women saw him as an ally, on their side for gender rights. Perkins said the women had not realized the entire truth about Wasserman, either. They had seen her as a powerful, visible role model and had no idea she was constantly being undermined by Brewster.
In speaking of the women, Perkins said, “I feel enriched by spending time with them.” I couldn’t help but think how enriched these women must feel to have their story told. In the book’s prologue, Perkins writes, “The women who go first and speak out help shape a better world for all of us, yet all too often their stories are lost. I was not going to let that happen to this story.”
