Constructing Coeducation in the American Academy

by Laura Wexler

Click to view detail

In 1969, the first structurally co-ed classes arrived at Yale College.  In advance of the 2019-2020 university-wide celebration of 50 years of co-education, and 150 years at the Yale Graduate School of Art, I am teaching a seminar that examines the history and philosophy of coeducation in American colleges and universities, with a special focus on Yale.  How far have we really come in the co-education project?

In this course, we are exploring the many ways in which the meaning of the arrival of female undergraduates at Yale should be understood vis-à-vis other intersecting categories such as race, class, region, sexuality, occupation, and nation.  We are studying the history of higher education in the United States; examining arguments for and against post-secondary education for women and co-education versus single-sex colleges; comparing and contrasting racialized initiatives including Freedman Bureau schools, Native American boarding schools, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions.  We are seeking to track changing patterns of inclusion and exclusion; inquire into the implications of landmark legislation; and jointly develop a specific case history at Yale that reflects the complexities as well as the successes, then and now.  Aided by especially prepared archives in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Sterling Memorial Library, the students are producing original research on important moments and figures. 

By reading history and theory, examining further primary and secondary sources, looking at photographs and films, gathering and proposing new archives and objects of interest, and circulating papers, we will create additional modes of storytelling and we plan to share these stories in the coming commemorations.

To start, here is a photograph of Alice Moore (’04 MFA. ’07 DFA, ’09 MA, ‘15Ph.D.) giving us a wonderful special session of “Women at Yale: A Tour,” which she created for the Yale Women Faculty Forum in response to a special gift by Nancy Alexander (TD, 1979, M.Arch, 1984) and Phil Alexander  (TD, 1979, M. Arch, 1983), while I was Co-chair.  Alice is showing us a stone carving in Sterling Memorial Library of a scholar in his cups, not reading his book, and a tiny nude woman hovering over his head in a kind of stone thought-bubble.  What could he be thinking…?  Or, is the tiny woman just trying also to get some education in the only way that it seems possible for her to enter?  It does appear that there was once a lot of anxiety that the library could become the scene of an outright bacchanal.  Women early on were banned from the L & B reading room, even when they were students at Yale.  The graduate students had to raise hell. 

To see more of Alice’s tour, go to the following site, where you will find a downloadable 50-site guidebook and a downloadable audio guide.  https://wff.yale.edu/resources/women-yale-walking-tour
And send your own suggestions!  Along with Maya Raiford-Cohen (Class of 2021) we are updating the tour.

 Laura Wexler
American Studies, Film & Media Studies, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies