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

3. Coeducation at Wheaton College: From Conscious Coeducation to Distinctive Coeducation?

48 3 Coeducation at Wheaton College From Conscious Coeducation to Distinctive Coeducation? Susan F. Semel and Alan R. Sadovnik Formorethan150years WheatonCollege,locatedinthesmallcityofNorton,Massachusetts , dedicated itself to the higher education of women.Then in September 1988 this private liberal arts college admitted its first men undergraduates. Given its historical commitment to the education of women, Wheaton College pursued coeducation within a framework dedicated to ensuring that its commitment to womenwouldbepreservedinthetransitiontocoeducation.Throughitsphilosophy of “conscious coeducation,” or what is also called “differently coeducational,” Wheaton has attempted to create a coeducational institution that links its strengths as a formerlywomen’ scollegetotheeducationofbothmenandwomen.Suchaneducation is grounded in the view that coeducation should help young men and women create a more just world, with men and women equal partners in this quest. The difficult task in this endeavor has been for Wheaton to expand its mission and yet not lose the historical commitment to women characteristic of women’s colleges. Wheaton College: 1812–1975 Judge Laban Wheaton founded Wheaton Female Seminary in 1834 with the assistance of Mary Lyon, who three years later established Mount Holyoke.1 In the early years, Wheaton Female Seminary was similar to the other seminaries for women of the mid–nineteenth century, as it was part of a larger movement for women’s education initiated by reformers such as Mary Lyon, Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and Zilpah Grant.2 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it reflected the changes since charted by Patricia Palmieri—from the Romantic Era (1820–60), concerned with “Republican motherhood,” to the Reform Era (1860–90), with its debates about higher education for women, to Coeducation at Wheaton College 49 theProgressiveEra(1890–1920),withtheentranceofwomenintotheprofessions and the conservative reaction to women’s higher education.3 Like those of many women’s seminaries founded before the Civil War, Wheaton’s early mission did not stress education for the professions, but rather for republican motherhood through liberal learning. During the Reform Era, after the Civil War, Wheaton provided for women the same type of rigorous liberal arts curriculum as the men’s liberal arts colleges . By the time Wheaton was incorporated as a college in 1912, it was an important alternative to the prestigious group of women’s colleges later called the Seven Sisters. Wheaton’s location between Providence and Boston and its upper-middle-class students made it a desirable women’s college. In line with the general expansion of higher education that began in the post–World War II period, Wheaton College doubled its enrollment between 1958 and the early 1970s to 1,200 women.4 Wheaton was more likely than many of its Seven Sisters counterparts, however, to provide an education for an “MRS” along with an AB degree. When Susan Semel attended Wheaton in the early 1960s, the hidden curriculum was threefold: pinned by junior year, engaged by senior year, and married shortly after graduation. As many of the Ivy League colleges and men’s liberal arts colleges in New England became coeducational in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as a number of women’s colleges, including Vassar, Skidmore, and Connecticut College also became coeducational, Wheaton College began to consider its future as a women’s college. Wheaton had started to have considerable difficulty attracting high-quality women applicants. Many women who formerly would have gone to women’s colleges began to choose coeducational colleges, viewing women’s colleges as quaint anachronisms. In 1970 the Wheaton College faculty voted by an almost four-to-one margin, 47 to 12, with two abstentions, to consider becoming a coeducational institution. President William Prentice recommended against this to the board of trustees, however, and the trustees decided not to make the change at that time. The Balanced Curriculum Project During the 1980s Wheaton moved in two contradictory directions. Under the leadership of Alice F. Emerson, who in 1975 became Wheaton’s first woman president, the college first strengthened its position as a women’s college and then became a coeducational institution. Although, before 1980, individual faculty such as Frinde Maher and Kirste Yllo had been implementing feminist curricula and pedagogy in their classrooms, in 1980 the effort became more systematic. Affected by the feminist movement in the larger culture, Wheaton began a four-year Balanced Curriculum Project, funded by a Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant. This initiative energized 50 Women’s Colleges That Have Become Coeducational or Have Closed the Wheaton...