"We thought of ourselves as architects:" Coeducation and the Yale Campus, 1968-1973

Curator's notes

During the summer of 2019, I was tasked with curating an exhibit on the history of Coeducation at Yale as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Coeducation in Yale College.  As part of the reunion weekend events for alumnae and their families returning to celebrate Coeducation, the University Archives sponsored a series of open houses in the Memorabilia Room at Sterling Memorial Library.  I gave brief talks about how the exhibit was created and answered questions about the exhibit and the University Archives program at Yale.  As the final open house wound down I was approached by an alum asking how long the exhibit was going to be up.  My reply was through October of 2019 then it would come down to make room for a new exhibit.  I was surprised and saddened by her disappointment.  "This story needs to be permanent."  She insisted.  My response was we could always do an online exhibit, which would be on permanent display on the library's digitial exhibition collection.  "Good.  Do that."  She said.  It was not a request.  

While working from home during the pandemic, I began to formulate my plan for the online exhibit.  I immediately realized that I could not replicate the 2019 exhibit online.  Many of the items used for that exhibit were simply too big or unwieldly to digitize.  I knew that another approach was needed.  Plus, I felt that replicating the 2019 exhibit would be a disservice to the First Women whose history I would be documenting.  Re-doing the previous exhibit felt lazy and uninspired.  Therefore, I gave myself two tasks: 1) come up with an entirely new exhibit idea and 2) use items from the University Archives never before seen in an exhibit. 

This summer I was extraordinarily lucky to have selected Charlotte Keathley to be the summer fellow who would partner with me to co-curate the online exhibit.   Charlotte's enthusiasm and creativity became the nucleus through which the exhibit was ultimately built.  In many ways, my job was to simply stay out of her way.  The five weeks we spent this summer putting the exhibit together were some of the most challenging and the most fun I've had during my tenure at Yale.  With that, I hope this exhibit proves to be a worthy (and permanent) successor to the 2019 exhibit.  

-Michael Lotstein, University Archivist

During a recent evening walk on Science Hill, a friend and I found we could not remember which buildings predated us, which were new, what occupied the space before they did, how we used to occupy the space before they did.  We studied the landscape, looking for weathered stone, fresh cement, substantial tree trunks, or young grass in a frantic attempt to jog our memories, to illuminate the history of a few acres on Prospect Street.

Yale's campus is a strange place - molded by centuries of tradition and occupied by an undergraduate body with a four-year memory.  The result is often the feeling that whatever version of Yale's campus you encounter (whether you find that version awe-inspiring or alienating), it has always been this way.

This spring, when I found out that I would be involved with this project, I was thrilled, but also uncomfortable, with the idea of helping tell the story of Coeducation in Yale College. I had never felt a strong connection to the history of Yale or the women who studied here before me. I never felt that the term “woman at Yale” told me much about myself. This is all to say: I had serious doubts that they had picked the right person for the job.

This summer, as I began exploring objects in Manuscripts and Archives, I was surprised to find that Yale College’s first coeducational classes also had uncertain relationships to the institution’s history and terms like “woman at Yale.” I came across fond accounts of individual friendships, small groups, and specific gathering spaces, but few students reported a general sense of cohesion and solidarity among the first cohort of women undergraduates. The word “scattered” surfaced again and again in descriptions of the physical and social map of women at Yale in the years 1969-1973.

I was surprised, too, by the campus. As I began to recognize some physical structures and spatial dynamics, I felt a stronger resonance between the campus that I know and the campus that the first women undergraduates navigated in the fall of 1969. But I also found a campus in physical flux, upending that vague sense that Yale has always been, and will always be, the same. I found that spatial relationships on campus - between genders, between students and administrative spaces, between Yale and New Haven - were changeable and contested.  I found that the campus many of us encounter today emerged, sometimes energetically, sometimes stumblingly, during the early years of coeducation. The exhibition started to come into focus: a map of Yale’s fragmented, lively, tradition-bound, mutable campus, during the first years that it was open to women undergraduates.

Though no buildings were razed to accommodate Coeducation, I found it revealing that in September, 1969, A WFSB television reporter articulated the arrival of women in Yale College through architectural language: "The ivy halls and longstanding ivied traditions here at Yale University are crumbling.  For the first time since the college was founded in seventeen-hundred-and-one, they're registering women undergraduates."

- Charlotte Keathley, Class of 2022 (Ezra Stiles College)