Elga Wasserman had been as engaged in the May Day crisis as most people at Yale.1 She attended the multiple meetings that preceded the protest and read with growing concern the predictions of mayhem and rioting. Yet she had not let May Day distract her. Yale was still not doing right by its women students, and while the rest of the campus lost focus on that problem over May Day, Wasserman and her Coeducation Committee did not.
On April 21, the committee gathered for its regular biweekly meeting. By that point, Yale was in a frenzy over the threat of impending violence, but all except two of Wasserman’s committee members attended. In the packet sent out in advance, Wasserman included some calculations she’d done on the students Yale had just admitted to the class of 1974.2 High school girls needed to rank in the top 5 percent of their class to be accepted by Yale that year, while high school boys in the top 30 percent got in. The committee was shocked. Yale’s gender quotas were “intellectually indefensible,” said some at the meeting. “Irrational,” said history professor Edmund Morgan.3
Two weeks later, Wasserman put Yale’s gender quotas on the committee’s agenda again. By that point, the flood of May Day protesters had come and gone, and the semester was pretty much over. Only three committee members missed the meeting, and those who were there included some of the weightiest names on Wasserman’s roster: Chief of Psychiatry Bob Arnstein, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey, Yale College Dean Georges May, history professor Edmund Morgan, law professor Ellen Peters, and Assistant Dean Elisabeth Thomas.4
Wasserman was preparing to issue a year-end coeducation report that would be widely distributed and serve as a public report card on the first year of coeducation at Yale.5 She did not want her name to be the only one on this report, however. She wanted her committee members’ names right on the cover, and hence it was critical to have their support of whatever recommendations she made. Had Wasserman planned to declare coeducation a success, those names would not have been necessary. But that was not her intention.
Up until that point, Elga Wasserman had behaved. Whatever her private thoughts, she had kept from publicly challenging Brewster. She played by the rules, which at Yale called for patience, acknowledging the multiple priorities of a university president, and never, ever pushing too hard. A lot of good it had done her. Women students remained a small minority, scattered across all twelve of Yale’s colleges. The numbers of women faculty and administrators were almost too small to speak of. And Wasserman’s own position was still off to the side of Yale’s administrative structure, as if to make sure she could not cause any trouble. Women at Yale would never get what they needed if they kept playing by rules that were made by Yale men. In May 1970, for the very first time, Elga Wasserman began breaking the rules.
At their meeting on May 5, the Coeducation Committee discussed some possible recommendations to include in the report and quickly focused on one issue: the token numbers of women. For coeducation to be successful, Yale needed to rapidly increase the numbers of women students, and the committee saw only one way to do so: abandon the thousand-man quota.
None in the room could have misunderstood the weight of what they were considering—a public challenge to Kingman Brewster by some of the most prominent professors and administrators at Yale—but by the end of the meeting, the Coeducation Committee decided on its recommendation: for the class of 1975, Yale must end its thousand-man quota and instead accept eight hundred men and four hundred women, a two-to-one ratio.6 Rather than vote then and there, the committee decided to pause and make sure there were no objections from the three members who were absent or second thoughts by those who were there. They would meet again on May 26 and vote on their recommendation then.
In the meantime, a second issue burned in Wasserman’s chest: her own position and title. Back in March, when the topic of women’s careers arose at her Women’s Advisory Council, she told the sophomores and juniors seated around the table that “often, women simply are not considered for promotions, despite seniority, skill, and other qualifications they may have.”7 Wasserman knew well the sting of that experience herself, and by May, she had put up with her “special assistant” title and the minor role it implied for a year. It was time to send a memo to Brewster.
“Confidential,” Wasserman wrote at the top. “RE: Administrative Structures Related to Coeducation.”8 Wasserman’s timing was terrible. On the day she sent her memo, Brewster was in Washington, DC, with fifteen busloads of Yale students, lobbying Congress to end the Vietnam War.9 The adrenaline from May Day still lingered as well, and Brewster was basking in widespread praise for the way he had handled the protest.10 Elga Wasserman was about the last thing on his mind.
Wasserman continued writing: “As Special Assistant to the President, I was able to carry out initial planning for coeducation effectively.” But now that the initial administrative tasks were done, she observed that “it will be increasingly difficult to respond to [women’s] special needs without being directly, rather than peripherally, involved in some aspect of the university.” Wasserman knew exactly the position she wanted: associate provost, a role held by women at Wesleyan and Brown. Yale would simply be following its peers by placing a woman in a senior administrative role. “I believe that a position in the Provost’s Office would provide the best opportunity for influencing future policy,” she wrote. “An appointment in this office could also establish a significant precedent for the participation of women in policy making at Yale.”
Wasserman copied the memo to Sam Chauncey and then sent it off to Brewster. She had a meeting scheduled with Brewster two days later and hoped that when she walked out of Woodbridge Hall afterward, she would do so with a new position and title. Once again, however, Brewster denied Wasserman’s request.11 She would spend the second year of coeducation just like the first, as Brewster’s special assistant.
Two weeks later, the Coeducation Committee convened to vote on its year-end recommendation for the coeducation report. Wasserman began by sharing some news she had just learned at a meeting of the Council of Masters. Corporation member Jock Whitney had donated $15 million to build two new residential colleges for Yale, enough to house another six hundred students.12 Would that change the committee’s recommendation? The men and women seated around the table, however, were unmoved. Even in the best scenario, Yale’s current students would graduate long before the new housing was built. Correcting Yale’s unbalanced gender ratio was “urgent,” they agreed, and the recommendation stood: for the class of 1975, Yale should decrease the number of male freshmen to eight hundred in order to make room for more women. The vote was unanimous.13
Two days later, Wasserman forwarded the committee’s recommendation to Brewster.14 She was now openly opposing him and his first ground rule of coeducation—that Yale would not reduce the number of men just because it was accepting some women. The next move was Brewster’s. Wasserman, who had broken enough rules already, would wait to release the recommendation and the full report until Brewster responded. In the meantime, the Coeducation Committee’s rejection of his thousand male leaders sat like a time bomb on Brewster’s desk in Woodbridge Hall, awaiting the moment when it would go public.
* * *
Over the summer, the women students scattered. One taught swimming at a summer camp in New Hampshire to help pay her tuition. Another took a “mind-numbing” clerical position in suburban New York after she got turned down for a job scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins—girls just weren’t strong enough, the store manager told her.15 Betty Spahn had a secretarial job too, typing up bills in an office in Illinois. She hated it, but her parents had insisted she come home for the summer. That year at Yale—with the predatory dining hall manager and then Betty’s suspension and finally May Day—had just been too much for them.
Sisterhood member Kate Field was in Maine with a job as an electrician for a summer musical theater. She had thought that she might stay in New Haven, playing guitar in Kit McClure’s rock band and doing political work, but she quickly realized that she needed a break. May Day “had just been so crazy,” said Kate: the intensity of the crowds, the night she’d been knocked out by the tear gas canister, the morning she had been woken at five because the National Guard tanks rolling by on the street outside were causing her house to shake.16 Kate had worked theater tech at the Yale Dramat. That skill gave her a ticket to elsewhere.
Few of the women students were in touch with one another that summer. There was no social media, no email. Long-distance phone calls were expensive enough that one felt the cost mounting with every hurried minute. Whatever thinking the women students did about their first year at Yale, they did on their own. But many still reached the same conclusion. “Something had been missing,” said a freshman girl from Columbus, Ohio. “I missed having women friends.”17
Roommates Patty Mintz and Betsy Hartmann had been two of the lucky few who had ended their first year at Yale with a close female friendship. Yet like other Yale women, they spent their summer apart. Patty was in South Dakota, teaching summer school on a Lakota Sioux reservation. Betsy had a job in Seattle. Over the summer, as both girls tried to sort through the confusing experiences of that first year at Yale, the two weren’t in contact. But each realized that Yale had to change if it was going to be as good a college for women as it was for men. “Something needed to shift, something was wrong,” Patty decided.18 Out in Seattle, Betsy was thinking the same thing.
Back in May, the two had gone to a Sisterhood meeting together. Betsy had never really thought about the women’s movement until then, but over May Day weekend, a high school friend who was at Yale for the protest told her that she should look into it. “Betsy, you need to become a feminist,” he said. “My sister is really getting into this.”19
So Betsy had asked Patty to go to a Sisterhood meeting with her. The group met right in Vanderbilt Hall, where the two girls lived. At the meeting, Betsy found it powerful to be with other women students who, like her, were beginning to question the givens of Yale and “starting to feel ever more pissed off” at the way that women were treated. Betsy’s older sister had also become somewhat of a feminist, and that summer in Seattle, Betsy began reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It “was like lights going off in my head,” Betsy said. Suddenly all that she had experienced in her first year at Yale began to make sense.
While most Yale students left New Haven for the summer, there were some who stayed. Kit McClure was there, practicing with the rock band and attending the meetings of New Haven Women’s Liberation, whose discussions often included the ongoing Black Panther trial and the conditions faced by Connecticut’s women prisoners. Students on Phil and Lorna Sarrel’s Human Sexuality Committee were also in New Haven that summer, working on a new project for the fall. Up until then, the group had focused its efforts on the human sexuality course—collecting the anonymous questionnaires needed to enroll, taking care of the myriad details required for a class of 1,200 students, evaluating the class afterward, and making suggestions on how to improve it. The course’s enrollment was unprecedented at Yale, but the Human Sexuality Committee still asked: How can we reach more students?
At one of the meetings around the Sarrels’ dining room table, a new idea emerged: What if they wrote a book on human sexuality for Yale students? The need, students felt, was enormous.20 Students came to Yale with so much misinformation, yet there was no good book they could turn to. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex had barely been in the bookstores a year, and some of the “facts” it contained just weren’t true. Our Bodies Ourselves, the groundbreaking women’s health book, was still a stapled-together newsprint pamphlet that few students had even heard of. Making the content of the human sexuality course available to every Yale student would fill a real need. The Human Sexuality Committee had its summer project: it would write a booklet on sex to distribute to all Yale undergraduates. Just like the human sexuality course and the sex counseling service, no other college had anything like it.
Over the summer, the students worked on their book, researching and writing up drafts. The project was ambitious, but the committee had the funds to pay for it. The proceeds from the human sexuality course—1,200 students multiplied by the $5 fee—had brought in $6,000. In the fall, when students registered for classes, every Yale undergraduate would be able to get a free copy of their new booklet: Sex and the Yale Student.21
Phil Sarrel was the book’s medical consultant, but the editors were three students. The full team included Lorna Sarrel, six more students, and Associate Minister Phil Zaeder. The project “gave us a very good sense of purpose, and there was an element of pride in that,” said Debbie Bernick, one of the students on the team. “This information was new, and a little scary and experimental. It affected our feelings. It affected our relationships. It wasn’t just book learning.”22
By the time the first draft of Sex and the Yale Student was finished, the booklet was sixty-four pages long. It covered anatomy, birth control, pregnancy, and venereal disease. “It was solid information,” said Debbie.
Phil Sarrel had always been careful about keeping Yale’s top administrators fully informed about his work with Yale students.23 College administrations don’t like to be surprised, particularly with a topic as potentially volatile as sex education. Chief of Psychiatry Bob Arnstein saw the draft of the booklet first, and once it passed muster with him, three more administrators got copies: Elga Wasserman, Assistant Dean Elisabeth Thomas, and Dean of Undergraduates John Wilkinson.
Wasserman had been a supporter of the project from the start, and she kept her comments to minor edits: On page 7, “alot” should be replaced with “a lot.” On page 8, “irregardless” should be “regardless.” On page 10, “public” should be “pubic.”24 Elisabeth Thomas’s comments were more substantive. Next to a section on birth control, she wrote in the margin: “Seems to be addressed only to women.” But it was John Wilkinson who really pulled out the red pen.
Wilkinson was known as an ally of Yale women, but Sex and the Yale Student pushed him right to the edge. “What a word!!” he scribbled in his large, looping script after circling preorgasmic. “Is this necessary?” he scrawled in huge letters next to “All males at some time or another compare their penis size with other males.” By the time Wilkinson got to page 33—“Almost fifty cases of condom failure were treated last year”—all he could do was write, “Stop!!” But Wilkinson let the book through, as did Brewster, who also was initially shocked. Students needed good information on birth control and sex, and Yale had long stayed away from censorship. When students returned to Yale in September, Sex and the Yale Student would be waiting for them.25
* * *
As the students on the Human Sexuality Committee worked away on their booklet, Elga Wasserman was busy as well, and she had not backed off her new strategy of breaking rules. Handing Kingman Brewster a unanimous Coeducation Committee recommendation to reject his thousand male leaders was her first open challenge to the status quo. Before the summer was out, Wasserman threw down two more.
The Coeducation Committee had given Wasserman the go-ahead to raise the issue of women faculty in her report, but the way in which she decided to do so made no pretense at subtlety. The report’s appendix E consisted of only two charts, both displayed on the same page, and there was no getting around the story they told: the persistence over time of Yale’s preference for hiring men rather than women.26 Students and faculty may have sensed how few women professors Yale hired, but appendix E of Wasserman’s report displayed that problem for all to see. Over the last eight years, Yale had increased the total number of tenured professors from 223 to 430, yet in the same period, the number of tenured women had grown from 0 to 2.
Coeducation Committee Report, 1970, appendix E
Total Members of the Yale College Faculty, 1963–1970
| 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
All Faculty |
562 |
588 |
606 |
620 |
668 |
817 |
869 |
839 |
|
Tenured Faculty |
223 |
243 |
252 |
269 |
285 |
393 |
407 |
430 |
Women Members of the Yale College Faculty, 1963–1970
| 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
All Faculty |
24 |
25 |
26 |
32 |
32 |
48 |
52 |
43 |
|
Tenured Faculty |
0 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
3 |
2 |
The chart was not yet public. It was sitting on Brewster’s desk along with the recommendation on Yale’s admissions quotas. But like that recommendation, Wasserman’s chart violated the norm of keeping quiet about problems that Yale did not wish to address.
Wasserman took aim at one final target before the summer was out: Mory’s. The women law school students’ January sit-in had drawn attention to Yale’s habit of holding meetings at a facility that barred women from entering, but nothing had changed as a result. Not only did Yale departments continue to hold meetings at Mory’s, but Yale continued to pay the Mory’s bills afterward. When pushed on the issue, Brewster refused to take action. “Yale cannot legislate where members of the University community may eat, even when the cost of the meal may be properly charged to a University account,” he and the other university officers declared back in February.27 Wasserman’s Coeducation Committee discussed the problem at five separate meetings that spring and reached a unanimous conclusion: Yale was supporting discrimination against women.28
At first, Wasserman tried to address the matter discreetly. In March, she and Sam Chauncey met with Mory’s president Stanley Trotman to urge that Mory’s change its no-woman rule.29 In May, Chauncey sent a letter to Yale department chairmen and deans listing various lunch venues that allowed women to enter.30 Neither strategy worked. Yale men kept holding meetings at Mory’s, and at the end of May, Trotman advised Wasserman that the rules of the club were not changing.31 By June, Wasserman had had enough.
“Dear Faculty member,” she wrote. “It seems to me inappropriate to conduct university business in a facility from which some members of the university community are arbitrarily excluded.”32 Wasserman’s letter went on to discuss the impact on women of meetings at Mory’s and the fact that other Yale venues existed. And then Wasserman asked her assistant to send out her letter to every single faculty member at Yale.
Over the summer, she received a few letters back in support,33 but the reply she got from Professor George Pierson, the sole faculty member to have voted against coeducation, was almost too hot to touch. “I wonder whether it is altogether ‘appropriate’ for you to adopt some of the language of the more aggressive women of the Liberation persuasion,” scolded Pierson, who copied his letter to Sam Chauncey. “It will hardly, in any case, make for good feeling.”34
Wasserman may have been tempted to just crumple Pierson’s letter into a ball and toss it in the trash, but “Pierson” was an important name at Yale, chiseled along the top of Woodbridge Hall in large letters along with the names of other revered Yale men.35 Abraham Pierson was Yale’s first president, and George Pierson was his direct descendent. Wasserman wrote back to apologize: “If my tone seemed hasty or aggressive to you, I am sorry. I did not intend it to be either.”36 Yet Elga Wasserman did not back down. “I really do believe that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct its business in an all-male facility,” she told Pierson. The solution seemed obvious. If Yale men simply stopped patronizing Mory’s over their discriminatory policy, then Mory’s would have to treat women fairly or go bankrupt. But Yale men liked going to Mory’s, and while some of them boycotted, most didn’t. Yale’s famous Whiffenpoofs continued to sing at Mory’s every Monday. The sports team captains agreed to have their photos hung on the wall. Yale continued to pay the Mory’s bills. If women wanted to end their exclusion from Mory’s, they would need to find a different solution than relying on the help of Yale men.
* * *
By the end of July, Kit McClure had been playing trombone in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band for five months, and the band, if not exactly good yet, was definitely enthusiastic. It even had a sister band: the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band.37 Naomi Weisstein, one of the speakers at February’s Free Women Conference, had started the Chicago band that spring, and there was overlap between the two groups. Virginia Blaisdell in the New Haven band was one of Weisstein’s best friends. Susan Abod in the Chicago band was the sister of New Haven band member Jennifer Abod.
The mix of instruments in each band was eclectic to be sure. The roster included slide whistle, tambourine, French horn, drums, and trombone. When the Chicago group first started, it had eleven vocalists, only three of whom could carry a tune. Weisstein compared it to “a hippy version of the Mormon Tabernacle choir.”38 But no matter. With enough practice, they would soon sound as good as Janis Joplin, and in the meantime, they were all having fun.
At the end of July, however, the carefree nature of the New Haven band’s early practices was supplanted by something much closer to panic. The band had scheduled their first public performance, and the date was approaching rapidly.39 August marked the fifty-year anniversary of U.S. women winning the right to vote, and on August 26, women across the country would take part in demonstrations and marches to celebrate that anniversary and to protest ongoing discrimination. The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band would perform in New Haven as one of the day’s events.
The Women’s Strike for Equality, as the August 26 protest was called, was part of a surge of attention to women’s rights.40 The House of Representatives had just begun debate on the Equal Rights Amendment, which proposed banning discrimination on the basis of gender. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was running for president as the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination and the first black candidate for president in either major party. And in Congress, Edith Green was doing her best to advance equal opportunity for women.41
Green was one of ten women in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. She had represented Oregon’s third congressional district, Portland, for the past fifteen years, and she chaired the House Special Subcommittee on Education. The chairmanship gave Green the power to sponsor legislation and hold hearings, and on July 31, Green concluded seven days of hearings on discrimination against women in America’s schools and colleges. “Let us not deceive ourselves,” she told those in the hearing room. “Our educational institutions have proven to be no bastions of democracy.”42
By the late 1960s, U.S. colleges and universities were receiving millions in federal dollars for research, financial aid, tuition grants for veterans, and support services for low-income students.43 Yet at the same time, they continued discriminating against women, who had lower pay scales than men, fewer job opportunities, worse odds of being admitted as students, and smaller financial aid awards. “Coeducational institutions that receive federal funds are no more justified in discriminating against women than against minority groups,” Green declared, and her hearings that summer were the first step to ending that injustice.44 By the time they concluded, Green’s hearings had produced 1,261 pages of testimony on the inequity faced by women in U.S. colleges and universities.45 Nothing like it had ever before been assembled. With this evidence in hand, Green and her colleague Patsy Mink began to draft legislation that would deny federal dollars to colleges and universities that discriminated against women.
Women in the know were following Green’s progress, but for the most part, her work stayed fairly quiet. No good would come from drumming up opposition unnecessarily, Green warned her supporters. There was no missing the August 26 Women’s Strike for Equality, however.46 It was the largest women’s protest since the suffrage movement. Women in forty-two states marched and demonstrated and made their voices heard. In New York City, ten thousand women, both black and white, marched arm-in-arm down Fifth Avenue. “At last, we have a movement,” Kate Millett told the Bryant Park crowd in the rally that followed.47
In New Haven, events included workshops and films and rap sessions on the New Haven Green, but the day’s most exciting event, at least for Kit McClure, was the debut of the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. For their performance that night, the band had rented space at Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) house, the fraternity where George W. Bush had once been president. Bush would not have been allowed into DKE house that night, though. The concert’s audience was restricted to women. While Kit may have been nervous about the band’s first performance, the crowd loved what they heard. At the end of the first set, the audience stood and applauded, and a few people held up a ten-foot long banner: “A Standing Ovulation for Our Sisters.”48
Five days later, the weekly issue of Time magazine devoted its cover story to the women’s movement. There on the front cover was a portrait of Kate Millett, who glowered out from the newsstands with her sleeves rolled up. “Who’s come a long way, baby?” Time asked, mimicking a Virginia Slims cigarette commercial.49 And with that question, the second year of coeducation at Yale began.