‘Not Bad for a Woman’: The Indignities of Life for Yale’s First Female Students

File this under the "Everybody is a Victim" heading. These are generally privileged women from privileged families going to one of the world's great colleges. And now they are complaining about it. Talk about a First World view of the universe.

Like the author, I too graduated in 1987 from an elite, recently male-only university: Notre Dame. At the time, the male:female ratio was 3:1, and although ND had been coed for about ten years, the women students were let in for a lot of sexist nonsense from the men. The worst of it came from the old priest faculty, some of whom made it quite clear that they objected to wasting their time teaching women, who would just get married and have babies = education wasted, because we were taking a university spot from a man. I told one professor if the man were as good as me, he would be there instead.

I write as one of the members of the first full class of women at Princeton. I had just bought this book and am unhappily delighted that the issues you summarize here applied to Princeton as well. We were told that the only reason that Princeton went co-ed was because they were afraid that they would lose male students to Yale (whether true or not, it did not precisely make us feel welcome). I had numerous professors who were not happy with our presence, who felt uneasy with a woman in their class and who had actively or passively resisted co-education. (One of my faculty freshman year told another student when I was not there that he had resisted co-education but was now glad since I had said something about the reading (something that had nothing to do with gender) that he had not thought of, and he now appreciated a girl's perspective. I thought I just said something intelligent but I guess it was because of my extra X chromosome. We had an organization - CAP - whose purpose was in part to resist our presence and one of whose members is now a commentator on Fox and another a supreme court justice. We had the parade of beautiful women on the weekend, implicitly telling us that we just weren't good enough. The campus paper did a congratulatory article on how we were sitting at home on weekends without dates. Were these attitudes true for all students and all faculty? Of course not. But this history tells us a lot about class and gender.

My mother was the third female graduate (in history) of the Yale Divinity School, in 1943. So the grad schools were ahead of the undergrad part of the university. She's still alive, at 98 -- and no one messes with her, even now!

Reading this review made me glad--again--that my alma mater did not merge with Yale in 1969, as was planned. It would not have directly affected me, because I graduated in 1969. However, to have had the young women after me treated as second class (at best) citizens, would have negated the very reasons Matthew Vassar established the college named after him.

It's astounding to think that this change at the Ivy League colleges didn't happen until then (and a good reminder to all current generations that we should never take our freedoms for granted).

These women should be honored. But Yale should acknowledge the shame and outright pathetic reality of being so late to a party. And if students really want to attend schools that embrace diversity they should look to schools like Cornell that have such an ethos at their core - blacks and women in the school in the 1800s....(and students there today should acknowledge and start any complaint or protest by thanking Cornell for these counter-culture moves almost 150 years ago!) The core problems remain today and Yale should apologize and apologize again rather than pretend celebrating these women today makes up for what should be shame. In New Haven, right now, they ignore the history by celebrating the brave. You can’t move on until you admit your sins...

I've ordered this book, which sounds very interesting, and should complement Nancy Weiss Malkiel's recent sweeping overview of coeducation at top elite universities. If anyone is interested, the eminent sociologists Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz wrote a contemporaneous book-length account, which is still a riveting account of what it was like for the first undergraduate women entering this historically-male institution (postgraduates had been admitted for a while).

78 Dartmouth grad, where coeducation started in 1972 and the male quota wasn’t dropped until sometime in the 80s. Always nice to hear it wasn’t just us.

I was one of the first boarding girls at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1971. We had similar issues. I didn't have any female teachers in my first year, and only had a few after that. Many of the male teachers had gone to all boys schools and universities, and had never really interacted with teenage girls. There were dances in which girls were bused in from all-girls schools. Faculty wives were asked to serve as advisors, and I doubt they received any training. Despite all that, I loved it, and many of my closest friends today are people I met there.

I'm going to compose this comment carefully so that it does not get rejected by the moderators for excessive acerbity. The material in this book shows that women were not welcomed to Yale. They had to fight bitterly for every inch of progress. Ditto for Harvard and other "top" schools. Likewise, read the history of women's fight for voting rights, women's admission to the military academies, women's fight for equal treatment in high school and college athletics, women's ongoing battles for employment rights and on, and on. Every. single. area. of public life has taken a pitched battle by hundreds and thousands of women who would not give up, would not shut up, in the long slog toward equal treatment for women. Many, many women were made to suffer mistreatment, insult, and rejection for each tiny advancement. Men DID NOT want to give up their lofty perch of superiority. Men DID NOT want to discontinue their subjugation of women. And now, some men are feeling sad and picked upon by women. Gosh, isn't that too bad.

I think it's worth pointing out that Elga Wasserman was far more than an administrator. Wasserman was an accomplished chemist, having earned her PhD in chemistry from Harvard working in the laboratory of the Nobel prize winner, R. B. Woodward. Not only was Wasserman one of the few women to hold a PhD in chemistry at that time, but she did so in arguable one of the most prestigious and demanding research groups in the world. Yale's treatment of Dr. Wasserman was in many ways reprehensible, but this did little to deter her from her goals.

Yet more proof, if any was really needed, that the Ivies are essentially an expensive dumpster fire.