"Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation

by Nancy Weiss Malkiel

Overview

A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed

As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men.

In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male.

Drawing on unprecedented archival research, “Keep the Damned Women Out” is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691181110
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Series:	The William G. Bowen Series , #102
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	688
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Nancy Weiss Malkiel is professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, where she was the longest-serving dean of the college.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xxiii

Introduction

1 Setting the Stage: The Turbulent 1960s 3

Part I The Ivy League: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

2 Harvard-Radcliffe:“To Be Accepted by the Old and Beloved University” 31

3 Yale: “Girls Are People, Just Like You and Me” 54

4 Princeton: “Coeducation Is Inevitable” 81

5 Princeton: “A Penetrating Analysis of Far-Reaching Significance” 110

6 Yale: “Treat Yale as You Would a Good Woman” 136

7 Princeton: “The Admission of Women Will Make Princeton a Better University” 166

8 Harvard-Radcliffe: Negotiating the “Non-Merger Merger” 195

9 Princeton: “I Felt I Was in a Foreign Country” 214

10 Harvard-Radcliffe: Playing in the “Big Yard” with the Boys 245

11 Yale: Yale Is “Not Yet Coeducational” 268

12 Princeton: “We’re All Coeds Now” 288

Part II The Seven Sisters: Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley

13 Vassar: “Separate Education for Women Has No Future” 309

14 Vassar: “Vassar for Men?” 328

15 Smith: “A Looming Problem Which Is Going to Have to Be Faced” 351

16 Smith: “Recommitting to Its Original, Pioneering Purpose” 371

17 Wellesley: “Should Wellesley Jump on the Bandwagon?” 390

18 Wellesley: “Having the Courage to Remain a Women’s College” 412

Part III Revisiting the Ivies: Dartmouth

19 Dartmouth: “For God’s Sake, for Everyone’s Sake, Keep the Damned Women Out” 441

20 Dartmouth: “Our Cohogs” 464

Part IV The United Kingdom: Cambridge and Oxford

21 Cambridge: “Like Dropping a Hydrogen Bomb in the Middle of the University” 491

22 Cambridge: “A Tragic Break with Centuries of Tradition” 517

23 Oxford: “Our Crenellations Crumble, We Cannot Keep Them Out” 540

24 Oxford: As Revolutionary as “the Abolition of Celibacy among the Dons” 570

Part V Taking Stock

25 Epilogue 595

Manuscript Collections and Oral

History Transcripts: Abbreviations 611

Interviews 622

Index 623

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Nancy Weiss Malkiel describes the complex, sometimes troubled, amazingly rapid set of decisions that led to coeducation at several elite universities and colleges in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. A thoroughly researched, gracefully written, unusually comprehensive account of an important historical transformation."—Nannerl O. Keohane, president emeritus of Wellesley College and Duke University

"In describing how single-sex colleges responded to the surge of interest in coeducation in the late 1960s, Nancy Weiss Malkiel has written an exceptionally thoughtful, balanced, and judicious account of a subject that aroused passionate feelings at the time on both sides of the issue."—Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University

"A monumental work of archival scholarship."—William G. Bowen, coauthor of Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education

"Malkiel's book will serve as the foundational work on which all future considerations of the drive for coeducation, begun during the late 1960s, will be based. Its broad field of vision offers a wealth of information about the nature of academic administration and collegiate life."—Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, author of Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s

"Well crafted and incredibly comprehensive. There is no question in my mind that this book will immediately become the go-to source for understanding why coeducation happened when it did, and how the story unfolded on elite campuses."—Susan Ware, author of Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports

"[A] fascinating story."—Leonore Tiefer, Wall Street Journal

Editorial Reviews

"Lest we forget, a professor of history emerita at Princeton and past dean of its college delivers an authoritative history of the coeducation of elite institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1969 and 1974. Invaluable history, beginning with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and enlivened with such vivid illustrations as Jim Berry's 1967 cartoon of two clubmen conferring from their wing chairs: 'Confused—of course, I'm confused! I have a son at Vassar and a daughter at Yale!'"

Harvard Magazine

"'Keep the Damned Women Out'. . . . Or in some cases, the damned men."

Smith Alumni Quarterly

Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Education Practice, Association of American Publishers

One of Times Higher Education’s Books of the Year 2017 (chosen by John Bowers)

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2016
Amid the social turmoil of the 1960s sparked by the antiwar and civil rights movements, students at the elite single-sex colleges in the East pressed for coeducation. Malkiel (history emeritus & former dean, Princeton Univ.) compares developments at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth with Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley in a carefully researched and compelling narrative. Activist students wanted more "normal" contact with the other sex, but the process was dominated by male leadership at both the men's and women's colleges. Although the rich Princeton archives illustrate a cautious, analytical process, the transition there, as at Yale, Vassar, and Dartmouth, stumbled because of inadequate planning and preparation. The early years were hard on the first female undergraduates. After a decade, better understanding and support for coeducation brought more success. Malkiel contrasts the contentious Ivy League experience with a calmer one at several Oxford and Cambridge colleges, where faculty took the lead and critical alumni were not so aggressive. VERDCT This highly recommended history presents a major cultural change in which coeducation both reflected and stimulated a transformation in women's social and professional status in America.—Elizabeth Hayford, formerly with Associated Coll. of the Midwest, Evanston, IL

Library Journal