The
Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts
Yale College was an all-male
institution from its founding to 1969 when the first undergraduate females
breeched its defenses. Women had been allowed into Yale’s graduate art school
for a bit of cultural polish since the late nineteenth century, but in the
undergraduate domain, the only women in New
Haven were visiting relatives, girl friends,
prostitutes, or strippers. It was an adolescent boy’s world with more than its
share of ugly episodes. One the worst was “the gang rape of a prostitute in
1940 that was a running public joke during the Brewster’s undergraduate years.”
[Kabaservice, “Kingman Brewster and the Rise and Fall,” 436]. Going
coeducational ended the most blatant manifestations of Yale’s masculine
culture, both in college and at alumni events.
In the first academic year of coeducation,
1969-19780, there were 1,025 men, and 588 women. The “freshmen” class had 230
women, but 358 transferring women moved into the sophomore, junior, and senior
classes to spread women around, helping to set a new tone on campus. The Seven
Sisters colleges, close to Yale in social composition and geography, provided
more than their share. Of the transferring families, fully 124 were from just
three of them: Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar.
In 1994, George W. Bush told an interviewer
that Yale “went downhill since they admitted women.”
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