Vassar Quarterly - Fall/Winter 2019 - 51

In 1965, seven of the eight Ivy League
colleges (Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth,
Harvard, Princeton, the University of
Pennsylvania, and Yale) were single-sex,
as were all the elite Seven Sisters Colleges
(Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke,
Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley). By
1975, all the Ivies (except Columbia) had
become coeducational. And only five of
the Seven Sisters were still single-sex.
These market leaders were not alone.
In that single decade, hundreds of men's
colleges, including Amherst, Williams,
California Institute of Technology, Johns
Hopkins, and the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point, went coed. Of the Catholic
institutions, Boston College, Georgetown,
Holy Cross, Notre Dame, and many more
went coed between 1969 to 1972. And from
1969 to 1971, Vassar, Bennington, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence, Skidmore,
and scores of others took the plunge. "Late
bloomers" Columbia, Haverford, Virginia
Military Institute, Washington and Lee, and
Wheaton finally admitted women between
1980 and 1997.
The macro-level trend is striking: In
the 1960s, there were about 300 secular
women's colleges in the United States.
Today there are about 30. And in the 1960s,
there were several thousand secular men's
colleges. Today there are three.
What caused the wildfire of coeducation
to spread across the country? The answer
is surely complicated. It involves shifting
social norms, evolving national politics, and
challenging economics. But, in a word, the
answer is survival.

From left: Vassar Archives / AP Images

THE VIEW FROM THE IVIES
Nowhere was the instinct for survival more
pronounced than among the Ivies. Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton, for example, had always
been in strong competition for the best
and brightest young men. By the 1960s and
'70s, however, it was clear that proximity to
women was becoming a critical element
of that competition. Thanks to Radcliffe's
convenient location, that advantage
belonged to Harvard.
The academic "romance" between
Radcliffe and Harvard began in the 1940s.

Juniors from
Sweet Briar
College in Virginia
celebrate their
arrival at Princeton
at the start of
a one-week
experiment as a
coed school in
1969.

For many years, the two institutions had joint programming and
social events that benefited both student bodies. In 1977, they
entered into an agreement-known as a "non-merger merger"-
that effectively allowed Radcliffe women to enroll in Harvard
classes. Although Radcliffe and Harvard had been "living in sin"
(quoting a Radcliffe '65 alumna) for more than 20 years, they
weren't "legally married" until 1999, when Radcliffe formally
dissolved into a research unit of the university.
In her book, Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for
Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2016), Nancy Weiss Malkiel
explains that in April 1999, after two years of secret negotiations,
Neil Rudenstine, President of Harvard, and Linda S. Wilson,
President of Radcliffe, signed an affiliation agreement that recognized what had already been reality. Full coeducation had long
since been realized in Cambridge, and Harvard and Radcliffe were
functionally one institution. Reporters had a field day describing
the Radcliffe-Harvard arrangement. The Los Angeles Times called it
"a burial that took place twenty years after the funeral." The New
York Times headline read "Radcliffe Packing Up and Going to Harvard."
And finally, The Harvard Crimson announced that "Radcliffe's
'College' Days End."
The President of Yale from 1963 to 1977 was Kingman Brewster,
whose ancestors crossed the Atlantic on the first Mayflower voyage.
Despite his patrician background, Brewster was progressive on
the issues of race, religion, class, and public schools. Yet he was
vehemently opposed to coeducation for undergraduates. Soon,

VA S S A R Q U A R T E R LY

Vassar Quarterly - Fall/Winter 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vassar Quarterly - Fall/Winter 2019