Challenged by Coeducation: Women's Colleges Since the 1960s

Preface

ix Preface Women’s colleges are an endangered species. Over the past forty years, threequarters of them have admitted men, merged with another institution, or closed. From about 230 women’s colleges in 1960, there were fewer than 60 in 2005. Most of those that remain struggle to survive, creating educational programs for new populations—part-time, adult, or graduate students—thereby becoming fundamentally different institutions than they were in the 1950s. While researchers have studied the early history of women’s colleges and their importance for women’s access to higher education, little has been written about their recent transformations. Challenged by Coeducation explores the recent history of women’s colleges in the age of coeducation. It includes institutions that represent the variety among women’s colleges: two Seven Sister colleges, three secular independent colleges, two Catholic colleges, a coordinate college, a vocationally based college, a state institution, a historically black college, and, for comparative purposes, two colleges in England’s Cambridge University. The book’s five sections partly reflect the fundamental outcomes for women’s colleges since the 1960s: a brief history of women’s colleges; a review of institutions that have adopted coeducation or have closed; studies of several women’s colleges that are still single sex; a look at some coordinate women’s colleges; and a conclusion that reflects upon the struggles women’s colleges face either in maintaining their single-sex status or in striving for gender equity while adopting coeducation. This decline in women’s colleges mirrors a similar, even more drastic change in men’s colleges—they have almost disappeared. During the 1960s and 1970s most men’s colleges opened their doors to women for financial and social reasons . Since the large majority of male students preferred coeducation, men’s colleges had to admit women in order to stay competitive. Many colleges found that coeducation enabled them to increase their revenue by expanding their enrollment and at the same time to become more academically competitive. Yet as we note in our previous work, Going Coed: Women’s Experiences in Formerly Men’s Colleges and Universities, 1950–2000, the admission of women to these institutions did not necessarily bring equity. Many campuses made little preparation for the presence of women, and many of the early women students had to maneuver in a difficult gender environment. One might think that the transitions to coeducation at men’s and women’s x Challenged by Coeducation colleges are parallel experiences. Yet they are not, for men and women have been unequal in society and the effects of coeducation have been very different . Because of the prestige of many formerly men’s colleges and universities, academically talented women students have flocked to them, enhancing their competitiveness. In the initial years of coeducation at a women’s college, however , men students have not shown a similar desire to attend formerly women’s colleges, as Griffen and Daniels document in their chapter on the conversion of Vassar to a coeducational institution. Because women have been a lower-status group in society, men have little to gain by attending a formerly women’s college. At some institutions bearing a woman’s name, there has even been discussion of changing the name so that the association with a woman is unapparent. Some at Sarah Lawrence, for example, believe that the small proportion of men (26 percent) enrolled decades after men were first admitted is partly attributable to the female name. The greater mixing of men and women in higher education was both a reflection of and a contributor to the dramatic changes in gender norms in the last half of the twentieth century. So long as women and men were seen as distinctly different in their appetites, ambitions, and talents, sex segregation seemed normal. When the most recent wave of feminism challenged these assumptions , and when the moral force of the civil rights movement confronted the social and legal boundaries that kept some social groups subordinate, Americans were primed to accept a reorganization of gender boundaries. Not only were women students subsequently admitted to formerly men’s campuses, but the more sex-neutral environment often spurred further change in their ambitions and in the college campus. Women were freer to plan a future in which marriage and motherhood were optional or additional to a career. Now that many more options are available to women, the question remains: Why are women’s colleges desirable? In an era when women can attend formerly men...