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Section IV: Masculine Cultures and Traditions
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151 SECTION IV Masculine Cultures and Traditions The chapters in this section discuss the difficulties of introducing coeducation at institutions that have had a strong masculine tradition. While it might seem that all former men’s colleges have had such traditions, other factors beside an all-male student body can make the culture more or less strongly masculine. In Chapter 6, Forcier compares two private institutions: Dartmouth, which like Yale and Princeton is a prestigious Ivy League institution, and Lehigh, a university in Pennsylvania that used to be regional and technical. Dartmouth’s geographical isolation, small size and long history contributed to its entrenched masculinity and delayed the admission of women; at Lehigh, a curricular emphasis on engineering had similar effects. The reasons these institutions decided to become coeducational, and the difficulties that women faced within them, are also related to these same factors. Forcier discusses, for example, the social reasons for Dartmouth’s admission of women, in comparison to Lehigh’s desire to become a true university. Not only is the South in general traditional, but postsecondary coeducation spread from the west to the east, and former British colonies were slower than other states to admit women, as Ihle explains in Chapter 7. The University of Virginia, the state’s flagship campus, resisted women’s admission, except in special circumstances, until a lawsuit in 1969 resulted in mandatory coeducation . Ihle traces the effects of coeducation on the university today, noting the mostly positive ways it has improved academics and students’ social lives. Boston College’s masculine tradition developed not only because it was founded in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of educating the sons of Irish immigrants but also because it is a Catholic, Jesuit institution. As Higgins shows, when the Catholic hierarchy agreed to let women into parts of the CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 151 5/26/04 4:53:53 PM 152 Masculine Cultures and Traditions college—first the nursing school and then the school of education—it did not provide the women with even minimally adequate services. Until 1970, women were admitted to parts of the college only out of fear that their morals would be compromised if they were educated in secular institutions. Yet once the Catholic hierarchy decided to make Boston College fully coeducational, it was able to implement this decision more rapidly and completely than in the case of institutions with less centralized authority structures. CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 152 5/26/04 4:53:53 PM ...