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

"It is to be a gathering place"

"In theory the Center has three functions. First, it is to be a communications center for the Women’s movement on the Yale campus; second, it is to serve as an information center for Yale women about women in general. Third and perhaps most important it is to be a gathering place for women." 

— Yale Daily News article on the opening of the Yale Women’s Center 

 

From the first semester of coeducation, women undergraduates began carving out corners of Yale’s campus for themselves, though space was often not easily ceded by administrators and male students. These spaces were often unshowy — a basement room, an unmown practice field, a college entryway — but they provided key opportunities for women to organize politically, hone their athletic abilities, create art, and simply to form bonds among the sparse and scattered women of Yale College. 

Women's Athletics

“We were told to feel grateful that the hallowed halls of Payne Whitney Gymnasium would be open to women at all!”

— Lawrie Mifflin, in the bulletin of the Yale Club of Philadelphia

 

Aside from the construction of a women’s locker room in Payne Whitney Gymnasium, virtually no preparations were made in anticipation of women’s involvement in athletics on campus. In the early years of coeducation (and for some teams, well into the 1970s) women had to put repeated pressure on the Athletic Department to gain access to facilities. 

The implications of this were social as well as athletic; many men had access to team-specific locker rooms where they could casually socialize with teammates and build communites, while women generally shared inadequate locker rooms with non-teammates (including visiting teams), when they were provided locker rooms at all. 

Synchronized swimming classes were one of the only athletic programs prepared by the administration for the arrival of women. It provided one of very few ways for women to gain easy access to athletic facilities at Yale. 

 

 

 

 

When women’s swimming was organized in 1972-1973, women were allotted 5.5 hours per week of pool time, whereas men were allotted 5.5 hours per day. Even when the alloted amount of pool time were expanded during the coming years, women were rarely assigned “prime time” in the pool. 

In the early years of coeducation, the field hockey team often arrived at practices or games to find that their assigned space had been used for football tailgating and left littered with beer cans and charcoal briquettes. “That situation was pretty insulting,” said player Jean Benefield, “The worst of it was they would always rope off the cars from the men’s intramural fields, but not from the varsity hockey field. It doesn’t seem fair.” 

 

Men’s basketball and hockey games were scheduled at least a year in advance (and sometimes up to five years), so when women arrived on campus, they were forced to schedule practices and games in the less desirable time-slots not already occupied. This led to women’s practices being scheduled during weekday afternoons, when many players had classes, or late in the evenings. Games were similarly scheduled in unoccupied, undesirable time slots, when spectators were less likely to attend. 

 

The women’s crew team began organizing in 1972, but even by the mid-late 1970s, there were no permanent locker room or shower facilities for the women’s crew team at the boathouse in Derby, Connecticut. A very small temporary structure was erected after the women rowed for several years with no facilities at all. Players described using the temporary structure as like being “jammed into a carton.” After practice, the athletic trainer would first provide treatment for men in their locker room, and then provide treatment for women in one of the boat bays. Without adequate facilities to shower and change into dry clothes, members of the women’s crew team found that their “shirts froze on back[s]” while awaiting transportation back to campus. 

 

 

 

 

Social Spaces, Gathering Places

 

Founded in 1969, The New Blue was one of the first women's singing groups established at Yale.  Male a cappella groups dismissed the organization's presence on campus, supposedly asking "New Who?" In response, The New Blue titled their debut album "Since You Asked."  The New Blue went on to produce seven more albums, hold concerts in dozens of countries and perform for two U.S. presidents. The New Blue recently celebrated their 50th anniversary.

The Whiffenpoofs, Yale's oldest a cappella group, has a long-standing tradition of Monday-night concerts at Mory's, the private club which accepted only Yale-affiliated men until 1974 (at which point membership was open to Yale-affiliated women).  In the fall of 1972, the New Blue countered this tradition with Monday-night performances at Naples Pizza (later called Wall Street Pizza), a more casual restaurant that attracted a combination of Yalies and New Haven residents.  

New Blue's pitch pipe, Pixie Williams, explained in a Yale Daily News article that "One of the main points was to make fun, not of the Whifs' but the whole idea of singing at Mory's.  Naples is a place to come, eat pizza, and just have fun."

In the fall of 1971, the “Sisterhood” began meeting to discuss the problems of incomplete coeducation, the Women’s liberation movement, and simply share personal stories. At the inaugural gathering of the Sisterhood 70 women packed into the Vanderbilt lounge to participate, in a testament to the vacuum of women-majority environments that the Sisterhood was beginning to fill. 

In 1969, 211 Park Street, which had housed Chi Psi fraternity for many decades, was converted into the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale. With this change, a previously white-dominated space became an enclave for black students at Yale, and a previously male-dominated space became a mixed-gender one.
       

Notes from a WAC meeting include passages as “Calhoun - black girls live together, all things separate,” alluding to the separation, both physical and social, of black and white women on campus.

 

 

 

While administrators pushed for housing women in separate entryways, they (and some white students) were less eager to support black students’ repeated requests for black entryways and other predominantly black spaces. Despite this, students in Saybrook College had success establishing Willis entryway as a black entryway for several years in the early 1970s. 

 

 

“Most of us imposed an isolation on ourselves to learn about ourselves, that “self” being a collective one. Only in knowing ourselves could we know others, could we give, could we lead. We were wanted, we were desired, we were invited, but it was they who were the intruders and not us… truth and beauty were to be found in a black world within, not the world without.”

— From “Through the Veil," 1973 Yale Class Book