Yale began admitting women 50 years ago. Its first female students are now sharing campus stories. Via TheAtlantic Yale
In April 1969, five months after Yale University announced it was becoming coeducational, its first female undergrads got stuck with a nickname they would never quite shake. The university announced in late 1968 that it would accept women as undergraduate students starting the next academic year, and the following spring, The New York Times Magazine published a feature by a Yale student about the selection process for Yale’s first undergraduate women.
“They had been carefully trying not to pay attention,” she said with a laugh. “But they said, ‘Well, welcome to Yale. Do you have stuff that you need help carrying from the bus station?’" The pair helped take her bags to her room on the top floor of Vanderbilt Hall, and when they stopped on the way at their dormitory, Newman remembers overhearing a conversation between two men observing the arrival of women at Yale in real time.
Rebecca Newman discovered—in somewhat jarring fashion—another way in which Yale was adapting when she showed up to take the famous Yale Swimming Test, where students had to demonstrate that they could swim the length of the pool at the Payne Whitney Gym. Newman had shown up to the gymnasium in a bathing suit and cover-up, and soon noticed a sign posted near the elevators that reminded gentlemen that “clothing must now be worn in all public places.
“This whole project to have women there, they wanted it to succeed,” Majure told me. “And, you know, the last thing they wanted was to have a bunch of pregnant freshmen.” Not everyone found class so welcoming, however. Linda Bunch remembers her seminar classes as particularly intimidating places—and not just because women were outnumbered by men, or because Bunch describes herself as “shy” at the time. “I didn’t feel like these people wanted me in the class,” she told me.
Still, Julia Preston remembers that during her freshman year, she often had to avoid social advances from male students when she was trying to study—especially from upperclassmen, for whom the college experience as they knew it had been transformed. “Sometimes I had difficulty being able to study in the big libraries, the big reading rooms. Guys would come up to me and want to chat, and they would sit down,” she told me.
What Preston—who told me her grandfather, father, uncle, cousin, and two older brothers all preceded her at Yale—now remembers most vividly from her freshman year is how the political upheaval that was playing out across the country affected New Haven.
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