Woman & Man at Yale

In the fall of 1968, two girls named Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz arrived on the New Haven campus to begin graduate studies in sociology. Women had been attending Yale graduate schools since the turn of the century, but around the university's ivied halls and paneled smoking rooms, they soon found out, to be female was a singularly disconcerting experience.

"The maleness of Yale was overwhelming," they recall in their book Women at Yale. "Male eating clubs, male-populated streets, even a male-oriented health department. Walking down a Yale street we became acutely aware of the staring. We were conscious of ourselves as objects, common objects to be looked over and appraised."

Vantage Point. As it turned out, Yale was at that very moment in the throes of deciding whether to go coeducational, as a number of all male and all female Eastern schools were doing. After Vassar opted out of a proposed merger, Yale President Kingman Brewster decided to go ahead and he announced that in the fall of 1969 Yale would admit 500 women undergraduate students.

From their special vantage point--that of girls who had already established themselves at Yale and who had done their undergraduate work at coeducational Washington University in St. Louis--Janet, 25, and Pepper, 26, decided to chart what promised to be a major university's painful adjustment to coeducation. Anyone might have predicted that with an overwhelming male majority of 8 to 1, the experiment would hardly represent a normal coeducational environment. But few would have guessed, as the authors were to find in some 300 taped interviews, the degree to which the venture would illuminate the problems of all-male schools.

Many youths found themselves unable to think of the girls thrust into their midst as anything but "mindless playmates" traditionally reserved for weekend dating. "Coeds are like Christmas-tree decorations or something," one student told them. "They're just sort of there, and I don't particularly want to get involved with them."

Said another: "I like having women around, but there's a few places that really are for men--like the TV room. If a girl shows up for a football game, she'll just get pushed to the back of the room--and rightfully so." Such comments may sound like isolated examples of male resentment, but they were pretty much the norm. For one thing, nearly 40% of Yale's male students were products of all-male prep schools. By seeing women only in social situations throughout formative years, says Pepper Schwartz, the men had never learned "to develop friendships with women or to treat them as intellectual equals."

Intimidated. Not all of the adjustments were confined to the men, of course. Vastly outnumbered, women tended initially to be intimidated in class, though the girls did well in their written work. "You were expected to be a mixture of Margaret Mead and Scarlett O'Hara," says Janet Lever. "There you are in class discussing Lolita, and the professor turns to you and asks for the woman's point of view. It created a very tense situation." By the second year, adds Pepper Schwartz, "the women students had been radicalized. They had more of an idea of what it is to be a woman in a man's world, and they were making more demands to know about themselves as women."

Nonetheless, many of the students have concluded that if coeducation at Yale is ever to be coequal, the male-female ratio, which has narrowed slightly to 5 to 1, must be equalized. That seems a remote possibility, though Brewster is considering some kind of reorganization to bring it closer. The main obstacle is his own promise to alumni that Yale would continue to turn out "1,000 male leaders" every year. Thus, while absorbing large numbers of women (a total of 823 this year), Yale has held male enrollment (4,000) constant--and has suffered from serious overcrowding.

By the Wayside. Despite all its social and emotional wear and tear, coeducation has brought few visible changes to Yale. One administrator admits that he is still startled to see a student wearing a bikini in the gymnasium elevator. A dean says that he enjoys getting notes from girls more than he does from boys because they are signed "Love." One senior professor, who laments the loss of "male fellowship," is still bluntly prejudiced. "Women may make a fractional contribution to an undergraduate lecture," he concedes. "They don't yawn as much."

Though female students have succeeded in getting ten women's studies courses added to the curriculum, Yale still counts only two women among its 785 tenured professors in arts and sciences. The university's tweedy, old off-campus dining club, Mory's, has adamantly refused to admit women as members, even though its liquor license was recently revoked because of discrimination.

Nonetheless, a few myths have fallen by the wayside. There has been no discernible loss of intellectual quality. Men have not dropped off in their studies because of the "distraction" of girls. The dropout rate for the women is only half that of the men (2.3% v. 4.4%). The women have higher grades--and the proportion of those going on to graduate school is about equal to that of men. Significantly, perhaps, more girls than boys choose law schools (17% v. 15%), a percentage far higher than the national norm.

Concludes Brewster: "Once we overcome the lopsided ratio, I don't think there will be any drawbacks to coeducation at Yale. People have a much more human relationship with each other now. They're more considerate. Educationally, socially, and even morally Yale is a much better place than it was before."

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