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When the revolutionary Vassar Female College was incorporated on January 18, 1861, even the name of the school proved contentious. Matthew Vassar immediately received a terse letter from Sarah Josepha Hale, famed editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book—the most popular American women’s journal of the mid-19th century. The use of “female” was Darwinian, Hale argued, undermining the notion that Vassar would be a place where women could receive an education equal to the men at Harvard and Yale. After much debate among the College’s Board of Trustees, the change in name was officially adopted in 1866.
The marble slab with the word “female” was literally chiseled off of “Vassar Female College” on the front of Main Building, leaving 15 discolored feet of exposed brick. The space looks as unfinished now as it did nearly 150 years ago.
The removal of “female,” many have since observed, foreshadowed a much deeper shift away from the College’s heritage: coeducation. Spring 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of full coeducation—a long, tumultuous process for the first endowed liberal arts college for women.
Members of the Vassar community first began to consider coeducation in the early 1950s. The College’s single-sex environment had become “increasingly unattractive to active and socially conscious young women,” according to the Vassar Encyclopedia. American culture in the immediate postwar period placed a premium on early marriage, and many women increasingly entered colleges with the hope of finding husbands and beginning families. Additionally, coeducation was increasingly becoming the norm at high schools across the country. Vassar’s single-sex model, once viewed as progressive, was suddenly becoming outmoded.
“Our student body should consist of 50 percent men and 50 percent women, drawn from as wide a geographical area as possible, by identical standards of admission,” declared The Miscellany News in a May 1950 editorial. “There is a strong element of inevitability in our feeling. We not only advocate, we predict.” But the Editorial Board was ahead of its time.
The administration would not begin formally exploring coeducation until the 1966 creation of the appropriately-titled Committee on New Dimensions. Vassar President Alan Simpson began meeting regularly with Kingman Brewster, President of Yale, about the possibility of merging the two schools. Yale, an all-male school at the time, was itself considering moving to coeducation. But student and alumnae opinion on the merger was decidedly mixed; many wrote letters of concern to The Miscellany News that Vassar’s unique identity might simply be absorbed into the larger university.
In October 1968, the College pursued a different route. Simpson began negotiating with Bowdoin, Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams, Colgate, and Trinity, forming an exchange program for male students interested in entering Vassar for the second semester of 1968-69. Sure enough, 77 male students enrolled in the College that spring. Over one-third of these men applied to transfer to Vassar at the end of the semester, and by March 1969, Vassar had amended its constitution to include the education of men.
But as alumnae/i and current students will quickly admit, the mere decision to admit men was only the beginning of the story of coeducation. Coeducation for Vassar meant more than just a change on paper; it meant a change to the school’s core identity. Questions immediately arose about Vassar men: Would they change the dynamic of the College? Would women feel less empowered to take on roles of leadership? Would Vassar men, as one student feared on the pages of the Miscellany, “be merely foxes in a cage of intelligent women, eating those who try to better themselves through knowledge”?
Stereotypes over the nature of Vassar men—debated far beyond the gates of the College by journalists and commentators—seemed to breakdown into two categories. First, there was the “fox” model described above. Many feared that the presence of men would destroy the benefits of single-sex education, distracting girls with relationships and other social concerns. In a column in The Miscellany News, one English professor worried that men would “force women from positions on campus groups, returning to a [structure] whereby men are dominant both inside and outside of the academic sphere.”
The second model for the Vassar man was the polar opposite. Many alumnae were less than pleased with rumors they heard of “the antics of the first onslaught of men,” according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lucinda Franks ’68 in a 1979 New York Times essay.
“Their ranks were peppered with characters who swung through the campus like bespangled high-wire artists at a three-ring circus. The most noticeable was a group that flounced about in glittery shirts, high-heeled boots, and rainbow-colored afros.” The implication was clear—that Vassar men were effeminate, blending in “all too well” with the women around them. This model of the Vassar man was concerning not only to the College’s socially conservative alumnae, but also to those who worried that Vassar’s reputation for excellence would suffer.
Ironically, neither of these common stereotypes for the “early Vassar man”—and, some would argue, today’s “Vassar man”—was quite accurate. Alumnae/i from the first coeducational classes do not recall either the “foxes” or the “three-ring circus” students of legend. “The men that I knew were very straight-laced,” said Jason Isaacson ’74, the first male Editor in Chief of The Miscellany News. “The rumors of men being flamboyant were entirely exaggerated. Some of the guys I knew became police officers, lawyers, doctors, and really no one was overly counter-cultural. They were just regular students, like ones you would find anywhere else.”
Nevertheless, these myths were powerful in the minds of observers. Many of the concerns that were debated in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to linger four decades later. In particular, some worry that male students are eclipsing female students in positions of leadership. “Since we went coed, I think Vassar has lost some of its history,” said Mary Catherine Halfpenny ’09, President of Strong House. “Walking around here and observing the culture, no one would ever know that we were once an all-women’s College.”
Halfpenny is the only female house president elected this year—a presidency that is de facto filled by a woman. Male majorities extend beyond just the house presidents; of the 23 student representatives on the VSA Council, only nine are female. “It can be really discouraging,” said Halfpenny. “Last month when we were discussing campus drinking, and [Terrace Apartment President Riane Harper ’09] brought up sexual assault, the topic was quickly brushed over. The next week, there was a sexual assault on campus. I just began to wonder, whose interests were really being represented in that room?”
Vassar is certainly not the only school with disproportionate numbers of men in leadership roles. More than two-thirds of Amherst College’s student senators are male, despite the fact that women constitute a slight majority of the student body. Amherst’s Executive Board is even more imbalanced—only one out of five members is female. According to Student Body President Nick Pastan, there is a very discernable decline in women running for office over their college years. Interestingly, Amherst women tend to hold many leadership positions over men in student clubs, but not in student government. “I wonder if it has to do with the fact that student government is deeply institutionalized and clubs aren’t, or if student government somehow dampens women’s voices rather than privileges,” said Pastan.
A similar situation, some claim, exists at Vassar. Women are well-represented on house teams, and as treasurers, secretaries and vice presidents. “But it’s those top-level positions where we feel the difference,” said Halfpenny. “Men are in so many positions of power across campus.” Along with Strong and Raymond House Advisor Jessica Bennett, Strong’s house team established womenleadersatvassar.blogspot.com—a forum to generate discussion on the absence of and barriers to women’s leadership.
Coeducation at Vassar is not so much a historical event—a date cemented in the past—as it is a living part of the College’s legacy. Like the discolored marble slab on the front of Main, coeducation is unfinished. Vassar’s heritage as a pioneering liberal arts college continues to shape the institution’s identity. Long after coeducation on paper, students remain conscious of gender issues, pushing not for a return to single-sex education—but rather for true coeducation. “It may take months,” wrote The Miscellany News in 1968, “It may take years, or even decades. Full coeducation is not something that Vassar can achieve overnight. Nowhere in this world is there true coeducation between the sexes. But if any institution can achieve such intellectual equality, we are confident that Vassar can.”
—This is the first in a two-part series of articles on the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Vassar College.
7 comments
- Majority of Vassar students are female.
- Female support is necessary for student representatives to be elected.
- There's nothing to "find interesting."