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Princeton professor documents the movement that ended single-sex education at elite schools

Men and women together in class is as much a part of college life today as final exams and grade-point averages.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel's new book documents how and why resistance to the end of single-sex college education was overcome.
Nancy Weiss Malkiel's new book documents how and why resistance to the end of single-sex college education was overcome.Read more

Men and women together in class is as much a part of college life today as final exams and grade-point averages.

Half a century ago, that wasn't the case at many elite colleges.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, professor emerita of history at Princeton University, documents the movement that ended single-sex education and the social changes it brought about in Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press; $35).

The book - the title makes reference to a disgruntled alumnus at Dartmouth - tracks "an amazing process of institutional change," says Malkiel, of Princeton, a professor and administrator at the university since 1969.

Once Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Vassar - also Cambridge and Oxford - became coeducational institutions, they often were slow to adapt.

At Yale, for example, the women's field hockey team initially had to practice on a parking lot. When a Yale woman asked a professor about offering a course on women's history, he said, "That would be like teaching the history of dogs."

At her Princeton office, Malkiel, a graduate of Smith, discussed her book and how its publication comes at a time when the United States could elect its first female president.

How much of a role did the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and the women's movement play in the move toward coeducation?

The world in which young people were growing up in the late 1960s looked completely different than what it had looked at the beginning of the 1960s. If you were protesting - men and women together - the Vietnam War, if you were working side by side to register blacks to vote in Mississippi, the notion that you would not also go to school together was hard to accept.

You were asked by Shirley M. Tilghman, then the president of Princeton, to write a book on the history of coeducation at the school. What led you to expand the book to other colleges?

After starting my research, I saw there was a flood of decisions [by institutions] to go coeducational at the same time between 1969 and 1974. It struck me that the much more interesting question was: Why did all this happen? Why did all of these very traditional, very conservative, very elite institutions decide all to go coeducational?

Do you feel that coeducation was an economic issue?

I would describe it as more of a strategic advantage, rather than economics. It wasn't that places like Princeton and Harvard couldn't fill their classes. It was who was interested in populating these classes. The central point in the 1960s was the Best Boys - and that's the way institutions referred to them - in private and public schools were beginning to show in their application patterns and especially in their decisions on where they wanted to go to school, they wanted to go to school with women. Not having the same hold on Best Boys was important to Princeton and Yale. Admitting women was a strategic way of retaining the hold.

Did you see much of a generation gap between fathers and sons on coeducation in your research?

I didn't see it as much between fathers and sons, as between younger and older alumni. There was definitely a generation gap in terms of younger alumni being much more sympathetic in terms of coeducation. [Eventually], the most fierce opponents of coeducation who wanted so much to preserve male camaraderie realized their daughters and granddaughters could not follow them. It became less unthinkable to have coeducation.

How did the rise of coeducation affect women's colleges?

There are a lot fewer than there used to be. I grew up in Baltimore in the 1950s. The assumption was if you were bright and a girl, you aspired to go a women's college, preferably a Seven Sisters school. That's the world I knew. Today, fewer than 5 percent of high school girls say they are interested in going to a single-sex college. That's a big issue in terms of the talent pool.

You started at Princeton in 1969, the year the university went coeducational. How long did it take for women to be fully integrated?

We made a lot of progress at various stages, but it took more than two decades after coeducation to settle that all of the eating clubs should admit women as well as men. It took more than a decade to settle that it was appropriate for the study of gender to be a formal part of the curriculum. We still have a long way to go to have a faculty evenly balanced to reflect the student body by gender.

Publication of your book comes as Hillary Clinton, who attended Wellesley and Yale Law School, is running for president. How do you think coeducation has affected women and her decision to run?

Every step we have taken matters. Electing women governors, electing women to the U.S. Senate, having women lead major corporations, having women lead Ivy League universities, every time something like that happens, it demonstrates that women can do what men do. That sets a context in which it's wholly plausible to imagine a woman running for president of the United States.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel will discuss "Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton.