As the Yale Corporation met in New Haven that December and decided once again to leave Yale’s gender quotas unchanged, a fundamental shift was occurring in Washington, DC. For the first time, the federal government halted payment on a university contract because of sex discrimination.1 Unless the University of Michigan stopped blocking women from applying for jobs reserved for men, stopped underpaying their women employees, and stopped the discrimination that kept women to just 4 percent of its full professors, Michigan would lose $4 million in federal funding.
The day after the Michigan news hit the press, Yale assistant professor Charlotte Morse bumped into her colleague Bart Giamatti in a New Haven coffee shop. “What the hell difference would it make to Yale if the feds cut off our funding?” she asked. Giamatti looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “About 33 percent of the annual operating budget.”2
No laws yet barred colleges and universities from discriminating against women. Instead, an executive order signed by former president Lyndon Johnson had blocked Michigan’s money. Executive Order 11246 had been on the books since 1965, but its use to fight gender discrimination was new.3 The order had initially barred discrimination by federal contractors on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin—but not gender. Johnson amended it in 1967 to add women, but even then the order sat unused for that purpose until Bernice Sandler read about it in 1969.4
Sandler held a PhD from the University of Maryland and had been told a few months earlier that she was unsuited for any of the seven open positions in her department because she “came on too strong for a woman.”5 After two more job rejections—the first because the interviewer said he never hired women, the second because Sandler was “not really a professional” but “just a housewife”—Sandler began researching to see what the law had to say about how she was treated.6 Not much, it turned out, but one afternoon, while reading about the efforts of black Americans to end public school segregation, Sandler came across Executive Order 11246 in a footnote and shrieked out loud at the discovery. Here was the tool that women could use to gain equity in U.S. colleges.
By December 1970, when the University of Michigan penalty was announced, Sandler had used Executive Order 11246 to help women file sex discrimination complaints at more than two hundred U.S. campuses.7 Yale was not yet on the list, but that was about to change. On January 29, 1971, U.S. secretary of labor James Hodgson received two letters from Yale, one from women clerical workers and the other from women faculty and administrators.8 Both letters alleged rampant gender discrimination and requested an immediate federal investigation. Two days later, Hodgson was copied on a third complaint against Yale, this one from Sandler herself.
Kingman Brewster may have delayed Wasserman’s coeducation report long enough the previous year that its challenge to Yale’s thousand-man quota was ignored, but the report also contained a dozen pages of data on the status of women at Yale, and Bernice Sandler had a copy. Sandler knew Elga Wasserman.9 They both were part of a group that worked behind the scenes with Congresswoman Edith Green to bring change on college campuses for women, and Wasserman’s report contained exactly what Sandler needed to back the sex discrimination complaint filed by Yale women: data. Sandler’s letter took its statistics right from Wasserman’s appendix E: Yale women faculty. “Out of a faculty of 839, only TWO women have tenure,” Sandler wrote.10 It was a fact that tended to get people’s attention.
Sandler’s charges against Yale did not stop with faculty hiring. Yale discriminated against women in admissions decisions, in awarding financial aid, and in faculty salaries and promotions, Sandler wrote. And then she sent her letter to more than fifty Washington officials, including the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Elliot Richardson. HEW has since been disbanded, its functions divided between two new federal agencies, but at the time, few college presidents did not know those initials. HEW was the agency that enforced Executive Order 11246.
Filing the discrimination complaint was “exciting,” said Yale graduate student Margie Ferguson, whose research helped bolster the findings. “There was a sense that the federal government was going to be a really important partner.”11 Even Brewster’s top legal adviser observed that “a prod from Uncle Sam” might move Yale toward change.12 Sandler’s letter and the two from Yale women had all made the same request: put any new federal contracts with Yale on hold until all discrimination against women was corrected. That should get Brewster’s attention.
Meanwhile, up in New Haven, the freshmen in the class of 1974 had settled in to their lives as Yale students. And once they did, these new reinforcements were asking the same question that Yale students had posed for over a year now: Is this what Yale thinks coeducation looks like? Many of the freshmen girls had felt the same shock on arrival as did the first women undergraduates the year before. Linden Havemeyer had come to Yale from all-girls Concord Academy. She grew up in a family of six girls. “Everything about entering Yale was overwhelming,” said Linden. “Suddenly, I was not only at a coed institution, but I was outnumbered four or five to one.”13 Yet despite students’ dismay at Yale’s gender ratio, progress toward increasing the numbers of women was stalled right where it had been the previous year.
No ground had yet been broken on Yale’s new student housing. Brewster had not even named a committee to consider all the issues that he’d placed in line ahead of Yale women, and the groups that had pushed him to increase women’s numbers were not quite as strong as they had been. The Coeducation Committee had retreated after the Corporation’s December rejection of its recommendation, while Wasserman seemed unable to make progress on Yale’s gender quotas whether she acted as a team player or provocateur. The Sisterhood was increasingly focused on other issues, from abortion rights to women’s studies to the HEW sex discrimination complaint against Yale. A new group, and new energy, was needed if Yale was to adopt sex-blind admissions any time in the foreseeable future.
Alec Haverstick, one of the freshmen in the class of 1974, might have seemed an unlikely candidate for that role.14 The status quo had worked pretty well for him so far. Alec grew up on Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side and attended St. Paul’s, one of the nation’s most elite boys’ boarding schools. He looked just like the preppy guy he was. Yes, his dark hair almost reached down to his shoulders, but Alec still wore Levi’s and Topsiders and cleaned up well in his sport jacket and khakis. His smile displayed perfect teeth. Yet there were things about Alec that did not show up in the St. Paul’s School yearbook.
His mother, a single parent, was “pretty much . . . a women’s libber,” said Alec, and she was one of the trustees at Barnard College, where she was working on her doctorate.15 Women faculty from Barnard would come down to the Haversticks’ East 70th Street apartment to talk. Alec was there once when Kate Millett, who taught at Barnard, walked in, and his education in how women saw the world continued at Yale.
A few weeks after Alec arrived there, he had dinner with a group of women students who had all gone to Concord Academy, the girls’ boarding school that Linden Havemeyer had attended. The Yale sophomores from the academy invited Linden and the other Concord Academy freshmen to join them for dinner in Yale’s Freshman Commons, and Alec came along too. Alec knew the Concord Academy girls from the three weeks he had lived there as a high school exchange student. When the sophomores at the dinner began explaining to the others what that first year at Yale had been like, their report was not what Alec expected.
“The bitterness oozing out of this conversation . . . was extraordinary,” he said. “It was anger personified. It was just coming out and out.” Alec was hurt to hear the women’s assumption that men were all chauvinists who saw women as inferiors. “I don’t feel that way,” said Alec. But if that was how things were at Yale, he asked, then what was the solution? “Numbers,” said the women. “Numbers?” asked Alec. The sophomore women responded. “Until there are more of us, we’re always going to be treated like fourth-class citizens.”
* * *
The antiwar movement had been dormant for months, but in February, it reemerged with vigor following news of the U.S. invasion of Laos.16 Protests erupted at campuses all over the country: Kansas State, Notre Dame, and the University of Alabama, of Nebraska, of Oklahoma. On February 22, Yale’s Woolsey Hall filled with 2,500 students who had come for an antiwar rally. The speeches that night lasted nearly four hours, but the one that drew the most applause was that of a twenty-seven-year-old Yale graduate who had fought in the war and was back now, a guy named John Kerry. Vietnam Veterans against the War was planning a massive protest in April, Kerry told the students before him. He hoped Yale students would support the veterans’ efforts.
As before, Yale women were involved in the antiwar activism, but their protest against sex discrimination did not stop.17 A year had now passed since the maître d’ of Mory’s had told the women law school students to leave, and the ranks of those who sought to change the club’s men-only policy had grown larger. In October, a dozen members of New Haven Women’s Liberation had picketed in front of Mory’s for a week.18 In November, the newly appointed dean of Yale Law School, Abe Goldstein, informed Mory’s that any account Mory’s was carrying in the name of the law school should be discontinued immediately.19 Until women were admitted to Mory’s on the same basis as men, Yale Law School was no longer a customer.
Yale economics PhD student Heidi Hartmann had been part of the weeklong picketing of Mory’s in October. Every time a Yale professor or faculty member crossed the picket line to enter Mory’s, a woman protester would walk up and ask him, “Are you a racist and a sexist or just a sexist?”20 Like Kingman Brewster, many of the men who frequented Mory’s boycotted clubs that discriminated against blacks. It angered the women that these men would not find discrimination against women equally objectionable. As Heidi was standing in the picket line at Mory’s, she spotted one of her professors, James Tobin, pacing back and forth across the street. Tobin was watching the protesters and clearly holding an internal debate over whether to stand up the men he was supposed to be meeting at Mory’s or walk through the picket line to join them. He decided on the latter, and as he did so, Heidi walked up and asked him the same question the women were asking every man who passed by them: “Are you a racist and a sexist or just a sexist?”
Tobin, troubled, entered Mory’s. Tobin was one of the most distinguished economics professors at Yale and would go on to win the Nobel Prize, but he was also well known for his integrity and commitment to racial justice. “He was a highly ethical person,” said graduate student Janet Yellen, who was Tobin’s advisee and a hot-shot economics student, well known by the younger students like Heidi for her reputation for brilliance.21 A few weeks later, Heidi received a long, heartfelt letter from James Tobin, explaining why he was neither a sexist nor a racist.
In February, however, women doctoral students in the economics department learned that some of their professors were still meeting at Mory’s, and they responded by sending a letter to the entire economics faculty. “We cannot accept the exclusion of women from the channels of communication and power which such a club represents,” the women wrote, detailing the impact on women of men’s continued patronage of Mory’s.22 It took courage to sign your name to that letter. The men who received it would soon be deciding which students to recommend for faculty positions. But at the bottom were the signatures of every female doctoral student in the economics department, thirteen in all, including twenty-four-year-old Janet Yellen.
A few days later, Mory’s received word that the Yale Economics Department would no longer be conducting business there either.23
* * *
Yale was offering four different women’s studies courses that semester, double the number of the previous spring: Women in the U.S. Economy, Images of Women in Literature, Psychological Perspectives on Women, and Women and the Law.24 The first three were residential college seminars, but the last course was taught at the law school to 147 students: 126 men and 21 women. Betty Spahn and a group of Sisterhood women were there every week, and Connie Royster signed up for it too.
Connie loved that class. She found the two law students who taught it, Gail Falk and Ann Hill, inspiring, and she liked that the class supported the thinking she had been doing about law and feminism without being on the “raising flags and marching” side of activism.25 Instead, Women and the Law was the “academically rigorous, thoughtful yet passionate and compassionate side of the women’s struggle,” said Connie. Betty might be comfortable out marching, but for Connie, the law school students’ approach to change was where she best fit. The paper Connie wrote for the class explored legal strategies to force fair representation for women in the media. It received Honors, the highest mark at Yale.
When they weren’t teaching Yale undergraduates or finishing their coursework at Yale Law School, Gail Falk and Ann Hill were involved in another feminist initiative: Women v. Connecticut, which sought to overturn Connecticut’s antiabortion law.26 Many women at Yale had seen the cost of that law when a classmate made a mistake and got pregnant. In Betty and Connie’s first year, a woman in their dorm started hemorrhaging one night after going through an illegal abortion. The girl’s roommate had pounded on their door. “Call the police! Call the police! She’s bleeding to death!”27 An ambulance arrived, and the student was saved, but she was never able to bear her own children afterward.
Some students were able to obtain safe abortions performed by a doctor. In the first three years of coeducation, about twenty undergraduates did so through the Yale Health Center, and after New York State passed its abortion law in April 1970, pregnant women could make the trip there.28 Sometimes, however, Yale women who got pregnant just dropped out. “It was like women, whether in high school or college, just faded away once they became pregnant,” said a Yale sophomore who learned only later why one of her classmates had left.29
The effort to make safe and legal abortions possible in Connecticut had begun the previous year, and the goal of the dozen New Haven women behind Women v. Connecticut reached even further than changing state law. Up until that point, the conversations about abortion law in Connecticut had all been conversations among men. The judges were men. The legislators, lawyers, and expert witnesses were men. Women v. Connecticut set out to change that. Women “were the experts about the effects of the abortion laws,” they believed, and women would be the plaintiffs, witnesses, and lawyers.30 At a time when only 4 percent of U.S. lawyers and 1 percent of judges were women, the women’s presence in the courtroom alone counted as rebellion.31
The strategy was to have not just a few women plaintiffs but dozens and dozens of women. That organizing effort could bring women together, and for each woman plaintiff, the mere act of signing her name to the plaintiff card was powerful. That’s where the Sisterhood got involved. To qualify as a plaintiff, women needed only to live in Connecticut, be of childbearing age, and state that they did not wish to bear a child at that time. Sisterhood members signed on as plaintiffs and then recruited other women to join them.32 Some stood out in their residential college courtyards with a pile of Women v. Connecticut’s bright-yellow pamphlets and spoke with women who passed by about the lawsuit.
Others did speaking engagements arranged by the Yale Law School women. Judy Berkan and Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt drove down to Stanford and met in a church there with twenty white suburban women who had agreed to come hear them speak. Betty Spahn did radio and TV interviews. She played well in the Connecticut media—a nice Midwestern girl, one of the first coeds at Yale, and well-spoken.
The efforts of the Sisterhood and others succeeded. Plaintiffs signed on. Momentum built. On March 2, Yale Law School graduate Katie Roraback, the lawyer who was defending Ericka Huggins in the ongoing Black Panther trial, filed suit against the state of Connecticut in U.S. district court, charging that the state’s antiabortion law was unconstitutional. By the time Roraback filed Abele v. Markle, as the Women v. Connecticut suit became formally called, the case had 858 women plaintiffs.33
The Sisterhood was involved in other efforts as well, and its presence at Yale that spring was made all the more prominent by the new Women’s Center that had opened in Durfee Hall, one door down from the student mailroom.34 The Women’s Center was a space where women students “could just drop in and talk to each other, and leave some reading material, and not have to be with the men all the time,” said Betty.35 Yale had not provided the Durfee Hall space to the women without a tussle. A few of the Sisterhood members had laid claim to it over May Day, and Yale had not taken kindly to their appropriation of the two unused rooms. Elga Wasserman and Undergraduate Dean John Wilkinson, however, spoke up for the girls, and Yale backed off its talk of eviction.
The Yale Women’s Center was nothing fancy. “Scruffy” was a little more like it.36 But it was a comfortable space, with some beat-up old chairs and colorful paint. There were coffee and doughnuts and feminist magazines spread on the table. “We hope that everyone will see it as a place they can be comfortable with other women,” Sisterhood member Barbara Deinhardt told the Yale Daily News. The center welcomed all Yale women, she said, no matter their politics.37
In March, the Women’s Center hosted a special visitor. Kate Millett was back in New Haven. “Ask yourselves the question,” she told the room full of women. “Are you in this for solace, or are you in this for change?”38 Consciousness-raising could only go so far. For many in the room, Millett’s question felt like a turning point. The answer was obvious. They were in it for change.
* * *
Kit McClure was not involved with the Sisterhood’s efforts to get plaintiffs for the abortion lawsuit or with its work to set up the Yale Women’s Center. By the second year of coeducation, Kit was not involved in the Sisterhood at all. She and Betty Spahn never talked about it. Kit just “sort of disappeared,” said Betty.39 But if the two had spoken, Kit could have explained in just a few words: “I had other things to do.”40 Kit was working on her cell fusion experiments in Kline Biology Tower and loading her schedule with music courses. She was an active member of New Haven Women’s Liberation. And buoyed by the rock band’s August performance, she was spending more time than ever practicing her trombone and doing musical arrangements for the band.
By the second year of coeducation, Kit barely resembled the freshman girl with bright-red, shoulder-length hair who had arrived at Yale carrying a trombone. She had cut all her hair off, for one thing, and now kept it cropped short above her ears. She wore dangly hoop earrings and wire-rim glasses, and she had long ago broken up with her freshman-year boyfriend. Kit was dating women now. Some of the radical lesbians at the Free Women Conference had made an impact on Kit, and she was finding it more and more contradictory to put all her energy into the women’s movement “and then relate to a man.” Before freshman year was out, Kit made a conscious decision to change her sexuality. “It was hard at first,” she said, “but I tried it, and I liked it.”41
Kit’s days were filled with her political work and Yale academics, but at the center was the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, now almost one year old. Practice and concert, concert and practice—there was always something going on. Mostly the band played at events around Yale and for dance parties held by New Haven Women’s Liberation.42 They played at other colleges too, and one afternoon, they loaded up their instruments into band member Virginia Blaisdell’s bright-yellow Volkswagen Beetle and drove an hour east to Niantic. The warden at the state women’s prison had agreed to let them perform.
Kit and the band were taken to a large room where two hundred women prisoners, including the four women Black Panthers still on trial, were seated in rows on folding chairs. Ericka Huggins’s daughter was two years old by then. The women prisoners were not allowed to dance, but the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band performed with its usual exuberance and mix of instruments: bass, drums, flute, sax, trombone, tambourine, French horn, and guitar. The band played every song it knew, and since it did not know very many, it supplemented the performance with feminist raps the band members had composed for the occasion. When it came time for the last song, though, the band just kept on playing, improvising and tossing the melody back and forth from one musician to another in one long, glorious jam session.
A few of the women prisoners leapt out into the aisle by their folding chairs and started dancing. The guards rushed over to tell them to sit down, but women jumped up and started dancing on the other side of the room. “Soon there were more dancers than guards,” said Virginia Blaisdell, and as the band continued to play, the numbers kept growing.43 Finally, the prison matron rushed up to the makeshift stage. “You must stop now,” she said to the band, and with the end of the music, the room calmed.44 Afterward, the band received a letter of thanks from Ericka Huggins. She was grateful, she told them, to have had the experience of looking across at her fellow women prisoners and “watching faces smile, really smile for the first time in months.”45
Kate Field was not part of the Niantic Women’s Prison concert. She wished it were otherwise, but when Kate returned to Yale for her sophomore year, she found that the band had been practicing all summer while she was in Maine, and another woman guitar player had taken her place. Kate was still in the Sisterhood, though, and like many Sisterhood members, she was now living off campus. Kate and one of her freshman-year roommates had moved into a three-story house in New Haven with several philosophy professors and graduate students whom Kate had met when she coordinated the peace marshals over May Day. Kate had a room on the ground floor.
Kate’s second year at Yale had been going well. No more poetry professors had asked her to go for a walk in the Grove Street Cemetery and then made a pass at her. The frenzied work leading up to May Day was behind her. She liked her housemates and living off campus. Late one night, however, when Kate was asleep in her bed, a man with a knife broke into the house and entered her room. He was wearing a ski mask. If she screamed, he said, he would kill her. He raped her in her bed.
After the rapist was gone, in the terrible hubbub that followed, someone called the master of Kate’s residential college at Yale, and he arrived at the house with some whiskey. “He was just so kind,” said Kate. Everyone was “amazingly kind.”46 Yet that could not erase what had happened.
Kate was taken off to the hospital, where they refused to examine her without parental consent. Kate was damned if she was going to wake her parents up at four thirty in the morning and tell them she had just been raped. “Yale Health Service has permission to treat me,” she told the friends who had come with her, and so Kate was put back in the car without having been seen by a doctor and driven to the Yale Health Service.
Kate reported the crime to New Haven police, who came to the house and saw signs of the break-in. Stereos and other goods had been stolen. They believed Kate about the rape once they saw the other evidence, but they did not want to believe that her assailant was white. “How do you know?” they asked, since she had told them about the ski mask. “He had a New Haven accent,” Kate answered. White men from New Haven had a certain way of speaking, black men another way entirely. “It was a white man,” said Kate. But the police “were put out. They were offended.” It was simpler to believe that the rapist was black.
Kate’s rape would have been hard enough if it had ended that night, but it didn’t. She got pregnant. She had to go to New York to get an abortion, since abortion was still illegal in Connecticut. Kate had arrived at Yale as a freshman proud of the poetry prize she had won and with dreams of becoming a writer. Now “nobody knew what to do with me,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with me.” And so, like Christa Hansen, she dropped out of Yale.
* * *
On April 16, two federal investigators arrived in New Haven to meet with Yale women about their sex discrimination complaint against Yale.47 The Sisterhood was there. Over the previous two days, Sisterhood members had stood outside residential college dining halls at mealtime, collecting signatures for a petition that called on Yale to “form a strong affirmative action program for the total elimination of all discriminatory practices in education and employment.”48 By the time the girls presented the petition to HEW, 1,973 students had signed it.49 The Sisterhood left a copy in Woodbridge Hall for Kingman Brewster, although few still believed Brewster’s September 1969 pledge that he would take student petitions seriously.
The HEW investigators met with representatives from five women’s groups at Yale: the Sisterhood, the Graduate Alliance, Yale Law Women, the Yale Faculty and Professional Women’s Forum, and the Yale Non-Faculty Action Committee. The agenda covered multiple types of sex discrimination at Yale, including the gender quotas in admissions and a topic that had never come up before in an HEW investigation: sexual harassment. It was “a new idea” to the HEW team, who said it had never heard the term sexual harassment before.50 The team promised to look into it when it got back to Washington.
Meanwhile, over in Saybrook College, Denise Maillet had found her own path to recovery from the sexual harassment and assault she experienced in her first year at Yale. After being harassed by the professor who phoned her at night to ask how tight her nightgown was and the attempted rape by the administrator in his office decorated with photos of his wife and children, Denise began attending a woman’s therapy group. Most of the other women there were Yale graduate students. Like Denise, none had reported what had happened to them. They all “had the feeling that nobody would do anything.”51 But within the group’s weekly sessions, they shared their experiences of being assaulted. Those other women gave Denise a safe space to talk about what had happened to her, and their accounts “sort of normalized the experience,” she said.
Denise spent the summer after her first year at Yale home in Puerto Rico, and then she returned to New Haven. She kept her job as a waitress at the various event banquets Yale hosted. She liked the financial independence the job gave her, and she liked the women she worked with, mostly townies from New Haven. Denise felt comfortable with these women workers. Yale was “somehow a little more foreign” to her than they were. Once Denise turned twenty-one, she also began bartending at Yale events. The job was easier than waitressing—no heavy trays of food to carry up and down stairs—and it paid a lot better. Yale normally reserved the bartending jobs for men, but the woman who screened the applications had read Denise’s too quickly and thought that her name was “Dennis.” When Denise showed up for work, the woman was appalled, but the standard excuse to turn away women did not work with Denise. You could hardly say she lacked the strength for the job since she had done all that waitressing and was taller than most of the men.
Other aspects of Denise’s life were going better as well. She never had another professor sexually harass her. She got off the committee with the administrator. And during the fall seminar, she met a guy named Elliott. By spring, they were dating. Once Denise and Elliott started getting serious, Denise made an appointment with Phil and Lorna Sarrel.
By the spring of 1971, the Sarrels had been running Yale’s Sex Counseling Service for nearly two years, and six hundred of Yale’s eight hundred women undergraduates, 75 percent, had been to see them.52 The Sarrels “were wonderful,” said sophomore Becky Newman.53 “They were like house parents.” Becky would climb the stairs to the Sarrels’ third-floor office at the Yale Health Service, and the Sarrels would check in on both her and the women in her circle of friends. “How’s Abby doing? How’s Joan?” When one of Becky’s friends told the Sarrels that her boyfriend wanted to get married, they told her, “You know, marriage is a wonderful thing—at the right time. Why don’t you go away and think about it and then come back and talk to us in a couple days?” Becky’s friend credited the Sarrels with saving her from a terrible early marriage. Once she thought about her boyfriend’s proposal, she realized she did not want to marry him at all.
When students sought birth control, the Sarrels hoped to see the couple together, but Yale men were far more reluctant to visit than Yale women, and only 150, less than 4 percent, had met with the Sarrels so far. Denise did not realize that most women at Yale went solo to the sex counseling service, and she did as suggested and brought Elliott with her. The visit went well. Denise and Elliott both felt comfortable with Phil and Lorna Sarrel. Afterward, Denise continued to visit, and her letters home to Puerto Rico would often say, “Oh, I went to see Dr. Sarrel again.”54 Like other students, she found the adult support and mentorship she needed in Phil and Lorna Sarrel, and she and Elliott eventually became discussion group leaders in the Sarrel’s Human Sexuality course.
The Sarrels had another new couple come see them that year, freshman Alec Haverstick and his girlfriend, Linden Havemeyer.55 Like Denise, Linden felt grateful for the Sarrels’ presence at Yale, and she continued to go see them on her own. Alec also kept up his connection with Phil and Lorna Sarrel. They “were so together and so interesting and so nonjudgmental,” said Alec. “They were real outside-the-box thinkers.”56 Phil Sarrel was equally impressed with Alec, and that winter, he phoned Alec with a request: “Will you join the Human Sexuality Committee?” Sarrel asked Linden to join too. She was happy to do so, since the Sarrels had been so helpful to her.
By spring, Alec and Linden were a part of the dozen students who formed the core of the Human Sexuality Committee. The group worked on running and improving the human sexuality class, which was offered again that year, and it was revising Sex and the Yale Student for distribution the following fall. The work gave them a front-row seat to some of the problems caused by Yale’s gender imbalance, although the Human Sexuality Committee had not yet been involved in any of the activism to end Yale’s gender quotas. By the following fall, that would change.
* * *
Through the spring of 1971, Yale had been engaged in increasingly contentious negotiations with Local 35, the union that represented its blue-collar workers. The union asked for higher wages and better fringe benefits. Yale refused, and when the contract expired on May 1, Yale’s 1,100 dining hall and maintenance workers went on strike.57 Students boycotted their classes in support of the strikers; Denise Maillet stood beside her waitressing coworkers in the picket line. The dining halls closed. There was no hot water in the showers. Trash pickup stopped, and bags of garbage piled up on the sidewalks. Yale issued a daily $3.35 rebate for food, and students bought groceries and cooked on hot plates in their rooms or lived off of tuna grinders from Yorkside Pizza.
In the midst of it all, the Black Panther trials finally ended.58 The charges against Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were dropped. Seale’s jury was stuck at 11 to 1 for acquittal, Huggins’s at 10 to 2, and when neither jury could reach a verdict, the judge declared a mistrial and then dismissed the charges entirely, stating that it would be impossible to find new jurors who were impartial. By that point, however, many students had already left Yale, given the chaos from the strike. Like the previous year, the campus scattered early.
Shirley Daniels went home to Boston for the summer. Her father, who had been so proud when she got into Yale, was sick with lung cancer. But other women students stayed on in New Haven. Elga Wasserman hired five of them—Judy Berkan, Barbara Deinhardt, Connie Royster, Betty Spahn, and one more Sisterhood member—using some of the Sue Hilles grant money and some funding thrown in by Sam Chauncey.59 For the first time, she had something that resembled a staff, even if it was only five undergraduates on summer stipends.
The second year of coeducation had been rough on Wasserman. All year, she would learn about meetings that had been held about policy affecting Yale women, meetings to which Wasserman was never invited. Frustrated, she met with Brewster in March and then followed up with a letter. “Without participation at the policymaking level, I cannot be effective in improving coeducation at Yale,” she wrote.60 “If, as you indicate, you want me to continue to share responsibility for women at Yale, I will need your active backing.”
Little changed. In May, Wasserman wrote Brewster again. “I continue to feel a lack of day-to-day contact with individuals involved in policy making and implementation as well as a need for more clear-cut agreement concerning my specific responsibilities. Can we discuss these issues soon?”61 The discussion that followed was predictable. Wasserman would spend the third year of coeducation the way she had spent the first two, as Brewster’s special assistant.
The summer, at least, went well. Students and faculty had been pressing to end the Yale Corporation’s insularity since the spring of 1969, and Yale’s top rivals were changing with the times.62 Harvard had appointed the first woman to its Board of Overseers in 1970, and in the spring of 1971, Princeton was poised to appoint its first two women trustees. When four slots became open on the Corporation in June, Yale could no longer dodge the calls for diversity, and the university appointed its first women trustees: civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman and University of Chicago professor Hanna Gray. The third slot went to a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard Law School assistant professor with shaggy brown hair and long sideburns named Lance Liebman. For the fourth, the Corporation chose a man who seemed more in the mold of Yale’s traditional appointments: William Beinecke, class of 1936, whose father and two uncles had donated the money for the Beinecke Rare Book Library.63 Yet even Beinecke brought a new perspective. His daughter Frances had just graduated as a member of the class of 1971. The next time the matter of Yale’s gender quotas came before the Corporation, at least four of the trustees might see things differently from those who had now voted twice to support the status quo at Yale.
In addition to the appointment of women trustees, Wasserman was pleased by the progress that the five women students she had hired were making.64 They created SHE, a resource booklet provided to every Yale woman, and held a fund-raiser for the Women’s Center. They worked with faculty member Cynthia Russett to create Yale’s first course on women’s history and contributed bibliographies from Yale’s women’s studies courses to the National Women’s Studies Clearinghouse. They produced a critique of the ways that Yale’s male-focused recruiting materials discouraged women from even applying. They wrote a welcome letter to entering freshmen women, the class of 1975, and organized three fall gatherings of female freshmen and upperclassmen to help ease the new students’ transition.
As one of the members of Wasserman’s team, Betty Spahn focused her efforts on the women’s history course. It was hard to find any history material on women, and Betty spent hours doing research. One evening in Sterling Library, she discovered the writings of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the women’s rights movement in the late 1800s. It “was like she was speaking to me across the ages,” said Betty. “No longer was I just weird. I was part of a tradition.”65 After that, Betty read everything she could find that Stanton had written as well as works written by Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass. Betty’s hours in Sterling that summer were an “unearthing of all this history that had always been there, just waiting to be reclaimed and brought into the sunlight again. It was wonderful. It was transformative. It was liberating.”
Betty was working three jobs that summer to earn enough money to pay for her Yale senior year: her midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift at the post office, a day job at the New Haven Head Start program, and her evening and weekend position as one of Wasserman’s five summer interns, for which Wasserman paid a stipend. Connie Royster was working hard too. She was trying to earn enough money to finance a trip to Ghana and Nigeria at the end of the summer so she could conduct research for her Yale senior thesis on African art. Connie had obtained a partial fellowship for the trip, but it was not enough money, and so she patched it together with the stipend from Wasserman, money she made working at Yale alumni reunions, and a small grant from Undergraduate Dean John Wilkinson. In August, Connie boarded a plane for Ghana.
Meanwhile, Elga Wasserman was still in New Haven. She closed the summer by issuing her annual coeducation report. Anger leaked out at the edges. The report protested the small percentage of women students and railed against the continued lack of women faculty. “Many students never meet a woman faculty member during their time at Yale,” Wasserman wrote,66 and in an interview later, she was even more pointed: “How could you have an education if the message out there is, ‘You’re going to be taught by men because women aren’t capable of being professors’? What kind of education is that?”67
Mory’s made Wasserman’s coeducation report also. There had been progress that summer. In July, Kathryn Emmett of the Yale Law class of 1970 filed a petition with the Connecticut State Liquor Commission, challenging the renewal of Mory’s liquor license.68 It was a brilliant move. Mory’s brought in $10,000 a month from alcohol sales; losing that income would cripple it.69 Emmett argued that state law required agencies to consider discrimination when issuing licenses. And as Emmett worked to disable Yale’s practice of holding meetings in men-only facilities, Wasserman used her coeducation report to lambast Yale’s continued patronage of men-only Mory’s one more time. Mory’s, she wrote, “symboliz[es] Yale’s pervasive maleness and its lack of concern for women members of the Yale community.”70 And with that verdict, the second year of coeducation ended.