Lawrie Mifflin was ready to play field hockey.1 She had played every autumn since she was eleven—many of the girls in her high school had played too. The streets of Swarthmore may have been named for colleges that only men could attend, but the playing fields were filled each fall with girls wielding hockey sticks, smacking the ball down the field as hard as they could. “Being a member of a team gives you confidence and power,” said Constance Applebee, who introduced field hockey to the United States in 1901.2 Lawrie had brought her shin guards and a bag of balls to Yale along with her hockey stick. She just needed to figure out how to sign up for the team.
Yale’s orientation week schedule listed introductory meetings for a half-dozen men’s sports but made no mention of field hockey, so after saying goodbye to her parents, Lawrie set off for the other side of campus, where the athletic office was.3 “Where do I sign up for field hockey?” she asked the man behind the desk.4 He looked confused. There were no sign-ups, he told her. There was no team. There was also no women’s soccer team, no women’s basketball, and no women’s tennis or swim team or crew. Yale was not offering any competitive sports for women.
Athletic girls did have a few options to choose from.5 Lawrie could take classes in modern dance, ballet, and something called “women’s exercise,” a watered-down version of the fitness training offered to men. She could learn synchronized swimming from a part-time instructor from Southern Connecticut College. She could help exercise the polo ponies, although girls could not join the team, and she could be a cheerleader, sort of. Yale’s cheerleading squad announced that it would include four girls on the team that year, a limit that kept the nine men in the majority. And no “girl-style” cheerleading. “We don’t want rah-rah cheerleaders here at Yale,” the team captain warned any woman who considered trying out.6 Cheerleading at Yale was manly, full of muscle beach tricks like headstands, pyramids, and forward rolls. While the guys performed in long pants, the girls would be baring their legs in culottes.
Lawrie Mifflin was not interested in cheerleading or any of the other choices Yale was offering to women. No field hockey? It was hard to believe.
Lawrie would miss all that she loved about playing on a team: the adrenaline of competition, the bonds built with teammates, the structure of daily practices, and the joy of the game. What was more fun than a day in September with the smell of fall leaves and the sun on your skin and a shot flicked just beyond the goalie’s fingers after a perfect pass from your friend? Yale’s failure to provide women’s sports teams also robbed women students of the visibility and prestige that came from representing Yale on the sports field. Just like at any other college, Yale’s athletes were campus stars. But you could only be one if you were a guy.
It wasn’t much better with the other student groups. The Yale Daily News said it welcomed women, but if you looked at the bylines, you could barely tell that Yale was coed.7 Other groups banned women outright. “It would make an inferior sound to have girls singing,” explained a member of the Yale Whiffenpoofs, the most prestigious singing group at Yale.8 The Whiffenpoofs toured internationally and produced a record album each year, but they saw no reason that they should allow women to join. To make sure that Yale’s new women would not complain about being excluded, the Whiffs went on offense and helped found an all-women’s singing group, the New Blue. If the women had their own group, the reasoning went, they would not ask to audition for the Whiffenpoofs.
Not all student organizations treated women this way.9 Connie Royster found a home right away at the Yale Dramatic Association—“the Dramat,” as everyone called it. Many of the less prestigious student groups—the Outing Club, the literary magazine, the Mathematics Club—welcomed women in. But girls were still barred from great swaths of extracurricular life at Yale: all competitive sports, five of Yale’s six a cappella singing groups, the marching band, and Yale’s most elite senior societies, the secret brotherhoods whose members included some of Yale’s most prominent student leaders.10
Kit McClure did not know yet that Yale’s marching band would not accept women members. She planned to play her trombone in the band, just like she had in high school. But back in January, before Yale had even sent out its acceptance letters to women undergraduates, band director Keith Wilson called Sam Chauncey to explain that the marching band would be staying all male. Women could play in the concert band if they were good enough, said Wilson, but the guys in the marching band had told him they did not want any girls marching with them. Besides, no Ivy League marching band allowed women musicians, nor for that matter did most of the Big Ten. Wilson saw no reason for Yale to be different.
Chauncey sent Elga Wasserman a memo about the phone call. “Sounds OK,” she wrote back in reply.11 She could not take on every injustice at Yale, at least not at once, and perhaps Wasserman, who had always made her mark in the classroom, underestimated how central extracurriculars were to life at Yale. A month later, her coeducation planning committee made that indifference to women’s exclusion from Yale student groups official. “Pressure should not be put on [student] activities if they were not eager to admit women to their number,” the minutes read.12 Yale may have given its young women students a room to sleep in and the ability to enroll in classes, but the roles as athletes and marching band members and other prestigious student positions were still reserved for men.
Lawrie Mifflin was having none of it. Damn it, she thought, I’m not going to let them stop me.13 Lawrie had met another student who played field hockey, and the two girls began talking. A few days later, handwritten fliers appeared on the entryway doors of Vanderbilt Hall: “Anybody want to play field hockey? Contact Jane Curtis in Vanderbilt Room 23 or Lawrie Mifflin, Vanderbilt 53.”14 Lawrie did not see herself as some feminist crusader. She never thought, I must do this to strike a blow for women.15 She just wanted to play hockey, even if Yale thought “women’s exercise” was good enough. “Doing what you’re told doesn’t amount to much,” U.S. field hockey founder Constance Applebee taught her players.16 It was a lesson Lawrie Mifflin already understood.
As for Kit McClure, well, she had never been too good at following the rules either, and this was not the first time she’d been told she couldn’t play in a band because she was a girl. In high school, a guy who had heard Kit play trombone asked if she wanted to join his rock band, but when she showed up for practice, the other band members all had the same reaction: no girls allowed.
The guy who had brought Kit to the practice made a deal. The band would audition every high school trombone player from the surrounding three counties over the course of three months, and if they found a guy who could play trombone better than Kit, they would take him. None of the other band members had needed to pass that type of test, but three months later, the spot was Kit’s. As for the Yale marching band, Chauncey and Wasserman may have backed down, but Kit was not going to. Director Keith Wilson gave in—but there would be no girls apart from Kit. One was enough.
Up in their dorm rooms, lounging on secondhand sofas, or sitting outside in the warm autumn sun, Yale men studied their Old Campus, the Yale freshman face book. It was small enough to carry around with you, a paperback just about a half-inch thick. Inside it was page after page of photos of each of the first-year students, both male and female, along with their high school, nickname, and Yale dorm and room number. The Old Campus face book had been published for years, but with the advent of coeducation, the 1969 edition provided Yale men with an invaluable resource: for $3.95, they could have a catalog of every freshman girl on campus.17 “I think every man at Yale memorized the info in that book,” observed one freshman boy.18
The men made good use of their Old Campus booklets, selecting the photo of a woman they deemed attractive and then phoning her up to ask her out on a date. The enterprising student editors of the Old Campus knew a market opportunity when they saw one, and along with the class of 1973 edition, they published Old Campus supplements for the classes of ’71 and ’72 with photos and information on the women sophomores and juniors. They didn’t even bother with photos of the men transfer students. It was the women whom everyone was interested in. With seven men for every woman, guys who wanted a shot at dating a Yale girl had to move quickly.
Some men studied the books intently enough that they could identify Yale women whom they had never met in person. Junior Jessie Sayre was stopped by a Yale student one day on her way back from the gym. “Pardon me—is your name Sayre?”19 He had recognized her from her photo. And lest any Yale woman wonder about the desires of the men who sought their attention the Yale Daily News spelled it out in its lead story that Monday: “The Yale University campus awoke from its annual summer siesta this week to discover that its 268 years of celibacy had come to an end.”20 For some Yale men, it wasn’t just women who arrived at Yale in 1969. It was sex.
The advent of undergraduate coeducation at Yale coincided almost exactly with another major change that was reshaping U.S. college campuses. The sexual revolution was in full swing—at least, that’s what the headlines all said—and the rules through which colleges had long sought to curtail student sex were being swept away in its wake.21 Administrators should not be meddling in matters that were none of their business, students argued, and after pausing a moment to consider, college administrators had tended to agree. The girls at Yale “will have to obey the same rules as the boys—which is virtually no rules at all,” tut-tutted the New York Times. “Many alumni, and some students as well, are concerned about the moral level-to-be.”22
Some remnants of Yale’s old rules regulating student sex remained, at least on paper. Technically, girls were not allowed in the boys’ rooms nor boys in the girls’ rooms after midnight, and Yale’s undergraduate regulations ranked the violation of these visiting hours ninth of the ten offenses that were “of particular concern to the University”: not as serious as cheating, riots, drugs, and improper use of fire extinguishers but ahead of unauthorized possession of master keys.23 No one enforced Yale’s rules about dorm room visitors, though, and even the guard at the entrance of the freshmen women’s dorm in Vanderbilt Hall did little to hinder the male students who sought to enter.24 A Yale ID got men past the guard any time before midnight, and after that, they easily met the challenge by hoisting themselves up and through the first-floor bathroom windows that the girls left open for the purpose.
Male students’ easy access to Yale women did not bother Elga Wasserman. Like many, she saw the shift in sexual norms as a sign of progress, an end to the days when colleges took it on themselves to patrol the virtue of their female students. “Yale is a contemporary urban university, and it would be unrealistic for us to establish regulations which are not appropriate today,” she wrote to the parents of incoming women students that summer. “Your daughter will therefore be called upon to make many of her own decisions.”25 If Yale men were free to choose to have sex, then Yale women should be free to do so as well. One problem, however, stood in the way of that goal: the risk of pregnancy.
The answer, of course, was birth control, and by 1969 the Pill had been available for almost a decade—if you were married. In Connecticut, as in many states, the use and prescription of birth control for unmarried women was illegal and would remain so until 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such prohibitions were unconstitutional.26
But Yale could get around that problem if it chose to. The university benefited from a sort of gentlemen’s pact with local authorities: Yale oversaw its students’ behavior as it saw fit, and for the most part, the police looked the other way.27 The legal drinking age in Connecticut was twenty-one, for example, but you would never know that from the surfeit of sherry parties Yale college masters hosted for freshmen or the kegs of beer consumed at Yale-sponsored mixers. If Yale wanted to make birth control available to its undergraduates, then it would just go ahead and do so.
The men who ran the Yale Health Service resisted the idea and feared that access to birth control would encourage promiscuity, but Wasserman had little patience with such views. They weren’t backed by data from colleges that did offer contraceptives, and they reflected the outdated image of “woman as princess, and protected, pure,” she argued.28 Early in her tenure as the chair of the coeducation planning committee, Wasserman discussed the matter with Robert Arnstein, the psychiatrist in chief at Yale Medical School and a member of her planning group. Both agreed that Yale should open a gynecology service for its women undergraduates, but it needed the right person to run it. Bob Arnstein had a suggestion.
Philip Sarrel was a Yale-trained gynecologist whom Arnstein had met through the sex education course that Sarrel designed for Yale medical students.29 Sarrel served on a national scientists’ committee with all the big names in U.S. sex research, including Paul Gephardt from the Kinsey Institute and William Masters of Masters and Johnson. His wife, Lorna, was a pediatric social worker at Yale–New Haven Hospital, and the couple was young enough—just in their low thirties—that Yale students would not see them as old or out of touch. Wasserman agreed that Sarrel was the right choice, and Arnstein picked up the phone.
The job of starting a gynecological service for Yale’s new women undergraduates was a perfect fit for Phil Sarrel, but when Arnstein made the offer, Sarrel replied with three conditions. First, “I don’t come alone,” he said.30 “Lorna comes with me. We’re going to be a team like Masters and Johnson.” Second, the couple would teach a human sexuality course open to every undergraduate. And third, the Sarrels did not want to just hand out condoms and diaphragms and prescriptions for the Pill. They wanted to do so within the context of a confidential sex counseling service where students could come to get answers to their questions about sex and be prompted to think through their sexual decisions in the context of their own goals and values.
Phil Sarrel’s proposal went well beyond what Arnstein and Wasserman had initially envisioned. The idea that Sarrel and his wife would work as a professional team was unusual enough for Yale at that time, but teaching a human sexuality course and running a sex counseling service? Open to the whole student body? No other college in the nation had anything like it.31 Wasserman was delighted. This was just the type of leadership role she had envisioned for Yale.
Had Wasserman been the only supporter of the Sarrels’ approach to sexuality education, the idea might have died there. But Arnstein, a close friend of Brewster’s, was widely respected, and Arnstein supported the idea too.32 If Bob Arnstein vouched for Phil Sarrel, then Sarrel must be okay. Moreover, a powerful motivator was at work that spring, one that made Yale’s male administrators far more open to bringing in a guy as progressive as Phil Sarrel than they might have been otherwise.
“There was a whole anxious thing around the sexual aspect of coeducation,” explained Lorna Sarrel.33 “The male administrators thought all these women [were] going to get pregnant; they definitely feared pregnancy. And that inclined them to think, ‘We need to do something.’”
The worry was not just about the consequences for the pregnant women students. The administrators wondered too: “What’s going to happen to these guys that impregnate them?”34 Wasserman put the matter on the coeducation planning committee’s agenda in February. Phil Sarrel’s proposal may have been a stretch for Yale, but it was better than pregnant coeds wandering the campus. The committee voted to approve.35 The Yale Sex Counseling Service would open at the start of October, a few weeks after the new school year began.
On September 17, the third day of the semester, Wasserman held an orientation meeting for all of the new women students. “You are urged to attend,” said the memo announcing the meeting, and most women did.36 It was the only time that the 575 women undergraduates who arrived that year were ever in the same room together. Wasserman had a broad agenda for the night—the “present and future plans for coeducation at Yale”—but that’s not the part that students remembered.37
It was “very scary,” said a freshman girl from a small town on Cape Cod. “Elga Wasserman sat us all down in one of the lecture halls and said, ‘By Christmas, six percent of you are going to be pregnant.’”38
The statistics came from similar populations of young women. There was no reason to think Yale, absent intervention, would be different. Yet whatever the press said about the unleashed libidos of the sexual revolution, few of the young women gathered in Yale’s Strathcona Auditorium that night were sexually experienced; 75 percent of the freshmen girls were virgins,39 as was half of the total undergraduate population.40 Some Yale women welcomed the new equity in relations between the sexes. “To me it was the dawn of a new era,” explained a woman sophomore. “I mean, that’s the essence of women’s lib. If you just sit there and go, ‘Oh, God, he’s looking at me,’ you might feel set upon and scrutinized. But in my case, I’m looking at him.”41 For many women students, however, this new era was coming far faster than they were ready for.
At the meeting in Strathcona Auditorium that night, Wasserman introduced Phil Sarrel. He told the girls about the Sex Counseling Service that would open in a few weeks and gave them the phone number to call for an appointment if they needed contraceptives, got pregnant, or simply wanted to talk about the relationship they were in.
“I was being very cool,” said a freshman girl from Chicago, “but inside I was thinking, ‘My God! Do they think this is all going to happen to me?’”42
By 9:00 p.m., Wasserman’s orientation meeting was over, and the girls filed out of Strathcona Auditorium, some with eyes wide about what they had heard. It would not be the last time, though, that they were confronted with the issue of sex. Over the next year or two, it would sometimes seem that they couldn’t get away from it.
* * *
The days set aside for registration and move in passed in a rush of activity as the women set up their rooms, purchased their books, and met some of the whirlwind of new people: faculty advisers, freshman advisers, college deans, college masters, and men—so many men. But on Thursday, September 18, classes began.43
Darial Sneed, a freshman from Manhattan, was the only woman in her economics class. “Hello, lady and gentlemen,” the professor announced as he entered the room, a small joke to start the day.44 Every guy in the class turned to stare at Darial.
Yale may have called itself coed, but 87 percent of its undergraduates that year were men,45 and by the end of the first week of “coeducation,” the new women students began to understand how that skewed ratio would shape their experience at Yale. “The worst part was being constantly conspicuous, which is something you don’t think about until it happens to you,” said one freshman girl.46 As one professor observed, Yale’s women students were denied, “the most precious right any of us ever achieves . . . the privilege simply to be able to disappear.”47 Instead, the young women lived their days dogged by the knowledge that they were always being watched.
“Everybody knew your business at Yale, as a woman. Everybody knew who you were dating,” explained a woman sophomore in Saybrook College. “You moved in there, and you were one of just a handful of women, and all the men knew what you did every minute.”48 The dining hall was the worst.49 Each woman felt it from the moment she entered: forty pairs of male eyes watching as she walked up the long center aisle to where the food was served, forty pairs of eyes as she carried her tray to a dining hall table, forty pairs of eyes any time she got up to get a glass of milk or a cup of coffee. The self-consciousness from having all those men watching was so acute that two freshmen girls made a pact. If one of them went up for coffee, they both would go up for coffee. Somehow, that made it not quite so awful.
Underlying the day-to-day difficulties caused by Yale’s gender quota was the symbolic sting that came with it: a woman who wondered how Yale valued her worth need only be reminded that Yale gave admissions preference to men. Before coeducation even began, that bias had been condensed to a tagline: “a thousand male leaders.”50 Yale had a responsibility to the nation to graduate a thousand leaders a year, the argument went, and since men were leaders and women were not, men should get preference in admissions. Kingman Brewster denied he ever said it, but every woman at Yale, including his wife, assumed that he did.51 It was the same rationale that had stalled coeducation in the first place and the same one now used to justify Yale’s admissions quotas, which limited women to 230 in each entering class while holding 1,025 places for men—the thousand leaders plus a cushion of 25 extra in case the admissions office made some mistakes.
By September 1969, the phrase “a thousand male leaders” was widely known at Yale and widely repeated. “I remember that ‘a thousand male leaders’ line,” recalled a freshman woman in Yale’s Silliman College.52 “I remember being pissed off at that.”
The phrase rankled, and some women liked to extend it: “one thousand male leaders and two hundred concubines,” they would say to each other, underscoring what the tagline implied for their own status.53 The male undergraduates were the given, the nonnegotiable, the heart of Yale’s mission. The women were add-ons. Within just a few months, the fight to end Yale’s gender quotas would begin. But in those first few weeks of coeducation, just being a woman at Yale was challenge enough.
The days veered crazily between two extremes. To be a young woman at Yale was to be simultaneously invisible yet unable to blend in. Sometimes, the women would scan the classroom and find that they were the only one there.54 Usually there were at least a few others. Either way, each girl felt the weight of proving not just her own merit but that of the entire gender.55 “Not bad for a woman,” a professor wrote across the assignment of one student.56 In some classes, boys would stare when girls spoke, as if the furniture itself had offered an opinion.57 If the women stayed silent, professors sometimes closed the discussion by asking, “Now what is the woman’s point of view on this subject?”58
Before coming to Yale, most of the women had thought that being surrounded by men would be great, a perk of their first-at-Yale status.59 Their friends and family had teased them about how many boyfriends they would have, and that didn’t sound half bad for those who had suffered through high school with the social handicap of being labeled “the smart girl.”60 But none had ever imagined it would be like this.
The experience was confusing. All those men. All that attention. This was exactly what every girl wanted, right? Yet sometimes it seemed as if responding to all the attention from men left little room for anything else. “Without fail, every time I sit down to write a paper or do some reading, the phone rings,” wrote a freshman from a suburb of Hartford.61 One guy would ask her to dinner, the next to a movie, and a third would suggest playing Frisbee. It wasn’t just the interruptions, though. There was an unpleasant edge to the attention as well, “an uncomfortable sense of being observed, judged, and if one was not strikingly beautiful, perhaps found wanting,” explained one woman sophomore.62
Many of the men liked what they saw. As a Morse College senior observed, “We do have the best girls, I think, and we are known for it.”63 Others were less pleased. A group of seniors had been watching one of the women in their residential college with concern. One day at lunch, they all walked over and sat down with her. She had never met any of them before, never talked to them, but they had some advice. She walked across the college courtyard “too quickly, too purposively,” they told her. She sat in the dining hall “too far in the corner, too hunched over, too often with a book.” She held her head “tilted too far up towards the sky or too far down towards the ground.” No need for despair, though, they assured her. With some effort, she could improve.64
* * *
As hard as most women found those opening weeks at Yale, there was one at least who was thriving. Connie Royster had been sad to leave behind her friends at Wheaton College, but she loved being at Yale. In many ways, she was home. Connie still had some older cousins who worked in the York Street fraternities, and some days she’d ride by on her bicycle to say hello. They were so proud of her. “How are you doing?” Connie’s cousins would call out. “Great!” she would answer.65 Connie thought of her cousins as her guardian angels, looking out for her at Yale, and they weren’t the only people she knew when she got there.
Connie had gone to junior high in New Haven and grown close to the small group of kids in the top track who took all their classes together. Connie’s junior high friends had continued on in New Haven public schools when Connie went off to boarding school, but she had remained friends with two in particular, the two who had gone to Yale. Both were among the first people she called when she learned she had been admitted. Connie knew those friendships would be waiting for her when she got to New Haven. What she had not expected was getting a roommate with whom she would become fast friends so quickly.
The girl had looked so forlorn when Connie first saw her on move-in day. Connie and her parents had swung open the door to her room in Yale’s Berkeley College, and there was her roommate, standing alone in the empty dorm room with her one little suitcase beside her. The space echoed. Neither of the other two roommates was there yet, and this one looked so confused. She said her name was Betty Spahn.
Betty was a white girl, about five foot two, with long, dark hair down to her shoulders. She had driven to Yale from Illinois, she said; a friend and his dad had given her a ride on their way to Harvard. Connie was long practiced in making friends from all races and backgrounds, but there was something about Betty she connected with right away. Betty felt the same way. “It was like we had always been friends,” said Betty.66
Connie’s father offered to drive the two girls to the Salvation Army to see if they could find a couch for their room, and by the time Connie and Betty returned with a suitably shabby acquisition, they were laughing and joking together and had made the first steps toward the friendship that would sustain them through Yale and for many years later. Over the following weeks, their days pulled them different directions—Connie to her art classes and theater rehearsals, Betty to her history and politics classes—but the two still managed to find time at the end of the day to touch base.
Betty would have loved to get involved in an extracurricular activity like Connie, maybe the Yale Political Union, but she had little time for extracurriculars. Betty needed to earn money to help pay for her tuition, and Yale had given her what was known as a bursary job as part of her financial aid package.67 Some of the women students on financial aid worked in offices of administrators or faculty, filing or making copies on the mimeograph machine. But many worked in the dining halls serving the students whose families did not need help paying Yale’s tuition. Yale assigned you to a college that wasn’t your own, so at least you weren’t serving your roommates. Betty worked the dinner shift in Silliman College, where she stood behind the steam tables, ladling out food to the students who came down the serving line with their trays.
Male bursary students worked at Silliman too, but their job was bussing the tables. Apart from Betty, the women serving the food were all townies. Betty didn’t mind her dining hall job, and she enjoyed the women she worked with. They were kind to her, and once Betty had her uniform on, she blended right in. A few days after she started her new job, though, something strange happened, something that she had trouble figuring out.
It was right at the start of Betty’s shift, before the Silliman students came in for dinner. The dining hall manager came over to Betty and tapped her on the shoulder. “I want to see you in my office,” he said.68 Betty knew who he was, but up until then it had always been Mary, the black woman in charge of the steam tables, who told her what to do. Betty turned to follow him anyway. Mary saw right away what was happening. “No, you can’t! She’s a Yale student,” Mary shouted, and she put her body between Betty’s and the manager’s. “Go back to your station,” she told Betty sternly. Betty did as she was told. The manager went back to his office. And then it was over. Still, it was all very odd.
A week later, the dining hall manager beckoned again, but this time the target was not Betty but a young black woman, a townie who was also new to the job. When the manager asked her back to his office, the woman left her station at the steam table to follow. While she was gone, the Yale students entered for dinner and Betty’s coworkers covered the woman’s station. Eventually, the young woman returned to the dining hall, disheveled and crying. Mary, the senior steam table worker who had protected Betty from the manager before, hugged the young woman tightly and took her off to the ladies’ room. Betty was puzzled and asked the women in the serving line beside her what was going on. “Shush, honey, you don’t need to know about this,” was the answer she got. “She’s going to be fine.”
Betty did not know what had gone on in that manager’s office, but she knew her coworker was crying. She kept listening as the other women talked. “Her husband doesn’t need to know,” they said. “It would just rile him up.” Such things were so far beyond Betty’s experience that she barely had words to describe them. She did not understand the details of what happened, but she did know one thing for certain: where she came from, it was not okay to make women cry by forcing yourself on them. Before the students came in for dinner one night, Betty approached Mary about what happened.
Mary’s response was swift: “Now, don’t you make any trouble, because it’ll just come down on her head.” The young woman was still in her probationary period, Mary explained. “This is a good job. It’s got benefits,” she continued, making clear that Betty was not to put that in peril. The woman had a young baby. If she wanted the job, she needed to wait out the months that remained in the probationary period. After that, the union could protect her. “Don’t you make any trouble for her,” said Mary. “She’s got enough trouble.” Mary had worked there a while. She knew how the system worked. She looked at Betty: “This is just the way the world is.”
A week after the start of fall semester classes, Kingman Brewster donned his tuxedo and walked the three blocks from Yale’s president’s mansion to Sprague Hall, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech to the Yale Political Union. Four hundred people had gathered to hear him, for this was Brewster’s first major address of the year, and he had prepared his thoughts with a national audience in mind. In colleges throughout the country, students were demanding more involvement in university decisions, and that night Brewster countered their call for “participatory democracy”69 by suggesting minor adjustments instead: performance reviews of university presidents, more attention paid to student petitions, and more transparency. Brewster was not interested in sharing more power with students, and he suspected many other presidents agreed with him. The next day, the New York Times ran the speech on its front page, exactly as Brewster had hoped.
And now on to the next issue: Vietnam. The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, with its call for college students across the nation to boycott their classes and hold antiwar rallies instead, was just a few weeks away. Yale took no official stand on the matter, but Brewster did not hide his own views. The war needed to end, and Yale students who attended the October 15 antiwar demonstration on the New Haven Green would find Brewster there too, as one of the rally’s lead speakers.
As for coeducation, the woman issue was done as far as Brewster was concerned. The goal was achieved. Acceptance rates were up: 64 percent of the men offered places at Yale had said yes that year, compared with 56 percent the year before coeducation began.70 True, Brewster still needed to find someone to donate the money for more housing—he had promised 1,500 women after all. But that aside, Yale’s foray into coeducation could be declared a success, and the woman issue moved off the agenda.
Had he spoken with any of Yale’s women students, Brewster might have altered his assessment. It could be so very lonely to be a woman at Yale. “I could walk for blocks at night without seeing another woman’s face,” said a freshman girl from Rochester,71 and other women also struggled to make female friends. “It is virtually impossible to meet other girls,” another freshman observed.72 “I am lost in a sea of men.” Even the architecture at Yale kept women apart. The dorms had no long hallways onto which multiple rooms opened. Instead, the colleges were designed with entryways that had just two or three rooms to a floor. “The structure is such that it’s like living in a hotel,” the distressed master of Davenport College wrote to Wasserman once he realized how few of the women there had even met each other.73
Yale women were not instant friends. Within the small group of women in their residential college, many had little in common save their gender. Field hockey player Lawrie Mifflin found some women friends in her college, Saybrook, but other girls were not as lucky. “If you didn’t find a really close simpatico friend in your college, that was hard,” said Lawrie. “You really felt alone then.”74 There was something else too, a feeling at Yale that friendships between women were not all that important. A freshman from all-girls boarding school Concord Academy called it Yale’s “antiwoman conditioning.”75 Her Concord Academy classmate, also at Yale, saw it too: “Yale men see nothing wrong with their all-male gangs and activities, but groups of girls are regarded as pathetic and queer.”76 And so Yale’s women were divided—by decisions made before they had even arrived, by buildings that kept them apart, and by a culture that said their friendships did not matter.
“How is your daughter doing?” one of the ubiquitous interviewers asked a father after the initial weeks had passed.77 “Well, I think she is like most freshmen,” he answered. “She is very lonely, and it’s a lonely time.” The interviewer kept pushing. “Has she met many people here?” The father paused and then, not hiding the pain he felt for his daughter, replied, “I don’t think so.”
Like their white women classmates, the black women were separated out across the twelve residential colleges.78 Ezra Stiles had three black women; Branford, Calhoun, and Pierson each had four. No college had more than eight. Four colleges—Jonathan Edwards, Silliman, Saybrook, and Trumbull—had no black women at all, a situation about which the black men complained.
“There are no black women in Silliman,” one of the Silliman men scrawled at the bottom of the fall housing survey.79 “This is one faux pas that cannot and will not be overlooked. Due to this situation, I have strongly considered transferring out of this college.”
Shirley Daniels lived in Timothy Dwight, where she was one of five black women students. From her first days at Yale, though, Shirley spent a lot of her time at “the House,”80 the nickname the black students gave to the black student center that Yale had just opened on Chapel Street. The building really was a house, with a front porch and a kitchen. “It was a homey atmosphere,” said Shirley’s friend Vera Wells, another of Timothy Dwight’s five black women.81 “You could study there and just have conversations.”
The House was the place where black students could let down the guard that came with being outnumbered and different. “It was a place where blacks could go where they didn’t have to worry about what they said, what they did, what they believed, because of being in mixed company,” said Shirley.82 Shirley never experienced any overt racism from students at Yale. But that did not mean it was comfortable to be one of the few black women in what was still a school of white men.
Black students had been attending Yale in sparse numbers well before there were undergraduate women.83 The first black student graduated from Yale in 1857, although for the next century Yale rarely admitted more than one black student per class. In 1962, Yale enrolled six black freshmen men. In 1964, there were eighteen. And now in 1969, there were ninety-six black freshmen at Yale, including twenty-five women. The class of 1973 was “the blackest class in the history of that ivy-draped institution,” wrote student Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who arrived a Yale in 1969.84 That did not feel very black at all, however, when 90 percent of the freshman class was white.
Many black women, Connie Royster and Shirley Daniels among them, were used to attending schools where they were part of a small minority. Connie had been the only black student in her entire high school, and before moving to Roxbury, Shirley attended army base elementary schools that never had more than a few black kids. For some of the black women students, though, Yale was their first immersion in a place full of white people. One freshman girl walked back to her dorm room after every class the first week and climbed into bed. “I wouldn’t sleep. I was just hiding. I was out of my mind frightened. It wasn’t so much Yale as coming to a white college.”85
Classroom interactions could be difficult. “They would sometimes look at me like I’m ‘the black opinion’; I’m ‘the female opinion,’” said Vera Wells, the junior who was in Timothy Dwight with Shirley.86 “It’s not that they meant to be cruel. It’s like I was a curiosity factor.” That didn’t make it any easier to be the one who was singled out. “I can’t speak for all black people or all women,” Vera explained to them. I’m not your experiment, she thought to herself.87
Many of the white students cared deeply about ending the racial injustice they saw all around them. “We were searching, trying to do a better job navigating race than our parents’ generation had done,” explained one white woman freshman.88 Theirs was the generation that grew up with the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat when they were in kindergarten. In middle school, Martin Luther King had told a crowd of 250,000 that he had a dream, and by the time they packed for Yale, both he and Malcolm X were dead. Yet supporting civil rights was one thing; figuring out how to negotiate an interracial friendship was another.
Close friendships between white and black students were not unheard of at Yale. The drama group with whom Connie Royster spent most of her time was mixed, and of course she and Betty were close. Lawrie Mifflin became friends with her black classmate Skip Gates after they suffered together through “Bio for Poets,” the science class that humanities majors took to check off their distribution requirements.89 But overall, Yale was not the integrated utopia that many white students hoped for. There were not enough black students to make that possible, and even so, many white students found it hard to reach across the divide of race. They had gone to white schools and lived in white neighborhoods, and that racial isolation had left many uncertain about how to approach a friendship with someone who wasn’t white. “Interactions,” said one white woman student, “were awkward.”90
A white sophomore from Queens felt it too. “We didn’t want to offend; we weren’t quite sure,” she explained. “We gave a certain space to the black students.”91 Sometimes when Shirley Daniels entered a room full of white students, she could feel a ripple of discomfort.
There was no denying that Shirley stood out, whatever the racial makeup of the crowd. “Shirley had a lot of leadership presence about her,” said Carol Storey, a black premed student from Los Angeles.92 Shirley was articulate and insightful and not shy about sharing her views, but she had a big laugh too, the kind that made you smile along with her. She wore her hair in a tight Afro and had wire-rimmed glasses. When she walked in a room, an aura of certainty swept in along with her. “She was very bright,” said Sam Chauncey, who knew Shirley through his work as Brewster’s point man on increasing black student admissions.93 Shirley did not have white friends at Yale, but that was through her own choice. She was oriented instead toward the black students at Yale and the black community of New Haven that surrounded it.
Coeducation arrived at Yale right when black students nationally were embracing Black Power’s vision of “racial solidarity, cultural pride, and self-determination,”94 and Yale was in step with the times. “We knew we had dreamed white dreams long enough,” wrote student Skip Gates, who may have been friends with Lawrie Mifflin but also wanted to spend time among fellow black students.95 “To understand, to preserve ourselves as black people . . . we turned inward individually and collectively.”
Black students sought one another out at mealtimes, and nearly every black student joined the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY), which was in its third year in 1969. And while most black students did not major in Yale’s Afro-American studies program, many took at least one Afro-American studies class. The distance between white and black students at Yale came from both sides, albeit for different reasons.
On weekends, most of Yale divided by race.96 The white social committee chairmen almost always hired white rock-and-roll bands for their mixers, but the black students liked to listen to soul music, and so the BSAY hosted its own Saturday night parties. When smaller groups gathered in someone’s dorm room, they were white or black but not often both. When black students got together, “we might be playing music, or watching a movie, ordering some pizza, or playing some cards,” said Carol Storey.97 “We played Bid Whist. That was the African American game.”
Some white students resented black students’ desire to spend time with one another. “If black students won’t be friendly and eat with me at dinner,” wrote junior Jeff Gordon, “then let them fight their own battles.”98 Connie Royster could have explained to him why black students ate together: “There is a comfort in being with your own,” she said, “especially if you’re feeling like an outsider.”99 That was an answer that white women at Yale were beginning to understand.
Connie did not spend much time at the House herself—she was always in one play rehearsal or another—but Shirley was there more often than not. Some of the black students Shirley met at the House were unlike any she had ever known. Shirley’s father was a career serviceman in the army, her mother a schoolteacher-turned-homemaker. Shirley had never before met anybody whose parents were millionaires, but she met them at Yale, and the wealthy students she met there were black. Far more of the black women students, however, came from families that knew what it was like to come to the end of the week without much money left over.
There were poor white students at Yale, to be sure. One sophomore woman had a male friend from deep Appalachia with an accent so thick that at first she could barely understand him. He had never watched a television before coming to Yale. But only 4 percent of the white women students were classed by Yale’s financial aid office as “economically disadvantaged” compared with more than half of the black women students.100 Shirley Daniels was thus an outsider on three counts at Yale: she was black, she was a woman, and she was working class.
Shirley marveled at the wealth of Yale: the thick oriental carpets, the gilt-framed portraits, and the wood paneling on the walls of her room in Timothy Dwight. Yale’s buildings were “extraordinarily beautiful,” said Shirley.101 “And the meals were out of sight.” The black students found out about a black cook who knew how to make the food they had grown up with: collard greens, sweet potatoes, cornbread, fried chicken, and black-eyed peas and rice. Shirley nicknamed him “Candy.” Yale rotated its cooks from one residential dining hall to another, and up at the House, they all knew Candy’s schedule. “Wherever Candy was, all the black students went there for dinner,” said Shirley. “I don’t care what college it was; we were there.” Like the House, Candy’s food was a refuge. “We would just look forward to it,” said Shirley. “For all of us, it brought back home.”