The women came to Yale in buses, peering out the large glass windows at the men who had gathered on the sidewalk below to await their arrival. The girls from Vassar College wore brightly colored dresses and skirts cut up above the knee. Their hair shone from being combed and recombed on the two-hour drive from Poughkeepsie to New Haven. The guys from Yale had dressed up as well: button-down shirts, narrow ties, and sports jackets. The men’s faces were clean-shaven, and their hair was trimmed neatly above the ears. It was Saturday night, November 1967, and the Yale men were ready for women.1
Yale was still an all-men’s college back then, and one of the only ways to find a girlfriend was to frequent the mixers that brought in busloads of women each weekend from elite women’s colleges like Vassar and Smith. On Saturday nights, the buses rolled into Yale at 8:00 p.m., each with their cargo of fifty girls. At midnight, the girls returned from whence they came. In the four hours in between, the Yale men sought to make their match. Guys who had girlfriends already would show up at the Saturday football games with their girls on their arms and then appear with them afterward in the dining hall or a local restaurant. But for the rest of the week, Yale undergraduates lived their days in a single-sex world.
To picture Yale as it was at the time, imagine a village of men. From Monday through Friday, students attended their men-only classes, ate meals in their men-only dining hall, took part in their men-only extracurricular pursuits, and then retired to their men-only dorms. Yale admitted scatterings of women graduate and professional students in 1967, but Yale College, the heart of the university, remained staunchly all male. The ranks of faculty and administrators who ran the school were nearly all men as well. If you were to peek through the door at any department meeting, the professors seated around the table would invariably be “white men in tweeds and casually expensive shoes,”2 as one of Yale’s rare black professors observed. Yale was an odd place, at least to a modern eye, but since its founding in 1701, Yale had always been a place for men.
Yale was the oldest men’s club in the nation—older than the Kiwanis, the Elks, and the Boy Scouts; older than New York’s Union Club and San Francisco’s Bohemian Club; and older than Princeton and Dartmouth and the dozens of other U.S. colleges that also banned women from applying in 1967. Only two colleges in America were older than Yale: William and Mary, which went coed in 1919 for financial reasons, and Harvard, where Radcliffe women had been attending classes since 1943.3 Yale never had a sister school. On the weekends, though, for a brief span of hours, a fissure opened up in that men-only world. The buses from Vassar and Connecticut College, from Smith and Mount Holyoke, pulled up at the curb, and the Yale guys began vying with one another for the best of the imported women. The evening always began with such promise.
The bus doors swung apart. The women clicked open their compacts to check their lipstick one last time and then descended one by one into the crowd of men below, wondering what the night would bring. Girl after girl stepped down off the bus, smiled, and filed past the group of college boys standing outside. They passed through the stone archway of one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges and then into the wood-paneled common room where more Yale men waited. The men had been drinking already, clustered in groups around kegs of cheap beer brought in for the event, bracing themselves for the night to come.
A girlfriend was “the most prized piece of chattel in the college man’s estate,” explained one Yale student,4 but not just any girl would do. She had to come from one of the colleges thought suitable for future Yale wives, and she had to be pretty. If a guy brought a good-looking girl with him into one of Yale’s dining halls, his classmates would show their approval by banging their spoons against their water glasses. Guys who arrived with a date thought unattractive would get ribbed about it later. And so the Yale men chose carefully.
A Yale sophomore appraised the women who now filled the room, picked out one of them, and approached her with his long-practiced line: “Say, aren’t you from California?”5
She was not, but the two chatted anyway, trading hometowns and majors. All the while, both scanned the room—was there someone better to be paired with?
In the next room over, the dining hall had been turned into a dance floor, with chairs and tables shoved over to the side, the lights turned low. A young man asked one of the newly arrived women if she wanted to dance. She smiled, and the two entered the room.
A band blared saxophone and electric bass from the front, the music so loud that conversation was impossible. There was little to do but nod and smile, pretending to hear what the other person said. A few couples over, one girl, put off by her partner’s awkward dance moves, pretended she was dancing with the guy next to him. The song ended, and she retreated to the ladies’ room, hoping he would be with someone else when she returned. The pairs in the room reshuffled, with men who sought a new partner excusing themselves to get a beer and women who wanted to move on explaining they needed to go find their roommates. The code in both cases was the same—not you.
Through the first two hours of the mixer, the cycle continued—choose, discard; choose, discard; choose, discard—a game of musical chairs where each person hoped not to be the one who turned up alone when the music stopped.
“Say, aren’t you from California?”
By 10:00 p.m., the pairings became less fluid, the matches more firm. The question shifted: Would you like to see my room?
A senior with long blond hair had heard this line too many times before. “No,” she answered, “I know all about your room.”6 It had been a long night for her already. A Yale freshman had offered to give her a tour of the campus. Another guy had offered to show her his rock collection. As one Yale man observed, “Some girls that I’ve talked to have the idea that all we want from them is sex. Maybe they’re right, but what else can you do when you don’t get to know them and haven’t got the time to establish a natural relationship?”7
At midnight, the buses readied to leave, and the women filed back out through the stone archway, some coming from the depleted crowd at the mixer and others from the men’s rooms they’d been visiting. The opening into Yale’s village of men once again closed. The buses of women pulled out and began the long drive home while the men pushed the dining hall tables and chairs back into place and the band carted away its instruments. All that was left was the smell of the beer. And so the rhythm of Yale continued as it always had, with men-only weeks followed by weekends with women. Change, however, hovered just around the corner. But no one at Yale seemed to realize how fast it would come.
* * *
The school year passed. Another class of Yale men graduated, and a new one readied to take its place, just as the cycle had gone for decades. Yet beneath that veneer of sameness, things were shifting at Yale, and Kingman Brewster Jr., Yale’s president, was the reason.8
By 1968, Brewster was in his fifth year as president and had established himself as a leader who was determined to bring about change.9 He had tasked his admissions director with increasing the numbers of black students at Yale, and he’d supported black students’ efforts to create an Afro-American studies major, one of the first in the nation. He increased the financial aid budget so that all admitted students could attend and halted the admissions office practice of checking on students’ family income before deciding whether or not to admit them. Brewster had hired some of the most renowned academics in the nation to strengthen the faculty and raised Yale’s profile in the national press. And in the process of all of this, he had attained a prominence that surpassed that of most politicians.
Brewster made the cover of Newsweek in 1964 and was named by President Lyndon B. Johnson to a U.S. presidential commission the following year and to a second one in 1966. In 1967, the New York Times published a gushing five-page profile of Brewster, and talk began in some corners of a possible cabinet position or even a U.S. presidential run. That same year, Brewster made the cover of Time and chaired a UN policy panel on peacekeeping missions. If Yale men, as some said, were destined for leadership, then Kingman Brewster was striding confidently down the path of his destiny.
Begin with the name: Kingman—or as old friends and colleagues sometimes called him, simply “King,” his childhood nickname.10 For if ever there was a person who embodied the ideal of manhood at Yale, it was Brewster. He was “an imposing figure. Big,” said one Yale student, and those who met him were struck by his presence.11 “Whatever ‘it’ is, he had it,” remarked one Yale trustee.12 Brewster was handsome by most accounts, with a craggy sort of face and brown hair that was just going gray at the temples. He wore pinstripe suits and shirts handmade in Hong Kong and was descended from ancestors who had come over on the Mayflower—the first trip. He carried with him “the assurance that came from being a direct descendant of the Elder Brewster,” explained one of his friends.13 “You know, ‘This is my place.’” And like every Yale president since 1766 but one, Brewster had gone to college at Yale, since, as every Yale man knew, quipped the Harvard Crimson, “a Yale man is the best kind of man to be, and only Yale can produce one.”14
Yet just when it seemed one might be able to sum Brewster up in a phrase—the patrician leader, the ultimate Yale man, the nation’s most well-known university president—a confounding piece of evidence arose to complicate the picture. “He was a very complex man,” observed student Kurt Schmoke.15
Brewster encompassed a span of seeming contradictions. He was politically conservative but open-minded on many issues. He was both a blue-blood New Englander and a man who sought to learn from others, regardless of their pedigree. He was reserved but sparkled at social gatherings, where he would amuse his friends by mimicking various political personalities or once by singing with gusto an impromptu performance from My Fair Lady. He was forty-nine years old, yet on some of America’s hottest issues—Vietnam, race—he stood not with the men of his own generation but with the generation that challenged them.
The students loved him. For their 1968 fund-raiser, Yale’s student advisory board sold T-shirts printed with the slogan “Next to myself, I like Kingman best.”16 The following year, when Brewster entered a contentious campus-wide meeting on the future of ROTC at Yale, four thousand students rose to give him a standing ovation.17 On the subject of coeducation, however, Brewster and Yale students stood apart. Indeed, of all the dissonances that defined Kingman Brewster, the contrast between his progressive stances on race, religion, and class and his conservative views on gender was perhaps the most striking.
Brewster refused to frequent clubs that discriminated against blacks or Jews, and the signature change of his administration had been opening Yale’s doors to more black students and students from families that could never before have afforded to send their sons to Yale. But when it came to women, Brewster was content with the world as it was. He enjoyed many a meal at clubs that banned women from the main dining room at lunchtime, and as to the idea of ending Yale’s 268 years as a men’s school by admitting women undergraduates . . . well, why would anyone want to do that?
By 1968, Yale students had been telling Brewster the answer to that question for more than two years, ever since Lanny Davis became chairman of the Yale Daily News in 1966. “Coeducation should now be beyond argument,” Lanny wrote in his debut editorial, which declared that the time was long overdue to end “the unrealistic, artificial, and stifling social environment of an all-male Yale.”18 Lanny did not stop there but proceeded to publish a barrage of pro-coeducation columns and editorials, more than nineteen in all, over the next five months. “Lanny beat the drums day in and day out and, in a wonderfully positive way, harassed the hell out of us,” said Brewster’s top adviser, Sam Chauncey.19 And when the Yale Daily News spoke, the men who ran Yale generally listened. The News was one of the oldest and most powerful student organizations on campus. Past chairmen had included Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Time magazine founder Henry Luce, and Kingman Brewster himself, who read the Yale Daily News and met regularly with the paper’s chairman to get a read on student opinion.20 When it came to admitting women undergraduates, however, even the News could not convince Brewster that the time for change had come.
Brewster was hardly alone in his stance. America’s most elite colleges had long maintained their reputation not just by the types of students they let in but by those they kept out: Jews, blacks, working-class kids—and women. Even after the wave of coeducation that followed the Civil War, upping the proportion of coed campuses from 25 percent before the war to 60 percent by 1890, the vast majority of top-tier colleges and universities in the United States stayed all male.21 Coeducation was solely a symptom of financial weakness, opined Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1873.22 The colleges that could afford to turn down women’s tuitions—America’s oldest and most prestigious—would continue to do so.
Nearly a century later, President Eliot’s prediction held true, and in 1968, the list of U.S. colleges that still banned women undergraduates reads like an academic who’s who: Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, Columbia, Dartmouth, Davidson, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, Hamilton, Harvard, Haverford, Holy Cross, Johns Hopkins, Kenyon, Lafayette, Lehigh, Notre Dame, Penn, Princeton, Rutgers, Sewanee, Trinity, Tufts, Tulane, Union, UVA, Washington and Lee, Wesleyan, West Point and the other military academies, Williams, and—of course—Yale.23 A few, like Harvard and Brown, had created sister schools that kept the women nearby without putting them on equal terms with men, but none admitted women to the same college that the men attended. “In the minds of many,” observed the Educational Record, “‘all-male’ education has become synonymous with ‘prestige’ education.”24
That status quo was just fine with Brewster, and unless he changed his position on the matter, Yale would stay just as it was. Brewster’s power at Yale ran unfettered by the constraints that frustrated other campus presidents. He was not just a member of the Corporation, Yale’s board of trustees, but its president,25 and “the faculty adored him,” observed one senior professor.26 Brewster had raised their salaries and strengthened their reputation, and the glow from Brewster’s accolades shone on all of them. Nonetheless, even Kingman Brewster could not always shape the world as he wished to.
The events of the spring of 1968 had shaken him. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April had struck particularly hard, for here was a man whose hand Brewster had clasped when, as one of the first acts of his presidency, he had awarded King an honorary degree.27 That same month, students at Trinity College, just forty miles up the road from Yale, had held a group of trustees hostage until Trinity acted on a long-stalled student demand for a scholarship fund for black and other disadvantaged students.28 A larger protest at Columbia three weeks later ended with more than two hundred students injured and seven hundred arrested.29
Over the summer of 1968, Brewster retreated with his family to their waterfront home on Martha’s Vineyard, where he spent his days in Bermuda shorts and sneakers, sailing and talking with friends and presiding over the grill at evening cookouts. And there, pecking out the words with two fingers on his typewriter, Brewster wrote the initial draft of his annual presidential report, his statement of Yale’s accomplishments in the year just passed and the goals for the year to come. As he looked ahead to the fall of 1968, Brewster set forth two central questions: How much say should students have in university governance? What was the university’s responsibility to the New Haven neighborhoods that surrounded it?30 Brewster typed out his answers, which in turn became his priorities for the year. His report was silent entirely, however, on the possibility of coeducation.
The summer ticked away, and as it did, the twine that held the nation together continued to unravel. In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In August, Chicago police assaulted protestors at the Democratic National Convention. And in the background was the constant drumbeat of the Vietnam War, where U.S. troop levels had surpassed half a million. The growing women’s movement would unsettle the givens of Brewster’s life still further, but in the summer of 1968, it was just gaining its footing.31 NOW, the National Organization for Women, was only two years old. Consciousness-raising groups had just started meeting in women’s living rooms and kitchens. Most Americans did not yet grasp the extent of the discrimination against women in education, employment, and the law. Aside from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the major works of second-wave feminism were yet to be written.
Out on Martha’s Vineyard, the days grew shorter with the coming fall; the time to pack away the Bermuda shorts drew near. Brewster finished his president’s report and readied to return to campus, not yet realizing that the agenda for the year ahead would be set not by him, but by students.
* * *
To Yale senior Derek Shearer, the idea that women were not good enough to attend a college like Yale made no sense. He had only to look at his family for evidence to the contrary. His sister Brooke was one of the smartest kids in her high school. His mother wrote for local and national magazines, and Derek felt proud to write journalist instead of housewife on the forms at school that asked his mother’s occupation. Derek had attended a coed public high school in California, and his friends there included both boys and girls. He did not like the all-male atmosphere he found at Yale, and he was determined to change it.32
Yale students and their views on the desirability of coeducation had changed in the four years since Derek had arrived as a freshman.33 Some Yale men were still happy to attend an all-male school, with its bonds of brotherhood and freedom from the pressure (albeit self-induced) of performing for the opposite sex. But by 1968, the bulk of Yale students did not want to spend their college years trapped in a village of men. Many saw their single-sex existence as unnatural. Others just wanted girlfriends. A number, like Derek, were moved by the unfairness of a policy that gave them a chance to get into Yale while denying their sisters the opportunity to even apply. Like the growing number of Yale men who grew their hair long or wore mustaches and beards, these new views reflected the changing values of youth across the nation. And at Yale, some of that shift had been inadvertently caused by Brewster himself.
After Brewster instructed his new admissions dean, Russell Inslee “Inky” Clark, to admit the top male students in the country regardless of their race or class or religion, the prep school boys who had long formed the majority at Yale had to compete against a broader field, and their numbers declined.34 In their stead, Yale admitted more students from public high schools, schools that with rare exception were coed. All-male Yale, while normal for the kids from all-male Andover and all-male Exeter, was not normal to this growing group of public high school graduates, and by Derek’s senior year, half of Yale’s four classes had been chosen by Inky Clark.
Derek held one of the top student positions at Yale: chairman of the student advisory board. The role granted him regular meetings with Brewster, and Derek used that pulpit to push Brewster on a topic that Brewster did not wish to be pushed on. “Complete and immediate coeducation,” Derek told him in February 1968, was Yale’s “most pressing educational need.”35 All that talk came to naught, however, just like the earlier student efforts to end Yale’s single-sex status. Brewster simply did not want Yale to admit women undergraduates. “Kingman was not comfortable with the idea of coeducation,” explained Sam Chauncey, whose title as Brewster’s assistant gave little indication of the degree of influence he held.36 Chauncey had occupied the office next to Brewster’s ever since Brewster became president in 1963. The two talked every day: first thing in the morning, as issues arose during the day, or by phone if Brewster was out of town. Chauncey was privy to thoughts Brewster did not share with others, and while he always supported Brewster in public, Chauncey was free to challenge Brewster privately on issues where the two men disagreed—coeducation, for example. Yet here Chauncey met the same resistance as Yale students. Brewster “believed in change,” Chauncey observed, “except when it came to things that were really important to him.”37 Keeping Yale an all-male school was one of them.
Despite his national reputation, Brewster had lived his life behind the walls of a markedly insular world. A graduate of an all-boys prep school, Brewster had attended all-male Yale, where he’d met Vassar College junior Mary Louise Phillips, the daughter of a Yale man, at a fraternity party.38 They’d married the following year. As Yale’s president, Brewster spent his days surrounded by men, and while the elegant dinner parties he hosted began with couples seated together, after the meal the men retired to the front parlor for brandy and conversation while the wives were shunted off elsewhere. For Brewster, the notion of two parallel spheres, one for men and one for women, was so deeply embedded in the structure of his days that it was hard to imagine an alternative.
“Kingman knew girls and women as someone apart,” explained Associate Dean John Wilkinson, one of Brewster’s inner circle.39 “He wasn’t accustomed to women who were his equals.” That perceived difference was at the center of Brewster’s opposition to coeducation.
To Brewster, admitting women students threatened the central mission of Yale: graduating America’s future leaders. By 1968, Yale had produced Supreme Court justices, a U.S. president, and a small army of U.S. senators, governors, and CEOs. Along with Harvard and Princeton, Yale was “widely viewed as the training grounds for the nation’s leaders,” wrote historian Jerome Karabel,40 and Yale would confirm that reputation twenty years later, when every U.S. president between 1989 and 2009 was a Yale man.
“We are a national institution whose ambition is nothing less than to try to frame a leadership for the nation,” Brewster told Yale alumni in 1966, and admitting the right students was the key to attaining that goal.41 The role of the admissions office, Brewster instructed his staff, was to “make the hunchy judgment as to whether or not with Yale’s help the candidate is likely to be a leader in whatever he ends up doing.”42 Since women were not leaders, Brewster reasoned, they would be taking up limited spaces that could have gone to men.
If Brewster had wanted evidence of women’s potential as leaders, all he had to do was look out his office window. Two blocks up at Yale’s graduate school, future Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen was getting her PhD in economics, while future UC Berkeley chancellor Carol Christ was getting hers in English. One block away, future secretary of state Hillary Rodham had just been accepted at Yale Law School, where future Connecticut Supreme Court chief justice Ellen Peters was on the faculty and future Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman had graduated six years earlier.
This blindness to women’s potential as leaders was not Brewster’s alone. Judging by Americans’ choices at the polls, he was right in step with his era. In the fall of 1968, all 50 of the state governors were men, as were 99 of the 100 U.S. senators and all but 11 of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.43 Yale’s brand was producing national leaders, and if examples of women leaders could not be found—despite women’s exclusion to date from nearly every avenue to power—then Yale was going to waste as few admissions slots on women as possible.
Brewster was a skilled political tactician, and for the two years following Lanny Davis’s editorial onslaught, he kept Yale students at bay by holding out the possibility of a sister school, a solution that would have brought women to New Haven without actually having to admit them to Yale.44 Brewster even tried for an entire year to convince all-women Vassar to abandon its campus in Poughkeepsie and move 120 miles east to New Haven. When that plan fell through, he was ready with another: Yale would happily build its own women’s college—as soon as a donor stepped forward to pay the more than $30 million that Brewster said it would cost for the additional faculty, staff, and facilities.45 And there the issue sat, nicely stalled, until student adviser Derek Shearer got tired of waiting.
Derek graduated in June 1968 without making much progress with Brewster, but he wasn’t done with Yale yet. While Brewster sat pecking away at his president’s report in Martha’s Vineyard, Derek was busy making plans of his own. Even if he would not be at Yale to carry them out himself, he knew plenty of students in the classes below him who were just as tired of Brewster’s intransigence on coeducation as he was. Perhaps Derek could provide a spark to ignite student activism for change.
When Yale students returned to campus in September, they found that Derek had been there before them. On entryway bulletin boards and hallway doors, on trees and telephone poles Derek had stapled a broadside that featured a large picture of his younger sister Brooke and the question “Please, Mr. Brewster, why can’t I come to Yale?”46 You couldn’t miss it, and there was no denying the boldness of the “Operation Coeducation” idea that it proposed: Bring one thousand women students to Yale for a week. Construct geodesic domes on the Old Campus to house them. And see what Kingman Brewster said then.
* * *
Yale may have felt like an all-male island to the students who were pushing for coeducation, but the university was not totally devoid of women. Women were present at the edges, as wives and mothers and girlfriends or as secretaries and dining hall workers. A few had even found places in the roles usually reserved for men. In 1968, Yale College had 2 tenured women on its faculty—and 391 tenured men.47 Yale was not alone in its preference for male professors, and women faculty were equally scarce at campuses that had long been coed. Just 4 percent of the full professors at the University of Michigan were women and 2 percent at the University of California Berkeley, even though both of these campuses had been educating women students since the 1870s.48 Among U.S. colleges, Yale’s male-dominant culture may have been an extreme, but it was no aberration.
Although Yale’s graduate and professional schools were technically coed in 1968, that wasn’t how it felt to the women. Invisible is the word they used to describe themselves.49 Women graduate students made up less than 10 percent of Yale’s student body, and they were spread out across eleven different graduate and professional schools, from the divinity school atop Prospect Hill to the medical school two miles south on the other side of the highway.50
Yale’s treatment of women as somehow less capable or deserving than men did not stop at women’s scant numbers.51 Male graduate students were given housing in a prominent building at the center of campus, while the women were assigned to an ugly 1950s structure several dark blocks past the cemetery. Yale’s Health Service did not offer gynecology, and the prescriptions there were preprinted with the title “Mr.,” as if women would never need medicine or somehow did not exist. Yale had one of the finest gyms in the world, but women were banned from entering it. When graduate student Carol Christ arrived at Yale’s famed Elizabethan Club with her male classmate, he was ushered inside, while she was whisked back out to the sidewalk. Women were not allowed.
Life for women at Yale might have been easier had there been some law or court ruling to prohibit colleges and universities from treating women unfairly, but in 1968 discrimination against women at U.S. colleges and universities was perfectly legal.52 The Fourteenth Amendment’s provision for equal protection under the law had not yet been judged to include women. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 exempted professional women, including faculty and administrators. The Title IV protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to race but not gender; Title VII excluded colleges and universities from its ban on employment discrimination. Title IX, which would ban discrimination in any federally funded education program or activity, was not even under discussion. For the time being, those at Yale who sought to change the status of women would have to fight that battle on their own.
Had Yale’s current students been the only ones pushing coeducation, Brewster might have held out a little longer. But Yale’s rivalry with Harvard and Princeton for the nation’s top high school students began at admissions, and that was where the woman question finally struck a nerve. In the fall of 1968, the students who shaped Yale’s direction were not just those who already went there but those who kept turning Yale down.
“Speaking strictly from an admissions standpoint, a decision to educate women at Yale . . . is not only desirable but virtually essential,” Inky Clark told Brewster in June.53 The numbers did not look good.54 By 1968, more than 40 percent of the students accepted by Yale were choosing to attend other colleges, with the majority citing Yale’s single-sex status as the reason. Worse still, more than three quarters of students admitted to both Harvard and Yale picked Harvard, and again the problem was Yale’s lack of women students. Yale men faced a two-hour car ride to Vassar or Smith for a date, while a Harvard guy who sought female companionship could turn to the Radcliffe girl sitting next to him in class or visit the women at nearby Simmons or Wellesley. If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without.
The final straw was Princeton. On September 14, while Derek Shearer was putting up his “Please, Mr. Brewster” posters at Yale, Princeton released an extensive study of coeducation that concluded that women students were “vital to Princeton’s future.”55 Princeton had not yet acted on the report; its trustees were still considering the report’s recommendations. But here was a threat Brewster could not ignore. It was bad enough losing top students to Harvard. Losing them to Princeton, still a second choice to Yale for most applicants, would never do, and if Princeton went coed and Yale did not, Yale might well find itself dropping to third place among the Ivy League schools.56 The Princeton report whetted Yale’s “sense of competitive rivalry,” said Brewster, and pushed him where he might not have otherwise gone.57
Two weeks after Princeton issued its report, Brewster released an eight-page memorandum in which, for the first time, he held out the possibility of admitting women directly to Yale. He listed two reasons for the change: “the loss of first-rate students”58 who turned down Yale to attend colleges with “coeducational attractions” and the Princeton report, which in addition to its competitive threat provided an “impressive analysis” of the financial implications of coeducation and the benefits of admitting women directly rather than opening a sister school. Missing from Brewster’s rationale was any notion of admitting women for reasons of equity or fairness. Nonetheless, coeducation at Yale was finally up for discussion.
Yet still Brewster stalled. Yale could not move forward with coeducation, he said, until it received that $30 million donation. And no, he hadn’t asked anyone yet. Brewster’s justification for his $30 million figure was based on the idea that going coed would cause Yale to increase its enrollment by 1,500 students, the number of women undergraduates Brewster proposed in his eight-page memorandum.59 But in 1968, Yale had plenty of space for women students if it simply chose to reduce the number of men in each entering class, and it had a fat $575 million endowment to dip into should it want to build the facilities and hire the faculty needed to expand.60 Even Inky Clark, an ally of Brewster’s, gave little credence to Brewster’s price tag argument: “It was a bogus issue,” he said. “It really was bogus.”61 By October 1968, there was nothing stopping Yale from admitting women students except Brewster’s reluctance to do so.
Derek Shearer’s “Please, Mr. Brewster” posters, however, had not gone unnoticed, and as the fall semester of 1968 got under way, the clamor for coeducation from Yale students only grew louder. “So Where Are the Women?” bellowed the Yale Daily News in an editorial on the first Monday of classes.62 The following week, junior Mark Zanger, the leader of Yale’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), joined the offensive. “Women Now. Talk Later,” demanded his October 4 Yale Daily News column,63 which charged that Brewster was only “pretending” to take the coeducation issue seriously.
Perhaps Brewster simply hoped the coeducation fervor would go away, but Avi Soifer, a Yale senior, was not going to let it drop.64 While Operation Coeducation and its idea of bringing women students to Yale for a week had first been proposed by Derek Shearer, Avi was the one to take the next step. Like Derek, Avi had attended a coed public high school, where the presence of girls as peers and classmates was the norm. Avi had been following the coeducation issue since his sophomore year, when he had covered Brewster’s attempt to lure Vassar to New Haven for the Yale Daily News, and he had come to know a few women graduate students who helped him see the ways in which Yale women were assigned a parallel yet lesser existence. By September 1968, Avi was ready to act, and in September, he pulled together some friends and got to work. Kingman Brewster did not know it yet, but Operation Coeducation—or “Coeducation Week,” as Avi’s group came to call it—was under way.65
On October 15, three weeks after Brewster released his memo noting the competitive pressure to go coed, Avi Soifer and his team went public with their plans. Coeducation Week would start on November 4 and bring 750 women college students to Yale for six days. The women would live in dorm rooms vacated by obliging Yale students, attend classes, participate in forums and panels on coeducation, and give Yale men the chance to interact with the opposite sex “under more natural conditions than the infamous mixer.”66 Coeducation Week would prove to alumni and the public that Yale students were “serious and sincere about normal coeducational life in the near future,” said Avi, and it would prod Yale to adopt coeducation now rather than in that vague distant future to which Brewster perpetually postponed it.
The day after Avi announced the Coeducation Week plans, more than fifty students signed on to help make it happen. The logistics required were staggering. Twenty-two teams were dispatched to sign up women participants from colleges throughout the Northeast. Other students went door to door in the residence halls, asking their classmates if they would move in with friends for the week so that women could stay in their rooms. The committee needed fifteen thousand dollars to pay for the women’s dining hall meals. The women, they decided, would cover half by contributing ten dollars each, and the committee would pay for the rest (or at least most of it) by asking the social committees of Yale’s twelve residential colleges to throw in three or four hundred each, the cost of a mixer. There was meeting after meeting of committees and subcommittees and then subgroups of subcommittees. On one night alone, Avi went to twelve different meetings.
It’s not clear how seriously Brewster had taken Derek Shearer’s “Please, Mr. Brewster” posters, but he was paying attention now. On October 21, Avi was summoned to meet with a roomful of administrators and Brewster himself. Brewster was not pleased. Coeducation Week was happening too soon, he argued. Avi was bringing too many women to Yale. Yale students should just be more patient.
“Well,” said Avi, “we may go ahead anyway.”67
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Brewster replied. But it was already too late.
* * *
The rest of October filled with the buildup toward Coeducation Week, and on Monday, November 4, 750 women students arrived in New Haven ready to spend a week as “Yalies.” Girls from Vassar and Smith, from Bryn Mawr and Brandeis and Connecticut College, filled out their registration forms and met the men whose rooms they would be occupying. “All over the campus there was something giddy in the air—like a giant joke that everyone was in on,” observed one visiting woman.68 “Lots of smiling went on.”
Some of the men were still hurriedly putting fresh sheets on their bunk beds as the women arrived, but on the whole, the first day went smoothly. The visiting women received meal tickets, lists of suggested classes to attend, and a calendar of the week’s events. Avi’s team had sent out dozens of press releases, and Time, Life, and Newsweek were all there, cameras flashing. “Women are people too,” Avi told the New York Times, and the Times ran his statement as its quote of the week.69
The week’s events were somewhat eclectic. Monday featured a welcome ceremony with Yale’s chaplain. Tuesday brought an Election Day rally; Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon was polling so close to Democrat Hubert Humphrey that the outcome was anyone’s guess. Wednesday included a coeducation discussion with Yale’s undergraduate dean. But the event that may have raised the most questions among the young women visiting Yale was a showing of porn flicks that the Yale Law School Film Society had scheduled to coincide with Coeducation Week. The movies were shown Monday night in a classroom right on the Old Campus, and the Yale Daily News, which took particular delight in the event’s timing, featured it on the front page. When a visiting Radcliffe student stopped by the News building on Monday and offered to write an article, they assigned her to cover the porn festival.
She attended one of the early showings and watched several ten-minute shorts before walking out early. “All of them consisted of ladies removing their clothing and writhing around—all by themselves—on sofas, beds, and even desk tops,” she wrote in the story the News published on the front page the next day.70 Her experience of writing a review of a porn festival while in the midst of all those male Yale Daily News reporters was unsettling. “There I was at Yale . . . sitting in a strange newsroom, writing some story about some lady masturbating with a cross,” she wrote a few weeks later. “It was bizarre and slightly absurd. All at once I was feeling isolated and quite lonely.”71
Most Coed Week visitors avoided that type of hazing, and by Wednesday, Yale students were gleeful with the success of the experiment. That evening, the Yale marching band concluded its weekly practice with an impromptu parade. With trumpets and sousaphones proclaiming their presence, the band members marched through the courtyards of half a dozen of Yale’s residential colleges and on toward their final destination: President Brewster’s front lawn.
All along the way, students came down from their rooms to join the band, and by the time the crowd of Yale students and visiting women arrived at Brewster’s house, its numbers had swelled to the hundreds. The band played Yale football songs, and Brewster came out onto the front porch in a jocular mood, with his wife, Mary Louise, beside him. “Give us a date!” the students cried, urging Brewster to commit to coeducation.72 Brewster asked the bandleader if he could borrow his megaphone, and then, in a nod to the college his wife had attended, proclaimed to the crowd, “Vassar was good enough for me!” The students wanted a better answer. “Give us a date!” they repeated, and this time Brewster did: “In 1972, there will be women at Yale!” But that was not soon enough. “Next fall!” shouted the students. “1969!”
Things moved quickly from there. Coeducation Week “was just a very smart political act,” observed John Trinkhaus, the head of one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges.73 “It got national publicity, and somehow brought the whole affair to a head.” Meanwhile, Princeton seemed poised to act. On Thursday morning, November 7, Brewster called a meeting with a one-item agenda: admitting women undergraduates to Yale.74 Avi Soifer was there, as was the current chairman of the Yale Daily News, Sam Chauncey, and a few more of Brewster’s top advisers.
Two days later, Brewster headed down to New York to meet with the Yale Corporation. Trustee Irwin Miller had been arguing for coeducation since 1967, warning that “the quality of admission at Yale . . . will undergo a long, slow decline unless there are women.”75 He was not alone in his views, and the Corporation voted to accept five hundred women students for the fall of 1969. Brewster’s $30 million price tag issue was set aside with barely a murmur. Yale would make do with the existing facilities and faculty: rooms designed for three students would hold four, and the few extra staff provided for the women would be covered by the women’s tuitions.
Before Brewster could go public with the decision, one final step was needed. On Thursday, November 14, he presented his coeducation proposal to the Yale College faculty. The vote was 200:1 in favor,76 with the sole negative vote coming from history professor George Pierson, a man who had arrived at Yale as a seventeen-year-old freshman in 1922 and was still there forty-six years later.77
The next morning, on elite college campuses across the country, men in presidents’ suites set down their coffee cups in surprise. They looked at the front-page story in the New York Times: “Yale Going Coed Next September.”78 Really? Yale? The last anyone outside the university had heard, Yale was still waiting for someone to write a $30 million check, and there was no mention of any donation. Yet clearly the decision was final. It said right there in the article that Yale’s faculty had approved the plan the day before and that Yale’s trustees had voted yes in a secret meeting in New York.
Yale had left itself just ten months to transform into a coeducational institution. “This is a crash program for next year,” Yale College Dean Georges May told the Yale Daily News.79 Within four days of Brewster’s coeducation announcement, Yale received eight hundred letters of interest from female students—some still in high school, some already in college. By March, nearly four thousand women had applied.80 They hailed from all over the country: Chicago, Little Rock, Brooklyn, Honolulu, Tulsa, and Cleveland. Step one, then, was to read through all those applications from women that the admissions office staffing had not planned for. The housing problem quickly became pressing too, since Brewster declared that Yale would not reduce the number of incoming men just because it was adding some women. And what about student organizations? Someone had to ask each of them if they would allow Yale’s new women students to join.
The list went on and on. The locks needed changing. The outdoor lighting was inadequate. Vanderbilt Hall, where the women freshmen would live, needed shades on the windows. The gym had to end its no-women rule. The Yale Health Center would have to hire a gynecologist. And then there was the worry of potential pregnancies. Could Yale do anything to avoid that?
As for the real changes that would shift an all-male institution to one in which women stood equal with men, there was no time. Such change was not, in fact, what Brewster had in mind. The goal for September, declared his hastily formed coeducation planning committee, was to admit women “with the least disruption of the current pattern” of education at Yale as possible.81 It would be up to Yale’s first women undergraduates to do the disrupting required. But first, they would have to get in.