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309 13 Conclusion Coeducation and Gender Equal Education Susan L. Poulson and Leslie Miller-Bernal By the mid-twentieth century most American colleges and universities had long been coeducational. There were exceptions, however. Some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, located primarily along the eastern seaboard, were still single-sex. Colleges and universities such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton , Williams, and Amherst continued to associate their high status with being all male. Catholic colleges and universities remained single-sex for different reasons—they were operated by single-sex religious orders whose conservative gender ideology favored separation of women and men. Some state universities, and a few private institutions, maintained a coordinate college system that segregated men from women. The case studies in Going Coeddiscuss some of the reasons why almost all these remaining men’s colleges and universities decided to admit women in the late 1960s and 1970s. The case studies also show how women have struggled to become a normal and valued part of these formerly male institutions. Factors Influencing the Transition to Coeducation Financial, demographic, and cultural factors influenced many men’s colleges to become coeducational in the 1970s, as Chapter 1 describes. The golden years of the 1960s, when the availability of federal money enabled many educational institutions to expand, had ended. Colleges and universities needed new sources of revenue. At the same time, the national proportion of women among undergraduates was increasing, and women tended to perform better academically than men. These two trends alone might have led men’s colleges to admit women; in addition, however, the social movements of the 1960s stressed integration—of races and genders. Single-sex institutions began to CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 309 5/26/04 4:54:34 PM 310 Going Coed be seen as old-fashioned or anachronistic, while coeducation seemed natural and progressive. Almost all the colleges and universities discussed in this book were affected by these trends. The case studies have also revealed, however, how these common factors affected some institutions more than others. Moreover, different factors had a more critical impact on some colleges. The historically black institution Lincoln University, for example, found that its enrollment of academically superior men students declined beginning in the 1950s, as predominantly white institutions opened their doors to racial and ethnic minorities. Lincoln was reluctant to become coeducational and at first tried to overcome its enrollment and financial problems by developing an interracial and international student body. Ultimately the admission of women proved to be the most successful way of maintaining Lincoln’s enrollments and its academic standards. The greatest upsurge in coeducation occurred in the early 1970s, yet two universities discussed in Going Coed made the transition earlier. Lincoln University , as mentioned above, slowly became coeducational in the early 1960s. The University of Rochester, which had been coeducational for the first decade of the twentieth century and then established a coordinate unit for its women students, became coeducational again after World War II. The major impetus for coeducation the second time was that a new president perceived the coordinate system as inefficient and an impediment to his plan to make Rochester a large, centralized research institution. The academic status hierarchy played a role in the order in which many all-male institutions became coeducational. Many colleges feared becoming coeducational given the historical link between academic status and an all-male student body. Once prestigious Princeton and Yale decided to admit women as undergraduates, in order not to lose the most highly qualified men who increasingly preferred coeducational institutions, other institutions followed. Not only did Princeton and Yale serve as models for other colleges, but they also served as competitive models for each other. Students and administrators at one campus were aware what was happening at the other campus and did not want to be left behind. What is missing in this litany of reasons for adopting coeducation is a salient concern for the education of women. The majority of these institutions admitted women to preserve or enhance their status or to improve the educational climate for men. There was no initial discussion about equity for women or about admitting women to redress their subordinate role in society. As Douglass dean Marjory Foster argued before the Rutgers board of trustees, talk about coeducation at Rutgers seemed mostly about “the uses of women for the education of men.” CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 310 5/26/04 4:54:34 PM [3.145.115.195] Project...

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