The staff of the Yale Alumni Office was quite pleased with itself. The annual midwinter Alumni Day would take place on Saturday, February 21, and this year’s event looked to be the most successful one yet.1 More than one thousand alumni and wives were coming, the largest turnout ever. The group would be fêted at a white-tablecloth lunch in the imposing University Dining Hall. Kingman Brewster would speak. Awards would be given. And then the gathering would move next door to Woolsey Hall for the grand finale: the dedication of the new Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center, during which Brewster would be handed the keys to the building by the man who had donated the money for it.
Henry P. Becton was the perfect alumnus: loyal to Yale, remarkably generous, and very, very rich.2 In 1947, ten years after graduating from Yale, Becton and his partner, Fairleigh Dickinson, took over the medical instruments company that their fathers had founded. By 1970, Becton Dickinson had reached the Fortune 500. Annual revenues topped $200 million, with profits of more than $16 million a year. Becton’s loyalty to Yale ran deep. He had sung in the Whiffenpoofs and had even written the words to “Sons of Eli”—not one of the more well-known odes to Yale men but in the official Yale songbook nonetheless.3 And Henry Becton had two children at Yale: Jeffery, a senior, and Cynthia, one of the 230 women freshmen. The men in the Yale Alumni Office would have been wise to ask Cynthia Becton about how things were going at Yale. But in all of their planning, this was one step they forgot.
On Friday, the day before the alumni event, Cynthia and her roommate Margaret Coon sat down over lunch with a group of their friends.4 The topic of Yale’s limit on women undergraduates arose and, with it, the challenges caused by the resulting seven-to-one ratio. Margaret had attended a coed public high school, where being a girl was certainly a part of who you were but not the only thing others saw when you walked in a room. Yale’s version of coeducation was nothing like that. Margaret resented being asked for “the woman’s opinion” in class and disliked how Yale had continued to bring in busloads of girls from other colleges every weekend. Other women at the table added their stories. The men sitting with them didn’t much like the skewed ratio at Yale either, but so far, no one had come up with a good way to change it.
Yale had come a long way already from the village of men it had once been. The first women undergraduates had brought change just by the fact of their being there: raising their hands to ask questions at the end of lectures, titrating solutions in the chemistry lab, racing after field hockey balls hit across the Old Campus.5 Since 1701, Yale had banned women from such spaces, and now here they were, pushing aside the barriers that had long defined women at Yale as somehow less than men. Not every barrier, however, melted away just through the presence of women. Sometimes more direct action was needed.
One of the students sitting at the lunch table with Margaret and Cynthia threw out an idea. What about the big alumni lunch at Yale the following day? What if the students did something there? Excitement coursed around the table. Most students at Yale assumed that the alumni were the main opponents to admitting more women. If only the alumni would drop their insistence on the thousand-man quota, the students reasoned, then Brewster and the Yale Corporation would be free to increase the pace of coeducation. The alumni lunch was the perfect opportunity to present the case for change. By the end of the day, Margaret and Cynthia had sketched out a plan for their protest, assembled a team to carry it out, and chosen a name for their group: Women and Men for a Better Yale. While the group was coed, only the women would take part in the protest. That way the alumni could see for themselves some of the coeds they had been hearing so much about.
At 1:00 p.m. the next day, a throng of business-suited alumni, their wives in cocktail dresses beside them, entered the University Dining Hall and took their seats for the alumni lunch. The guests began eating and chatting among themselves. None of them noticed when one of the bursary students who had served them their lunch opened a locked door behind the podium and let the girls in. Forty girls, all freshmen like Margaret and Cynthia, entered the dining hall. Some of them were carrying signs: “End Women’s Oppression” and “Women Up from Under.”6 While most of them wore jeans, Margaret had put on a dress and pulled her long hair back neatly with a bow. She ascended the podium where Kingman Brewster and some other dignitaries were seated and, using the calmest voice she could muster, asked Brewster a question: “Mr. Brewster, I’d like to address the alumni for a few minutes. Would that be OK?”7
Brewster was surprised. Alumni lunches were typically dull and predictable affairs, not the site of impromptu protests, but Brewster was an innately gracious man, and he was open to hearing student views. He gestured Margaret over to the microphone, and she stepped up and looked out at the crowd. Although she had acted in high school and been the valedictorian for her class of sixty-seven students, she had never spoken before to an audience this large or one so potentially hostile. Margaret grasped the long stem of the microphone with her right hand, glanced down at her notes in her left, and began to speak.
“There are not enough of us,” Margaret told the alumni. “We are scattered in tiny groups.”8 As Margaret spoke, the other freshmen girls circulated silently among the rectangular banquet tables where the alumni and their wives were seated, handing out leaflets about the challenges caused by their small numbers. Kit McClure was among the protesters. The night before, when word spread through Vanderbilt Hall about the action planned by Women and Men for a Better Yale, Kit did not hesitate to say she would be there. At the rate Yale was going, women students would still be vastly outnumbered by the time she graduated, and no one was even talking about enacting sex-blind admissions. Planning the protest was one thing, however. Actually doing it, Kit found, was scary. It was intimidating walking through that huge room filled with important men, knowing you weren’t supposed to be there.
Margaret spoke for three minutes. “To accept 1,000 ‘male leaders’ while accepting only 250 women is not only sexual discrimination but bad education,” she said,9 and then she presented the group’s solution: “Limit the class of 1974 to 1,000 people . . . 700 men and 300 women.”10 Margaret asked that Yale agree to the group’s proposal by the end of the week, eliciting scattered laughter from the crowd and a chuckle from Brewster. That was not how things worked at Yale. Margaret stepped down from the podium, and the student protesters left the University Dining Hall as quickly as they had entered.
Kit had hoped that Brewster would make the case to alumni for equal opportunity for women, but that was not his intention. Before commencing his prepared remarks on the economics of running Yale, Brewster responded to Margaret Coon’s comments. He started by seeking the audience’s sympathy, noting that he had suffered “harassment” of late not only from students but also from alumni. Brewster had been stung in particular by a recent book, The Rape of Yale, authored by a Yale alumnus who charged that Brewster was a radical leftist. “After having been wedded to Yale for seven years,” Brewster told the crowd, “it’s a little hard to be accused of rape by your father-in-law.”11
Brewster was right to be concerned about the alumni.12 Some, like the author of The Rape of Yale, thought Brewster should keep his views on civil rights and Vietnam to himself. Many alumni were angry that their children were no longer getting into Yale as easily as they once had, now that Brewster and Inky Clark had reduced the alumni child preference in admissions. But while many Yale students assumed otherwise, there had been no grand bargain between Brewster and alumni that gave him coeducation in return for holding firm on the number of undergraduate men. The final decision had been so hastily made that the alumni were barely consulted. Some may have worried that alumni who became angry over the admission of women would stop donating to Yale, but in the first year of coeducation, alumni donations topped $4.6 million, a record high.13 Brewster’s problem with alumni over coeducation, if there was one at all, was entirely of his own making.14
The week after Yale announced it was going coed, Brewster promised a Yale Alumni Fund audience that Yale’s coeducation decision would not impact the number of men admitted to Yale. Two months later, he repeated that promise to a different Alumni Fund audience. And at the alumni luncheon where Margaret Coon had just spoken, Brewster added a new reason Yale could not go below its thousand male leaders: “accountability to alumni.”15 The promise may have been made unnecessarily, but it was not one Brewster was prepared to renege on. Brewster then repeated his standard line on Yale’s mission. Coeducation has been “a terrific success,” he observed, but Yale had an “educational responsibility to the nation.”16 It could not consider any step that would “increase the number of women at Yale at the expense of the number of men.”
As for the protesters themselves, Brewster dismissed the girls as a “much too small band of women undergraduates.”17 But those who had read the January editorial of the Yale Daily News—and many alumni subscribed to the publication—knew that it was not only women who were calling for change. The name and membership of Women and Men for a Better Yale made that clear too. Yet Brewster also dismissed the Yale men who supported a more equal ratio: “We can’t give them women as a new gesture every year.”18 His comments on coeducation complete, Brewster returned to his speech on Yale’s finances. When he concluded his remarks, the alumni and wives rose in a standing ovation, and then the room stood together and sang Yale’s anthem, “Bright College Years,” pulling out their handkerchiefs and, as traditional, waving them overhead for the closing words: “For God, for country, and for Yale.”
* * *
Shirley Daniels was not at the protest. None of the sophomore or junior women were—the freshmen had organized it. But even had she known about it, it was unlikely Shirley would have been there. The lines of race that often divided Yale students’ social lives ran through much of Yale’s student activism as well. At the start of the alumni lunch protest, a few black women freshmen had entered the University Dining Hall with their white classmates, but they didn’t like what Margaret Coon said and left early. “We listened to the speaker, but it sounded more like an anti-male than a pro-female kind of thing, so we left,” one of them explained later.19 Any rifts over matters of gender threatened the unity of Yale’s two hundred black undergraduates, almost all of whom were members of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY). And besides, black women at Yale did not see their male classmates as the problem.
“Women felt respected in the BSAY,” said Los Angeles premed student Carol Storey. The group “felt unified by ethnicity more than gender-divided.”20 White women students did not often experience that same respect in the male-led white activist groups that they joined. There, women “weren’t given a speaking role,” said junior Judy Berkan, who was involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a number of leftist ad hoc initiatives.21 “We were the ones who licked the envelopes.” Betty Spahn felt the same way about her experience in the Wright Hall sit-in. No one liked to feel like they were invisible.
At Afro-Am House, black women did not experience that type of silencing. During the BSAY strategy sessions, the men listened to Shirley and the other black women. Sometimes discussions grew heated. Shirley did not shy from speaking her mind. And unlike in many of the white-led student organizations, women in the BSAY quickly rose to positions of power.22 At the end of the first semester, Shirley and her classmate Sheila Jackson were elected to two of the BSAY’s top leadership positions: Sheila became the BSAY treasurer, and Shirley became chair of the BSAY’s largest committee, the Recruitment, Tutorial, and Counseling Committee, which ran the group’s massive effort to recruit black students to Yale and ensure they graduated once they got there. During Christmas and spring breaks, Yale’s black undergraduates traveled to black high schools in a dozen different cities, from Los Angeles to Detroit, Little Rock, and Philadelphia. Yale paid the costs of the airfare, food, and local transportation; students stayed with family or friends. In addition to coordinating all those student visits, Shirley managed an annual budget of $10,000 and met regularly with Associate Director of Admissions W. C. Robinson, one of Yale’s few black administrators, and with Sam Chauncey, whom Brewster had charged with increasing Yale’s enrollment of black students. Shirley also managed the BSAY’s financial aid initiatives and its counseling and tutoring program for incoming students. It was exactly the job she had wanted when it came time that winter for the BSAY elections.
Yet the BSAY’s priorities did not encompass many of the issues that affected black women.23 On those, the black women students needed to act on their own. The attempt to have the forty black women meet regularly as a group had not lasted much more than a month, but at the Afro-Am House, the women sophomores and juniors had kept talking. How did they fit in American society? What did it mean to be a black woman? The discussion was important, Shirley observed, “because a lot of times, black women don’t think about who they are and what they are, and what they need to do. We basically serve everybody else in the world.”24
Shirley began looking into women’s issues on her own, and one thing stood out from her research: “There was a kind of totem pole situation, and black women were always at the bottom of it.” U.S. wage statistics put numbers to Shirley’s statement.25 The median annual salary of white men was $7,900 in 1970. That fell to $5,300 for black men, $4,600 for white women, and $3,500 for black women—less than half that of the white men.
Some of the men in the BSAY argued that black women were getting jobs for which black men weren’t hired. “Look,” said Shirley. “I’ve looked at the statistics and that’s not true. We are still earning less than you are. We are still not able to get the jobs that you are able to get as a black man.” Time magazine did not disagree. “Black women are the lowest-paid members of the work force,” it reported. “A black man with an eighth-grade education has a higher median income than a black woman with some college education.” As Shirley observed, “That wasn’t a conversation men liked to hear.”
Shirley’s friend Vera Wells joined those discussions, but she was more focused on a different problem at Yale, the absence of black women faculty.26 Her first two years in college had been far different. Before transferring to Yale, Vera had attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. But the summer after her sophomore year, Vera married a Howard Law School graduate and moved with him to New Haven before getting her bachelor’s degree. Vera’s mother, a Pittsburgh beautician, was so disappointed. Vera was the first in her family to ever attend college, and now she was not going to graduate. A few months after Vera and her new husband moved to New Haven, however, Yale announced it was going coed and Vera got her second chance. The following September, she became one of the seven black women in the junior class.
At Yale, Vera was shocked by how white the faculty was. “It just seemed so strange to me,” said Vera.27 Of the hundreds of faculty members and administrators at Yale, only five were black women—two at the nursing school, two at the Yale Child Study Center, and one at the drama school—and none of them taught undergraduates.28 Black women were also missing from Yale’s curriculum.29 The syllabus for the new women’s studies course did not mention black women, and the classes offered by Yale’s Afro-American studies program focused almost exclusively on men. And so Vera wondered: Why couldn’t they have a course at Yale that focused on black women and hire a black woman professor to teach it?
When Vera told the Afro-American studies program director about her idea, he said he had no room in his budget for a course on black women but suggested she try getting the course approved as a residential college seminar, the same path Wasserman had used to slip Women in a Male Society into the curriculum. Vera talked to her classmate Cecelia McDaniel about what she had learned about starting a class on black women. “This is something we should do,” the two students agreed. Over the spring, Vera and Cecelia put together a proposal for a class that would study black women leaders from Nzinga and Nefertiti through Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks. Sylvia Boone, one of Cecelia’s former professors at Hunter College in New York, would teach it—there was no one at Yale who knew the material. When the class was approved, Vera was thrilled. The Black Woman: Yesterday and Today would be offered the following fall.30
* * *
News of the alumni lunch protest organized by Women and Men for a Better Yale spread rapidly through the campus. “It was a very ‘un-Yale’ thing to do,” observed two graduate school women, and thus it was a story all the more amazing in the telling.31 Did you hear? went the word through the dining halls. Did you hear what a group of freshman girls just did?
Elga Wasserman was horrified when she first heard what had happened.32 Increasing the numbers of women students at Yale was critical. Wasserman had known that for months. But this type of action—interrupting the winter alumni gathering of all things—risked creating a backlash. You had to be careful when trying to change a place as set in its ways as Yale, thought Wasserman. You couldn’t push too hard. She had made just that point the previous month when she warned the petition enthusiasts on her Women’s Advisory Council against suggesting that Yale reduce the number of male students. And now this. Even those sympathetic to the girls’ cause could be turned away by their methods. “They should have taken this matter up quietly with the president, rather than making a fuss in here,” one alumnus complained.33 Exactly, thought Wasserman. If change became associated with “radical elements,” as Wasserman called them, even the incremental progress she hoped for would be threatened.34
To describe Jenkintown High School valedictorian Margaret Coon, in her dress and neatly bowed ponytail, as a “radical element” would seem a far stretch indeed. A three-minute interruption of an alumni event may have created some discomfort for Brewster, but he had always been quick on his feet, and the girls had left quietly. “We were not bomb throwers,” explained one male member of Women and Men for a Better Yale. “All of us were trying to work within the system rather than blow it up.”35 Most people, however, had learned about the protest from accounts in the press, and the New York Times had done the students no favors in the way it portrayed the event.
The Times ran the protest right on the front page of its Sunday edition. “About 40 of Yale University’s new coeds invaded a quiet Alumni Day luncheon . . . and, with clenched fists and placards, protested the ratio of women to men,” the article began. “One coed strode to the dais, seized a microphone and lectured the 1,000 stunned guests.”36 Margaret Coon barely recognized herself in the description.
Other papers picked up the story, including the news service of the Los Angeles Times. The New York Post sent a photographer, who posed Cynthia Becton and Margaret in front of the door to their Vanderbilt entryway. By the time the story ran in Spokane the following week, Margaret was being described as both a “militant” and a “pretty freshman.”37 Margaret’s father saved the New York Times article and showed it to friends. He was proud of her actions. But for Margaret, the experience of being splashed across the front page of the Times at age eighteen was a bit overwhelming.
The alumni seemed far less upset about the student protesters than the New York Times was. “Their demands are reasonable,” observed one Yale graduate who had been at the lunch,38 and at the end of Margaret’s remarks, the alumni had applauded.39 Many saw the new women students as part of the Yale family—both figuratively and literally. Henry Becton was not the only one with a daughter at Yale. Becton himself had not been bothered in the least by the protest, and he stopped by Cynthia and Margaret’s room in Vanderbilt Hall afterward. “He was a very nice man,” Margaret said. “He seemed amused by the whole thing.”40
Yet Wasserman’s concerns about the alumni reaction were not totally unfounded. “I think it was a bit presumptuous of them,” said a member of the class of 1926. “You invite them here, and now they want to take over the place.”41 One of the men said something awful to Kit McClure, who, of course, was still just a teenager: “No wonder you’re feminists—you’re so ugly.”42 But more shocking than the alumnus’s response were the remarks of a few of the girls’ male classmates: “Women’s liberation? What you need is a good lay.” Kit wrote down the comments in careful cursive in her diary. And then she added at the end, “The reactions disturbed and surprised me.”
* * *
One week after the alumni lunch protest, a graduate student dressed as the Statue of Liberty entered the Berkeley College dining hall at lunchtime, accompanied by six other graduate school women and Kit McClure. The Free Women Conference would be held at Yale Law School the following weekend, and conference organizers wanted to make sure that every Yale undergraduate knew about it. Kit played a musical fanfare on her trombone as the group entered the dining hall, and then, with all eyes now on them, the women performed a short skit. “Take her torch and give her a mop!” they shouted, pretending to be male chauvinists harassing Ms. Liberty.43 “Take her crown and give her some curlers!” Some of the Berkeley College students applauded. Others heckled. Kit and the other women handed out leaflets with details on the Free Women Conference, and then they moved along to the lunch crowd at the next residential college to repeat their performance.
Two days later, the conference began. Thursday night featured a showing of feminist films, but it was Friday night’s two keynote speakers who drew the biggest crowd—about five hundred women and a noticeable contingent of men.44 Radical feminists Kate Millett and Naomi Weisstein were scheduled to give speeches, and everyone wanted to hear them.45 Millett went first. She was a few weeks away from defending her Columbia University dissertation, which would be published later that year as Sexual Politics and, with its application of Marxist theory to gender politics, would become a seminal work of second-wave feminism. A current of excitement ran through the law school auditorium as Kate Millett stepped up to the stage, and she delivered a message far bolder than that which Betty Friedan had given in a speech at Yale earlier that month.46 Women needed to go further than just amending a few laws, Millett told the crowd before her. Attitudes, assumptions, systems, and power structures all needed to change. But there was hope. “We have 53 percent—the most powerful political force in the nation!” she declared. “Right on!” came the shouts from the crowd.47
Once the applause for Kate Millett died down, Naomi Weisstein took her turn at the podium.48 Weisstein lived in Chicago and was less well known than New York–based Millett, but the personal story she shared that night resonated with many of the women in the audience, particularly the graduate school students. Weisstein was twenty-nine years old with a PhD in psychology from Harvard and a faculty position at Loyola University in Chicago. That night in New Haven, she told the audience about her goal of an academic career and the gender discrimination that had stalled her: a Harvard library that banned women from entering lest they distract the men; a Harvard professor who prohibited her from using the research equipment she needed because, being a woman, she might break it; nepotism rules at the University of Chicago that kept her off the faculty since her husband taught history there. Weisstein had thought she could get where she wanted by working harder, being smarter. But individual credentials, no matter how impeccable, she argued, were not enough for a woman. Weisstein’s message was clear, wrote a woman graduate student afterward: “Changes in social structures require a social movement.”49 You couldn’t do it alone.
Few women at Yale would have agreed with her. Individual accomplishment had worked well for each of them so far. They were at Yale, weren’t they? “To me, what you do is you go to classes, you participate, you do well, you impress people with how great it is to have women around and women as equals. That’s what you do,” said one sophomore woman.50
Field hockey player Lawrie Mifflin saw no need to get involved in a women’s group either. True, the absence of any Yale sports teams for women had surprised her, but she was already working to change that. Just make your way, Lawrie thought. Just make your way and make your mark in your subject area, in your sports, in the Yale Daily News. Whatever is your thing, do your thing and show that you’re good at it.51
The idea of challenging the rules with which Yale began coeducation did not even occur to most women. They simply felt lucky to be there. Being accepted at Yale “felt like a generosity,” said Los Angeles premed student Carol Storey.52 “The first year . . . women felt so grateful,” observed Elga Wasserman. “They felt like guests invited to be in a fancy home, and weren’t we great to have them here.”53 Some girls were just hunkered down in survival mode. Let me just get through this in one piece and get my degree, one freshman girl would say to herself on the days that were particularly hard.54
Yale women were all so different anyway. It was hard to imagine how they might join together to bring about change. They had grown up in different places. They studied different subjects. They lived in different residential colleges and would graduate in different years. They came from families with different incomes, different religions, and different politics. “We were all as different as any other group of heterogeneous people,” said a freshman who had grown up in Kansas.55 Her father was a mailman who hadn’t finished high school, her mother a homemaker. What did she have in common with the boarding school girls from the Northeast? All that bound them together was their experience of being women at Yale. For a few students, however, that shared experience of being a Yale woman was enough.
The Free Women Conference sold out all its women’s lib buttons and literature and had to send away as far as Baltimore for new supplies. It introduced like-minded women to each other and exposed Yale students to the ideas and goals of feminism. It produced a two-page document, “Unofficial Proposals for Equality,”56 that listed priorities for action:
WHY NOT DEMAND a 50–50 undergraduate admissions policy beginning with the Class of 1974?
WHY NOT DEMAND a department of women’s studies, designed, administered and taught by women?
WHY NOT DEMAND that Yale stop separate job categories for men and women and inequities between men’s and women’s wages?
WHY NOT DEMAND that Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital openly demand an end to Connecticut’s anti-abortion law?
WHY NOT DEMAND that the percentage of full-time women faculty be increased until it at least equals the percentage of women students at Yale?
For Kit McClure, the Free Women Conference could not have gone any better.57 Kit met other feminist activists, who gave her their phone numbers so that she could get in touch later, and at the Saturday session, the conference organizers pointed Kit out to the crowd and announced that she wanted to start an all-women’s rock band. Afterward, three women came up to Kit. Did she want to join their band? They’d had one practice already, and they even had a name for the group: the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Virginia Blaisdell played French horn, Jennifer Abod sang and played tambourine, and Judy Miller, whose idea it all was in the first place, had bought a used drum set and was taking lessons on how to play from Virginia’s husband. A trombone player would be terrific. Kit answered yes to their offer, of course. The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band had gained one very dedicated musician, and Kit McClure was that much closer to achieving the goal she had brought with her to Yale.
* * *
For those who attended the Free Women Conference, the weekend brought a rush of hope and excitement. Yet the postconference euphoria was tempered somewhat by an event that occurred on the conference’s last day, an early reminder that change would not be won quickly or easily. The schedule called for a final gathering on Sunday afternoon in which women and men could “come and hash things out together.”58 When participants arrived at the law school for their final session, they found six hundred people, mostly students, waiting in line for a different event. The Yale Law School Film Society was hosting another porn festival, and it had scheduled this year’s affair to overlap with the Free Women Conference. The Russ Meyer Film Festival featured six movies by the national leading producer of low-budget sex films. “Russ Meyer is coming: Hold onto your popcorn,” read the advertising posters papered all over New Haven.59
The Film Society’s decision to hold the porn fest at the same time as the Free Women Conference, just like the timing of its previous porn fest on the first day of Coeducation Week, was intended as a hilarious joke. Women’s lib conference? We’ll show them. The showing of Russ Meyer skin flicks was granted a small measure of respectability by questions being debated nationally at the time: Was pornography art, or was it just smut? Should it be celebrated as an aspect of free speech or banned for its obscenity? Such philosophical debates, however, had little to do with why six hundred guys, and a few women as well, were waiting in line at the law school that Sunday.
Russ Meyer flew in from Hollywood for the festival along with two of his starlets, “beautiful, bosomy broads,” according to one Yale student writer.60 Being the focus of a film festival at Yale lent credibility to Meyer’s pornography, and he walked Yale’s campus trailed by a bevy of East Coast reporters and a young Chicago Sun Times film critic, Roger Ebert. The crowd that filled the law school auditorium that Sunday was treated to a Russ Meyer double feature: Cherry, Harry, and Raquel and Faster Pussy Cat, Kill! Kill!, the latter of which starred “three go-go Watusi dancers [who] embark on a whirlwind tour of violence and seduction.”61 Russ Meyer was “the last great undiscovered talent” in American cinema, Roger Ebert proclaimed in his introductory remarks to the audience.62
A few days later, Russ Meyer and his “bosomy broads” were back home in Hollywood, his talents, for the moment, forgotten. Conversation at Yale instead revolved around the feminist activism that the campus had witnessed over the previous weeks. For the first time since the start of coeducation, Yale’s discrimination against women nudged aside Vietnam and race as the topic of the moment. In less than a month, Yale had witnessed the freshmen women’s alumni lunch protest, the efforts of Women and Men for a Better Yale, and now the Free Women Conference.
Its interest sparked by all this activity, the Yale Daily News ran a long, front-page story that explained the U.S. women’s movement to those who had not yet been following it. A photo of Kate Millett ran alongside the article, a rare instance of a woman on the News’ front page. Admissions Dean Inky Clark, who by then had announced he was leaving Yale to become headmaster of a New York prep school, went public with his own views on how coeducation was going at Yale. Yale’s quota limiting women was “not healthy,” Clark told the Yale Alumni Magazine; it should be abolished.63 And in every Yale College dining hall, Women and Men for a Better Yale circulated a petition that called on Yale to adopt sex-blind admissions.
The issue came to a head at the Yale Corporation meeting on March 7, 1970.64 Women and Men for a Better Yale presented its petition, which had been signed by 1,900 students, more than a third of the student body.65 Corporation members met with a delegation from the group and declared themselves impressed with the students’ arguments. And then the fifteen Yale trustees, each one a white man, voted to leave Yale’s gender quotas unchanged.
“I had thought that an issue like admitting men and women to Yale College on an equal basis would not be considered extremely threatening to Yale,” Kit McClure wrote in her diary. “I was mistaken.”66