In Little Falls, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark, in a three-bedroom ranch house on Brookhill Place, seventeen-year-old Kit McClure was working on her application to Yale.1 Kit was a senior at Passaic Valley Regional High, a high school like so many others in the United States that it could have come off an assembly line. Passaic Valley had a mascot (a hornet), long linoleum hallways that shone after waxing, a prom, a football team, and a marching band. At the halftime shows of the Passaic Valley football games, you could see Kit right out on the field with the band. She was the one with the bright-red hair, the only girl playing trombone.
Kit’s parents, liberal on so many other matters, had forbidden it. Girls don’t play trombone, they told her. Girls played flute, violin, and piano—the instrument Kit had been playing since she was seven years old. Kit was determined to play trombone, though, and she talked Passaic Valley’s band director into letting her practice with one of the trombones in the band room after school. By the time Kit’s parents figured out what she was up to, she had already taught herself to play. And now there was this opportunity at Yale.
Yale had one of the best music programs in the country, world-class concert halls, and the icing on the cake: building after building of science labs. After music, science was Kit’s passion. The summer before, she had won a National Science Foundation scholarship and spent July and August doing research at Cornell. Yale would be an incredible college for Kit, but kids from Passaic Valley High School did not go to places like Yale. They went to Montclair State or Patterson State or became beauticians or auto mechanics. Still, it was worth a try. Maybe Kit was the type of girl Yale was looking for.
Meanwhile, 230 miles north at Simmons College, an all-women’s school in Boston, Shirley Daniels was also working on her Yale application.2 Shirley was already a college freshman when Yale made its announcement, but in Shirley’s first fall at Simmons, she’d met a guy named Sam Cooper, a black sophomore from Yale who was there one weekend on a road trip to check out the Simmons black women. Shirley and Sam started talking, and he told her about the Afro-American studies major that Yale would begin offering the next year. It would be one of the few in the country.
Shirley had lived in Roxbury, the heart of black Boston, ever since she was twelve. At Simmons, she was a member of the black students’ organization. Shirley would have preferred a coed college, but she liked how Simmons encouraged its women students to get professional degrees and the way it emphasized that women should be independent thinkers. Simmons did not offer Afro-American studies, however, and as far as Shirley knew, it was not planning to. The idea that she might be able to spend her next three years of college studying black history was remarkable, and Sam said Yale was accepting transfer students as well as freshmen. “Why don’t you apply?” he asked her,3 and so Shirley did, writing with her whole heart why she wanted to major in Afro-American studies at Yale.
From across the country, the applications poured in as girls who had grown up thinking that Yale was off-limits now went for their chance to get in. Connie Royster4 had grown up a few miles from Yale and so knew firsthand Yale’s reputation and the incredible resources that were on offer there: a university art gallery with collections rivaling some of the best museums in the country, world-class teachers, and a thriving theater scene that included the University Theatre and the newly opened Yale Repertory Theatre. Connie’s love of the arts, first cultivated by her boarding school, had grown deeper in her year as an exchange student in England and during her first semester at Wheaton, a women’s college in southern Massachusetts. If colleges let you major in being a Renaissance woman, Connie would have been the first to sign up. Absent that possibility, she could not think of a better place to attend college than Yale.
For Connie, the draw of Yale was personal as well. Her family had worked in Yale’s fraternities as chefs and managers since the early 1900s, and as a small child, Connie had played in the fraternity kitchens when the extended family was called in to help for a major event. Connie’s family was well respected among New Haven’s black community. Her grandmother had cofounded the New Haven branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and her Aunt Connie was well known nationally, although by a different name: U.S. district court judge Constance Baker Motley. Motley had been appointed in 1966 as America’s first black woman federal judge. Before then, she worked as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and argued ten cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning nine of them (the tenth was later reversed in Motley’s favor). In the early 1960s, she succeeded in overturning the long-standing ban on black students at a number of public universities in the South, including the University of Mississippi and the University of Georgia.
Connie Royster was named for her Aunt Connie, and now she had a chance to apply to Yale, something that had not been possible for women when Constance Baker Motley went to college. Connie’s family took pride in their long connection with Yale, and she had always been one of the smart kids at school. Of course she would apply . . . but whether she would get in was anyone’s guess.
* * *
Betty Spahn did not apply to Yale, at least not intentionally.5 It all started as a joke played by her roommate Caroline. Betty and Caroline were freshmen at George Washington University, and after Yale announced it was going coed, Caroline’s father, a Yale alumnus, sent Caroline one of the transfer student applications. Caroline’s grades weren’t good enough to even bother filling it out, but Betty, thought Caroline, was perfect for Yale. Betty had just aced her first semester at George Washington, and before that, she had been an Illinois high school debate champion. The preliminary application for transfers was no more than a form with some blanks for grades, extracurriculars, and address—information that Caroline could easily provide about her roommate. On a lark, she and one of their other roommates filled out the form on Betty’s behalf and sent it to Yale. Betty had no idea.
Betty was from Park Forest, a town an hour south of Chicago. She grew up in a neighborhood of ranch houses built right after World War II, where you could walk into any one of your neighbors’ kitchens and find the exact same layout as your own. The stove was on the left as you walked in, the sink sitting under a window that overlooked the small yard out back. Betty’s parents were churchgoing Republicans, suspicious of the moral bearings of Easterners. Neither was happy that Betty had decided to attend George Washington. Why couldn’t she just go to the University of Illinois? It had been good enough for her mother. But Betty had spent a year as an exchange student in Germany by then. She was not interested in limiting her world to that which lay within a two-hour drive of her childhood home.
At the beginning of March, Betty opened her George Washington mailbox and was surprised to find inside a letter from the director of undergraduate admissions at Yale.
“Dear Miss Spahn,” it read.6 “The Admissions Committee has concluded its review of preliminary candidates for transfer, and I am pleased to advise that the Committee wishes to have you submit your complete credentials.” Betty was totally confused. What was this about? The letter went on: “The application for final transfer candidates and other forms and cards are enclosed . . . We look forward to receiving your application.”
Caroline thought it was hilarious. Of course Betty had to follow through with the rest, Caroline argued after explaining what she had done, and once Betty got over her initial shock, she agreed. Yale was one of the top two schools in the country, right? Who would pass up a chance to go there? Betty wrote the essay required and sent it in with her recommendations and the other material Yale asked for. In a month, she would know whether or not she had made the next cut.
On April 13, 1969, the week before Yale’s acceptance letters went out, the New York Times’ Sunday magazine ran an eleven-page article about the young women who had applied to Yale, every one of whom, reported the Times, came with effusive recommendations, straight A’s, and flawless board scores (or close to it).7 One had traveled through Bosnia with a Serbian friend, taught in the newly formed Head Start program, and choreographed the dance scenes in her high school’s production of The King and I. Another had studied Anglo-Saxon poetry and religious art and hoped to major in medieval studies; she had tutored high school students on a Navajo reservation over the summer. Of the entire eleven-page article, however, what Yale’s women undergraduates remember most is what the New York Times called them. They were “the female versions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Uebermensch.” They were “superwomen.”8
The word stuck like a mark on the forehead of every girl admitted to Yale that year. “Oh,” they’d hear, “you’re one of those superwomen.”9 It separated them from one another, as each newcomer wondered, Why would any of these superachieving women be friends with someone like me? For the students who harbored any insecurities or thoughts that maybe they had been admitted by mistake, there was that superwoman word, feeding their doubts.
Yale sent out two types of letters that April. Most girls got the thin envelope, the one that held the sparse words of rejection. The fat envelope crammed with the acceptance letter and the accompanying forms was the one that you wanted.
Outside Philadelphia, in the small town of Swarthmore, a postman wended his way through a subdivision of half-acre lots with street names that spoke to the aspirations of its residents: Columbia Avenue, Dartmouth Avenue, Harvard Avenue, North and South Princeton Avenues, Rutgers Avenue, Yale Avenue. When seventeen-year-old Lawrie Mifflin began her senior year at Swarthmore’s public high school that fall, not one of those colleges accepted women.10 Lawrie lived on Drew Avenue, one of the few streets in the neighborhood named for a college that was already coed. She was cocaptain of Swarthmore High School’s field hockey team, and as one of the top kids in her class, Lawrie had seen for herself that boys were no smarter than girls. She deserved a shot at Yale as much as they did. Lawrie sent in her application, and then, like everyone else, she waited.
The postman turned onto Drew Avenue and walked up the short driveway to number 419. He lifted the lid of the metal mailbox on the wall beside the front door and jammed a fat envelope inside. The announcement it contained was printed at the top with Yale’s coat of arms and its motto, “Lux et Veritas,” light and truth. At the bottom was the signature of Yale’s dean of admissions, R. Inslee Clark. In between were the words that most mattered: “Yale University announces with pleasure the admission of Lawrie Mifflin to the Class of 1973 of Yale College and hereby extends a cordial welcome to this community of scholars.”11 Of all the students, male and female, who applied to Yale from Swarthmore High School that year, Lawrie was the only one who got in.
The acceptances were equally slim at other schools: one girl from Lincoln High School in Kansas City, one from Susan Miller Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, and one from Passaic Valley Regional High School outside of Newark, New Jersey—a redheaded trombone player named McClure.12
Kit had been excited at first when she got the letter, but then she thought about it for a moment. “Oh, no. We can’t afford this,” Kit said to her mother.
“Oh, no. We’ll afford this,” her mother replied.13
For every high school girl who applied to Yale that year, one in twelve got in.14 It was far better to be a boy, where the odds improved to one out of seven. Yale may have gone coed, but that did not mean it wanted a school that was half girls. Even among alumni kids, that most favored group, boys were twice as likely to be accepted by Yale as girls were.15
The competition for spaces in Yale’s sophomore and junior classes was equally fierce. “Ever since you’ve been two years old, you’ve heard that Yale and Harvard are the schools,” explained one Brandeis sophomore. “And suddenly now you had this chance to go.”16 Yale offered a breadth and depth of resources and programs that none of the colleges then open to women could offer. And for many who had ended up at an all-women’s college, a coed environment was just as appealing as it was to Yale men. As the letters from Yale’s admissions office began arriving, the mailrooms at Smith and Wellesley, at Vassar and Mount Holyoke, filled with the shrieks of the girls who had been accepted, while others walked back to their rooms in silence. In some cases, one roommate got in while another did not. The friendships did not always survive the experience.
From Simmons College in Boston, Yale accepted two students. One was Shirley Daniels. She would get to major in Afro-American studies after all.
Shirley’s father was ecstatic. “Yale! Yale! My daughter’s going to Yale! She’s going to Yale!”17 He too had once had plans for college, and while he rarely talked about himself, Shirley learned from her aunt that he had even been accepted to Harvard. But after he graduated from Boston Latin, Boston’s premier public high school, World War II had broken out and Shirley’s father chose to join the army instead. He served for twenty-three years and never got his college degree. But now his daughter was going to Yale. “She’s going to Yale!” he said over and over.
“He could not stop talking about it,” said Shirley, smiling.
In towns and cities across the United States, the envelopes from Yale arrived. Betty Spahn may have been surprised the first time she received a letter from Yale, but this time she was watching for it. Her parents were hardly enthusiastic. Both of them were proud of Betty’s good grades. Her father told her she could be anything she wanted to be. But if Betty was going to transfer schools, why not come back to Illinois? She could achieve her dreams there too, and the tuition would sure be a lot cheaper. Betty had made up her mind, though. She was accepting Yale’s offer of admission, and she would just have to figure out later how to earn the money she needed to go there.
New Haven native Connie Royster got the fat envelope too. Connie was thrilled, of course, but her acceptance was still bittersweet. Connie was nearing the end of her first year at Wheaton. She had made friends and a place for herself there. Wheaton had supported her love for the theater, and she had starred in a number of plays. Once the letter from Yale came, though, there was really no choice.
For Connie, going to Yale was “a kind of reclaiming or claiming.”18 Her family had been employed at Yale since the start of the century, when her grandfather and his brother emigrated from Nevis. Connie’s grandfather was no longer alive, but he would have rejoiced at the news. Connie’s acceptance was not just a personal accomplishment but an accomplishment for the entire family. She would never turn that down. Besides, it was Yale after all, one of the top two schools in the country. “Education was the most important thing in my family, the most important,” said Connie. She told her roommate first and then went to call her parents. Connie Royster was going to Yale.
The New York Times may have called them superwomen, but most of the women undergraduates accepted by Yale that first year were still teenagers. It’s not hard to imagine each of them at kitchen tables or bedroom desks, reading through the paperwork and filling out the forms that Yale sent them in thick envelopes each month through the summer of 1969. And as they did so, all around them events unlike any they had ever seen began to reshape the world they grew up in.
In June, hundreds of gay men and women, fed up with their relentless harassment, fought back when police began arresting patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn. In July, a man walked on the moon. In August, four hundred thousand young hippies at a New York music festival made the name “Woodstock”—until then just some town in the Catskills—a permanent part of the American vocabulary. And in every part of the country, whether Spokane or Houston or Baltimore, the first women undergraduates ever admitted to Yale made ready for the next step in their education and prepared to travel to New Haven in September.
* * *
Less than two weeks remained before the students arrived at Yale, and Elga Wasserman, special assistant to the president for the education of women, was firing off memos.19
To Lewis Beach, physical plant manager: The ladies’ restrooms are still not ready. Seven are locked. Two have broken toilets. You can barely find sixteen of them.
To Kingman Brewster, president of Yale: We need a woman in the admissions office; I’ll come up with some names. We need a write-up of our coeducation plans to give potential donors; I’ll work on it. And yes, with some luck, I think the housing for the girls will be ready by the time they arrive.
That a woman at Yale would be signing her name to such memos was startling. Power was not a word one associated with women on college campuses in 1969—not at Yale, not anywhere. Deans of women, who had once held sway at the big state schools like the University of Kansas, had been losing their jobs for two decades to the new deans of students, invariably men.20 Ninety-five percent of coed colleges had men as presidents, and even some of the top women’s colleges had male presidents too.21 “The higher, the fewer” was the rule that applied to women in college administration,22 and so just like the women undergraduates who would soon be arriving at Yale, Elga Wasserman was breaking new ground.
Wasserman was the most visible woman administrator at Yale, the only one reporting directly to Brewster. The job of overseeing coeducation was not hers alone, though—at least, not at first. The day after the Yale Corporation voted to move forward on coeducation, Brewster turned to his adviser Sam Chauncey and said, “You son of a bitch, you pushed me into this thing. You’ve gotta make it happen.”23
Chauncey agreed to take a temporary leave from his role in the president’s office and help Yale prepare for coeducation, but Brewster wanted a woman to lead the coeducation effort—it wouldn’t look right to have it led by a man—and he wanted a woman from inside of Yale.24 Yale was special. No outsider could understand what made it that way, and Brewster almost always hired administrators who, like him, had gone to college at Yale. No woman could yet lay claim to that credential, but at least a woman who worked at Yale would have a feel for the place. Yet Brewster’s choices were slim. Like other colleges, Yale had not made it a practice to hire women administrators.
In the fall of 1968, when Brewster began his search for a Yale woman to lead coeducation, fifty-three of Yale’s top fifty-four administrators were men.25 The one woman was the associate librarian for technical services—not exactly a position of influence. Widening the pool from Yale’s central administrative ranks to its graduate and professional schools expanded the list of women candidates by four: two nursing school deans and two assistant deans at the graduate school. And Assistant Dean Elga Wasserman wanted the job.26
Wasserman was forty-four years old, with a string of accomplishments unusual for a woman of her era. But when the Yale Alumni Magazine introduced her to the broader Yale community in a December 1968 article, it described Wasserman as “a housewife, mother of two, skating and skiing enthusiast, sometime interior decorator, chemist, teacher, and former assistant dean of the Graduate School,” burying at the end of the sentence the achievements that most qualified her for the job.27 Wasserman was in fact a chemist with a PhD from Harvard, a college chemistry professor, and an administrator with six years’ experience at Yale Graduate School. And she had three children, not two.
By the time Brewster chose her to lead coeducation at Yale, Wasserman had lived in New Haven for twenty years, ever since Yale’s chemistry department hired her husband, Harry, in 1948. Wasserman’s two decades at Yale had not left her bitter; her personality did not tend that way. But like any woman with aspirations, Elga Wasserman bore a few scars.
She had graduated summa cum laude from Smith College, and when she and Harry first moved to New Haven, they came with the identical degree: a PhD in chemistry from Harvard. Harry stepped right onto the track leading to a tenured position on Yale’s faculty, but for Wasserman, that PhD was a path to nowhere. Yale did not hire women chemists. Instead, the university routed them into positions as research assistants, a job where women could tread water and watch men with the same qualifications move swiftly by. This was the job that Wasserman got when she first came to Yale.
Women with degrees in history or English didn’t do much better. There was not yet a single tenured woman on the Yale College faculty when Wasserman first got there. Neither Princeton nor Harvard had a tenured woman professor either. But at least in Boston a woman with a PhD might teach at Wellesley or Simmons. For those who sought to work at a top-ranked college, New Haven was a one-company town, and if you were the woman in a two-PhD couple, as Wasserman was, you were out of luck. “Women were sort of the ornaments to the men, which was not my style,” said Wasserman. “I was very unhappy.”28
But Wasserman was resilient. She had learned that trait as a young girl. She was German by birth, and until she was twelve, her family had lived a comfortable middle-class life in Berlin. Hitler’s rise did not bode well for Jewish families like hers, though, and in 1936 the family fled, eventually settling in Great Neck, New York. There, Wasserman mastered a new language, made new friends, learned the routines of a new school, and excelled. That early practice at negotiating change served her well.
Wasserman had her first child a year after she and Harry moved to New Haven, and over the next thirteen years, she crafted a life from the options available. She pulled together a series of part-time jobs, working as a lab assistant and teaching a few courses at the local state college. She raised her three children and made some friends. Then, in 1962, Elga Wasserman got a break. Yale Graduate School dean John Perry Miller, who lived down the street, called and asked if she would be interested in working as assistant dean. It was an unusual move. Outside the nursing school, Yale had no female deans at that point, and the job that Miller offered Wasserman was not just assistant dean but assistant dean in charge of sciences, the land of men. When Miller agreed to let her work part time so she could be home when her kids got out of school, Wasserman accepted his offer and became assistant dean at the Yale Graduate School, the spot from which, six years later, Kingman Brewster hired her to lead the transition to coeducation at Yale.
Those, then, are the outlines of Wasserman’s life up to age forty-four, when Brewster tapped her to work on coeducation with Sam Chauncey. Over the next four years, she had both fans and critics. But of all the things said about Elga Wasserman, the sentence perhaps most worth noting is one she uttered herself, a comment on Brewster’s decision to hire her: “I don’t think he knew who he was getting, really.”29
* * *
The first women undergraduates arrived at Yale on September 12, a Friday. Shirley Daniels came by bus, making her way from her home in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood to the Trailways station downtown and then settling into her seat for the three-hour trip to New Haven. The bus let her off across from her residential college at Yale, Timothy Dwight, and Shirley carried her bags through the college’s arched entryway and into the courtyard beyond. She could hardly believe it. Less than a year ago, she had not even realized it was possible to major in Afro-American studies, and now here she was, ready to begin. Shirley found her room, unpacked her belongings, and then went out to walk around Yale.
It was quite a sight. The college rose up from the city around it like some Gothic mirage, as if the campus had been airlifted out of fifteenth-century England and deposited neatly in downtown New Haven. The school’s stone buildings, with their towers and turrets, pressed up tight to the sidewalks. Gargoyles stared down from the rooflines. Yale’s campus included museums, concert halls, courtyards, sculptures, and one building older than the nation itself. The gym was the largest in the world, the library as majestic as a European cathedral. Yale was a place where one walked with head craned upward, trying to take it all in.
It was quiet the day that Shirley arrived, with a misty rain cloaking the city, but by Saturday, the tempo picked up. The streets of New Haven clogged with cars bearing out-of-state plates and cruising for parking spots. Students arrived from all over the country. Some came by airplane, others by train or by bus. But mostly, Yale’s first women undergraduates came by car, arriving in Pontiacs and Chevrolets from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the outskirts of Syracuse.
“It was an hour and twenty-five minutes via the Throgs Neck Bridge,” said a woman sophomore who drove up from Queens, her father behind the wheel of the family’s light-blue Chevy Chevelle.30 “And it was exciting, I tell you.”
Yale enrolled 575 women undergraduates that year: 230 freshmen, 151 sophomores, and 194 juniors.31 The senior class remained all men, since Yale did not award undergraduate degrees to students who had not been there at least two years. For the most part, the new female students mirrored the racial and ethnic diversity of their male classmates, which was to say, they were not that diverse.32 Ninety percent of the women were white. There were forty black women students in all: twenty-five freshmen, eight sophomores, and seven juniors. The numbers of Asian American women were smaller still: thirteen across all three classes. As for Latina students, there were three: one Chicana freshman and a sophomore and junior of Puerto Rican heritage. Native American women, if there were any, went uncounted.
Over the weekend, the students streamed onto campus, with cars parked every which way along Chapel Street. The sidewalks crowded with parents and kids carting boxes and suitcases up to their rooms while reporters and film crews who had traveled to New Haven to chronicle the arrival of coeducation trailed after them. “Oh, you’re a Yale woman!” they called out to the girls.33 “Tell us what it’s like to be a Yale woman.” The New York Times was there, along with the International Herald Tribune, Time magazine, and Women’s Daily. Everyone wanted to hear what the superwomen would say. But there were bags to unpack and roommates to meet, and so the young women went about the task of moving in, dodging the press as they did so.
Connie Royster and her parents drove to Yale from their home in Bethany, Connecticut, on Saturday. The family had moved from New Haven when Connie was in junior high school, but on Sundays, they still worshipped at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, a few blocks up Whalley Avenue from Yale, and work and family were in New Haven as well. They made the half-hour drive in all the time. Yet this trip was special. The Royster clan had put in lifetimes at the fraternities at Yale, and now Connie was enrolling as a student there. She had been assigned to Berkeley, one of Yale’s residential colleges, and given three roommates: two juniors and one who was a sophomore like Connie, a girl from Illinois named Elizabeth Spahn. Connie had been close with her roommate at Wheaton. With any luck, this Elizabeth Spahn might become a friend too.
As the Royster family approached New Haven, Betty Spahn stood alone in the Berkeley dorm room that she and Connie had been assigned. Betty’s parents had not been able to take her to Yale. It was a long way from Park Forest, and they had her three younger brothers to take care of. Besides, it was not as if this was Betty’s first time leaving home. She had already been at George Washington University for a year by then and in Germany for the year before that. Betty caught a ride east with her high school boyfriend and his father, who were headed to Harvard and agreed to drop her off at Yale on the way. Betty had never been to Yale before. She knew it was famous. But until she asked to look at the map at the start of the trip, Betty had thought Yale was in Boston.
The drive took more than fourteen hours, mile after mile through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. It was an uncomfortable journey. Betty and her boyfriend had continued dating through her first year at George Washington, and she had traveled to see him at West Point, the college he attended for his first two years. But over the summer, they had drifted apart, and Betty was taken by surprise when he told her that he was transferring to Harvard. His family, however, blamed Betty for his decision because she was the one who had started to question why the United States was in Vietnam.
They had Betty wrong, though. True, Vietnam made less and less sense to her, but even President Richard Nixon was promising an end to the war. Betty was no radical—they didn’t grow them out there in Park Forest—and she wasn’t a feminist either, at least not yet. Few of Yale’s first women undergraduates would have described themselves that way.34 They all were aware of their pioneer status. How could they not be? But Kingman Brewster wasn’t the only one who hadn’t yet read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. “Most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies,” wrote novelist Julian Barnes.35 So too with the women’s movement.
The car pulled up in front of the arched stone entryway of Yale’s Berkeley College. Betty Spahn unfolded herself from the backseat and stretched her cramped legs. Her high school boyfriend and his father were quick with goodbyes, and Betty watched as their car pulled back onto Elm Street and drove off. Betty was nine hundred miles from home, alone in a place where she did not know a soul. She got the key to her room, carried her suitcase up the stone stairway, and slowly opened the door. The room was entirely empty. No roommates. No furniture. Yale provided a bunk bed, a desk, and a bureau, but the rest of the furniture was up to you. No one had told that to Betty, and she had assumed Yale would be like George Washington, where her room came fully furnished. They must do things differently at Yale, she thought. At least they had sent her a postcard with the names of her three roommates. Two were juniors, but the other, like her, was a sophomore: Constance Royster from Connecticut. Maybe Constance would be the friend that Betty Spahn needed.
* * *
Over in the Coeducation Office on Grove Street, Elga Wasserman was pleased with how smoothly the move in was going. She and Sam Chauncey had worked well together in the lead-up to September.36 Chauncey managed the renovations made to the freshmen women’s dorm in Vanderbilt Hall, and Wasserman handled pretty much everything else with the brisk, get-it-done efficiency for which she’d been known at Yale Graduate School. Gynecology service set up in the Yale Health Center? Check. Women students assigned roommates? Check. Women’s locker room added to Payne Whitney Gym? Check. Academic advisers assigned to each incoming woman? Check. Speakers organized for the women students’ orientation meeting? Check. Yet not everything had not gone as Wasserman wanted in the initial months of her new job.
Transforming Yale into a college where women felt as welcome as men was already a formidable goal. Institutions do not slough off their history so easily. But before the women had even arrived, Kingman Brewster put in place two ground rules that made Wasserman’s task even harder.37
Rule number one was that the addition of women would not reduce the ranks of Yale men, and so the women were outnumbered seven to one, a ratio whose costs would soon become clear. The second ground rule was that the women would be divided evenly among Yale’s twelve residential colleges, thus diluting their small numbers still further.38 These colleges were far more than just dormitories with fancy names. They were enclosed communities within the larger campus, complete with their own academic deans, fellowship of faculty members, and masters (the heads of the colleges). Yale had no student center where undergraduates could gather. Instead, there were the twelve colleges, each turned inward to a central courtyard accessible only through the college gate. Students ate in their college, formed their closest friendships in their college, attended the social events of their college, took part in the student government of their college, and from sophomore year on, they lived in their college.
Some stereotypes arose about the college personalities—Calhoun was supposedly for the beer-drinking jocks; Ezra Stiles was full of eccentrics—but such characterizations did not hold up to much scrutiny. Yale sought to make each college a microcosm of the university as a whole, and so they chose students’ colleges for them in the summer before their freshman year. Transferring to a different college required all sorts of permissions and paperwork, so students generally stayed where Yale put them. For the white male undergraduates whom Yale had long served, the system worked to create a smaller, more intimate environment. For groups that were in the minority—students of color, women—dividing a small number still further only made things worse.
The freshmen girls would seem to have avoided this splintering up since they all lived together in their own dorm on the Old Campus, Vanderbilt Hall. Yet even here, the residential college divisions separated the women from one another. If you were in Trumbull College, then your roommates were too and so were the women across the hall. These were the same women whom you would see at meals and the social events of your college. There may have been 230 freshmen women at Yale, but each of them would graduate having never met most of the women in their class. The women sophomores and juniors had it harder still, for Yale parceled them out in groups of thirty to each college, where they lived in the same buildings, although not on the same floors, as the 250 men who lived there.
Brewster himself had argued at first against splitting the women up. Women students should not be housed as “a small isolated minority”39 in each college, he told the residential college masters right after the coeducation decision went through. The solution was straightforward: some colleges would have women students in the first year of coeducation, but others would have to wait until women’s numbers increased. Yale’s male students, or at least the ones Brewster listened to, saw it differently and pushed hard for assigning women to all twelve colleges. By February 1969, Brewster gave in. Every college would have its own small group of girls. As a Yale Daily News columnist explained, Yale had to divide the women up “to prevent a spring riot by giving every undergrad a slice of—or at least a look at—the pie.”40 And if the cost was creating an environment that was harder for the women, well, so be it.
Elga Wasserman fought the decision to split up the women long after Brewster stopped listening to her,41 and she assured incoming women students in an August letter that Yale would soon have a plan in place to expand women’s enrollment from the initial 575 to “at least 1,500,” the number Brewster had initially promised.42 That target would still leave women students outnumbered four to one by the men, but at least it was a start. Achieving even that meager goal, though, would prove far more difficult than Wasserman ever anticipated.
By the time the women students arrived, Wasserman was overseeing coeducation on her own, and Chauncey had moved back to his office next to Brewster’s. Wasserman was ready to lead, and she had the intelligence and charisma required. “There was something hard-edged, but hard-edged like a finely cut diamond, when she walked into a room,” said a student intern in Wasserman’s Coeducation Office.43 “She glowed . . . and not because she was flamboyant. It was her intelligence and her personal energy.” But the traits that worked well for men in positions of power did not always work so well for women.
Wasserman had been in her new role at Yale for seven months by September and was beginning to see the walls of the box she had been placed in. When she first got the job, a male colleague described her as “a really brilliant gal who doesn’t push it.”44 That wasn’t just a description of Wasserman, though. It was a job requirement. Push too hard as a woman, and you would get labeled as “strident” or “aggressive” or “difficult.”45 Fail to push and nothing changed. For a woman leader at Yale, the space in between was only a few inches wide. And so Wasserman learned to stay in the “safe middle ground,” as she put it,46 but that did not mean she was happy about it. She had come to her new role at Yale with such a strong vision of what she wanted to accomplish.
Yale could be a leader in the education of women. It could show the nation how to build an institution where women with talent got the same chance as men.47 The work was not just about students, thought Wasserman. Faculty, staff, graduate women, and careers after college—Yale needed to move forward on all of them. Up until September, the logistical crises created by Yale’s hasty coeducation decision had required all Wasserman’s attention, but now that most of those problems were behind her, there was time to consider real change. And that is where things had started to get murky. Did Brewster intend to give her the power she needed, or was she just the one brought in to tidy up details after the decision makers had left the room? Wasserman knew the role that she wanted. But she had been at Yale long enough to recognize the signs that she might in the end be just the gal with the broom.
Maybe the title was a small thing, but she still burned every time she had to put it at the bottom of a letter: Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women. It was “an insane title,” said Wasserman, a mouthful of words no one ever got right.48 “Associate Dean of Yale College” was the title she wanted.49 The associate dean was a recognizable role at Yale, one held by men. It was the logical next step from Wasserman’s assistant dean position at the graduate school. But Brewster said no.50 Some of the male deans in Yale College objected, he told her, explaining that they felt it would be demeaning to them for a woman to hold that title. So Wasserman became a “special assistant,” a position well off to the side of the hierarchy at Yale.
The slight, like many Wasserman bore, was invisible to the students. But each time Wasserman’s standing at Yale was diminished, so too was her power to advocate for the young women who were unpacking their bags at Yale.
* * *
Across Yale’s campus, the women students continued to arrive. For the Yale men who hoped to gain a girlfriend, move-in day offered a chance to meet the new women before the prettiest ones were all taken, and Yale men were quick to introduce themselves to the thirty women sophomores and juniors assigned to their college. The 230 freshmen women in Vanderbilt Hall were a particular draw. There were more to choose from, for one thing, and a sense perhaps that the freshmen girls might be more impressed than the female sophomores and juniors by all the charms of Yale men.
Out in the Vanderbilt courtyard, the men waited, surveying each new arrival.51 When a girl caught their eye, they leapt up with a smile and offered to carry her luggage. Some men skipped this step and just knocked on the doors of the women who had already moved in. “Oh! I lived here when I was a freshman!” they told the girls, who invited the visitors in so they could see what had changed.52 The boys surveyed the room and stayed to talk for a while afterward. Eventually they left, smiling their goodbyes. “Oh, how nice,” the women said to one another. And then, a few floors down, the men knocked on a new door and exclaimed to the young women who answered: “Oh! I lived here when I was a freshman!”
By Sunday, the weather grew hot, and the women students who arrived that day—some dressed in bell-bottomed blue jeans, others in short skirts or dresses—gratefully accepted the men’s offers to carry their suitcases up Vanderbilt’s long flights of stairs. Among those ferrying belongings from their car to their rooms, it was hard to miss Kit McClure. Her red hair fell in waves down to her shoulders, and out of her car came the trombone. For a girl in 1960s America, it was like some bright piece of contraband. A few other freshmen arrived with possessions that puzzled the Yale men as well. The hairdryers, the typewriters, the posters and desk lamps—those were expected, but from one station wagon came a girl with a stick that was polished and sturdy and curved at the end. Lawrie Mifflin had driven up from Swarthmore with her parents and was carrying her field hockey stick up to her room with the rest of her things. It would be exciting to play field hockey for Yale. Hopefully she was good enough to make the team.
Back and forth went the shuttles from car to dorm room until eventually some of the parents began saying their goodbyes, the mothers trying not to cry, the fathers long practiced at avoiding such emotion. The moment weighed hard on Yale’s first women freshmen as well. Most were leaving home for the first time.
The 575 women undergraduates who arrived at Yale in 1969 came from the West Coast and East Coast and most states in between. They came from big cities and suburbs and places so small the address was a rural free delivery number. They differed in race and ethnicity and in whether they worried about their family’s ability to pay the $3,600 it cost for Yale’s room, board, and tuition that year—the same amount of money it cost then to buy two Volkswagen Beetle cars.53 In many ways, Yale’s first women undergraduates were as different as a group of 575 can be, but they did hold a few things in common.
These girls were smart—smarter than the boys, as the first term grades would show. And they were tough. Or at least, that’s how they had appeared on their applications.
Sam Chauncey and Elga Wasserman had made the final decisions about which women got in that year. The admissions office had already started reading the applications of male students by the time Yale decided to admit women, and so a compromise was struck. The admissions staff would manage the initial processing of the women’s applications—ensuring they were complete, sorting them into folders, arranging the folders into stack upon stack of file boxes—and Wasserman and Chauncey would take it from there. Over the winter, the two spent hour after hour reading through the applications of each of the nearly five thousand women who had applied.54
Typically, Yale employed a two-part ranking system that emphasized applicants’ leadership potential as much as their intelligence, a reflection both of Yale’s perceived mission and, before Brewster became president, its long-standing anti-Semitism.55 Yale had stopped admitting students based solely on academics in the 1920s, when too many Jews began passing its entrance exams. By the 1940s, the Yale Alumni Magazine defined Yale’s mission as educating “fine citizens” who would be “rather unscholarly” but demonstrate “character, personality, leadership in school affairs, and the like.”56 And so it continued through the years. By the late 1960s, Yale economics professor Ed Lindblom, who served on the admissions committee, was appalled to find that Yale’s admissions staff saw scholarly excellence as “a source of personality disorder or sickness or queerness.”57
Despite the inherent subjectivity of measures like character, Yale’s admissions process had at least the appearance of objectivity.58 Each folder had two readers. Each reader ranked the application from one to nine on two different scales: academic promise and personal promise, the leadership piece. Thirty-six was the perfect score, a nine on both scales from both readers. These scores were then condensed into one of four numbers: one for the strongest applicants, two for those who were reasonably strong, three for applicants who were shakier, and four for the weakest group. The admissions staff did this initial ranking, and then from the beginning of March through early April, an admissions committee of faculty members and Yale College deans worked with the staff to decide which applicants to admit. The ones almost always got in; the fours never did, and most of the deliberation focused on the twos and threes: which to admit, which to reject, and which to wait-list.
That was the process used for the male students who entered Yale in 1969, but there was no time for that for the women, and besides, Chauncey and Wasserman were looking for a quality in that first group of women that was not as necessary for the men. After screening for academics, they chose the women for grit.
Girls who had four brothers, who had attended a huge high school, who had worked for a year, who had lived abroad, who had played sports, who had endured a traumatic event—those were the ones that Chauncey and Wasserman wanted. Yale’s first women undergraduates may not have yet understood the challenges that awaited them, but Chauncey and Wasserman did. “There was no point in taking a timid woman and putting her in this environment,” said Chauncey, “because it could crush you.”59