The First of the ‘Yale Women’
In April 1969, five months after Yale University announced it was becoming coeducational, its first female undergrads got stuck with a nickname they would never quite shake. The university announced in late 1968 that it would accept women as undergraduate students starting the next academic year, and the following spring, The New York Times Magazine published a feature by a Yale student about the selection process for Yale’s first undergraduate women. “With the proviso that the identities of the girls be guarded, I was granted permission to look through a sampling of the applicants’ folders,” he wrote. “The experience was humbling: there on paper were the female versions of Nietzche’s Uebermensch”—supermen. And so the first female Yalies were forever called “superwomen.”
Yale’s first female four-year undergraduate students matriculated 50 years ago this fall—an occasion that’s being celebrated on campus this month as well as commemorated in a new book titled Yale Needs Women—after the university completed a somewhat haphazard process of going coed. By the mid-1960s, Yale was behind the times: Though the then-268-year-old institution had welcomed women into its graduate programs, Yale had only ever accepted men as undergrads, while some 75 percent of other American colleges and universities were coeducational. Yale was also one of only three Ivy League schools where women could not enroll at all in undergraduate classes: While Brown, Columbia, and Harvard, for example, were still technically male-only, students from their institutions’ adjacent women’s colleges—Pembroke, Barnard, and Radcliffe, respectively—could also take classes on campus. After an abortive attempt to merge with the then-all-women’s Vassar College, Yale’s then-president, Kingman Brewster, announced that female students would be accepted in the class of 1973. More than 2,800 “female Uebermensches” applied for what would eventually be 230 spots in the freshman class. (Smaller numbers of female students also transferred into the sophomore and junior classes that fall.) I spoke with four of those 230 female freshmen, and they shared their memories of that first turbulent, dazzling, groundbreaking year.
While plenty of the
