Faber was a crime akin to turning over the poems to theologians. So, i realized right away that this was an opportunity to revisit a story in changed times. And heres where writing about what you can connect to came into it. All of my books, with one exception, that book about research, have been about strong, remarkable women. Karen horneye was the first, the psychoanalyst who took issue with freud odd idea busy sexuality. Marie currie curie, and a book about one strong woman, a woman name hally flannigan. So, there was another reason that i connected to this. Even though the love relationship had been floating around in the atmosphere, times had changed and this was a story that could be embraced, even celebrated, about two women who loved and empowered each other. And now i am delighted to introduce tonights author. Nancy malkeiels from Princeton University and was the longest serving dean and the first woman dean of the college, a scholar of 20th century american history. Her previous books include witness h it in young, jr. And the struggle for civil rights and farewell to party of lincoln, black politics in at the age of fdr. Her new book keep the damned women out orecounts the recess stance to, the motivations for and the implementation of coeducation at Ivy League Colleges such as princeton and harvard and oxford and cambridge in britain. It didnt hit home to me how recently coeducation occurred until i was visiting colleges with my father 15 years ago and he gasped, there are girls at harvard. Professors comprehensive research detail houston the admission of women into these conservative institutions was driven mostly by men. University leader who were inside in preserving an elite applicant pool. Derrick bach, says in screening occupy single sex colleges responded to the surge of interest in coeducation in the late 1960s, nancy has written an exceptionally thoughtful, balanced and judicious account of a sum that aroused passionate feelings at the time on both sides of the issue. Were very pleased she is here with us at Harvard Book Store tonight. Please join in welcoming professor nancy white mal ky el. Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here tonight and to have an opportunity to talk about my new book. Now she has already told you about the book to you have to forgive me if i repeat just a little built of what she said. It addresses the flood of decisions for coeducation at elite colleges and universities in the United States, and the United Kingdom in the period 1969 to 74. Literally dozens of single sex institutions went coed in this very short space of time. Ive chosen to focus my book in the United States on the allmail if ayes, princeton, yale, harvard and dartmouth, on three womens colleges, vassar, which went coed, and smith and wellesley, which had high level reports recommending coeducation, but backed away, and in the uk, to focus on churchhill, claire, and king, the first three members rams at the wherever of cambridge to admit women and the first five at the university of oxford. Im complaining the remarkable clustering of decisions for coeducation between 1969 and 1974. Why did so many very traditional, very conservative, very elite, very old, colleges and universities decide to embark on such a fundamental change . Why then . How did those decisions get made . How was coeducation accomplished in the face of strong opposition . And with the admission of students of the opposite sex to formerly singlesex schools what happened . In other words, how well did coeducation work in its early incarnation, those are the questions that framed this book. Lets begin with why it happened and why it happened then. As now has suggested, it happened because it was in the strategic selfinterest of allmale institutions like princeton and yale, and later dartmouth, to admit women, by the late 1960s, these schools would begunking to see their applications dline, along with the yields. The high School Students, the school referreds to as the best boys no longer wants to go to allmale institutions. The key issue then was the ability to continue to attract those best boys. This is the time, by the way, when harvard begins to pull away from yale and princeton in the competition for the Best High School men. Coeducation then became the means for places like princeton and yale to shore up a firstrate applicant pool and a firstrate enrolled student body. It was not the result of any highminded moral commitment to opening Educational Opportunities for women. It was not a matter offed a a myth to educate women. Not the result of deep thinking about how to educate women. Rather, it was about what women could do for previously allmale institutions. About how women would help these schools renew their hold on the best body. Women, in other words, played the instrumental role of improve thing oidioid indicational experience of men, and therefore its not surprising that going coed did not always, well, serve the women who were admitted to the early coed classes. Later point which may be up expected, the protagonist in the story are men. Save for polyup bunting, the president of radcliffe, every strategist, every decisionmaker, everybody leading the charge for coeducation, was male. So, coeducation resulted not from organized efforts by women activists, but from Strategic Decisions taken by powerful men. What happens when it did . Ive already hinted about that in terms of changes in application patterns in the late 1960s, but theres more to understand than terms of the context of the set 1960s. Everything about the 1960s speaks to the question, why then . Civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the student movement, the Womens Movement, by the end of the 1960s, colleges and universities looked quite different than they had at the beginning of the decade. The the composition of student bodies gap to change to include a major number of Public School students and students from lessed a vega students, students who are catholic and jewish, evening students who are africanamerican. So admitting women followed lodge include from these other demographic changes, at well men and women in the 1960s demonstrate together. Protested together, registered black voters together, not going to School Together seemed increasingly outmoded. So all of this bears on why high School Students changed their minds about the attractiveness of all male schools. What some of the factors bearing on the implementation of coeducation . I think there are two important points to mention. First, probably obviously, leadership matters. The more skillful the president , the easier it was to imagine and then move the institution to embrace the different future. President s deal with alumni, and mobilize internal planning and execution to make coeducation happen, but the other way, the less effective lead are, the easier wait for the many forces of opposition to throw sand in the gears. Second point is that process matters. The more an institution invested in careful analysis and planning, the more likely it was to introduce coeducation reasonably, smoothly. In the absence of adequate process, newcomers are especially women, had a more difficult time. It would be difficult to overestimate how tough it was to make these changes happen. There was fierce opposition from alumni as well as significant resistance from many faculty and students. Let me give you some examples to illustrate the point. As for alumni, lets start with the title of the book keep the damned women out. It comes from. A 1970 letter from a dart mouth alumnus to chair of the dartmouth trustees. He wrote for god sake, for dartmouth sake and for everyones sake, keep the damn women out. He could not have been more typical in his sentimentses. For an example from my university. Why this death wish on the part of princeton, one of alumnus wondered . If women were admit node doubt a very fine school would emerge but Princeton University would be lost forever. Coeducation, another alumnus said, would dilute what the called princetons sturdy masculinity with disconcerting miniskirted young things cavorting on its playing fields. So another alumnus put it this way what is all this nonsense about admitting women to princeton . A good Old Fashioned whor house would be more efficient and much, much cheaper. Is a for tackty the insults faculty the insults dame in different varieties, both subtle and explicit. Some were supportive, some opposed, but virtually everybody but the newly admitted women students on the spot by asking for the womans point of view, no matter whether it was a course in literature or psychology, or the womans point of view might be relevant, or a course in calculus or statistics where such a view clearly wasnt. As for explicit insults consider the art history professor at dartmouth who posted slides of nudes on the screen, winning his hand up running his hand up and down the sides of the or the oceanography professor 0 whod pick pure odd sea crete temperatures, squid, lobster, and naked win oreck the yale Hoyt Department chair who responded when hi was asked by women student to consider offering a course in womens history, he responded that would be like teaching the history of dogs. Now, students were not always much better about welcoming their female classmates. There were regular outbursts from men unaccustomed to having women in their classes. The ben nine version went this way. Its girl. It talks. Male students often told their female counterparts they did not really belong on their campuses. Perhaps not surprisingly, dartmouth offers the most striking examples of that behavior. Dartmouth men hung banners from their dormitory windows declaring no coeds. Coeds go home. They shouted out numbers, meant as ratings of attractiveness as women entered the dining hall. As if they were rating the quality of a dive. Fraternities delighted in and got away with drunken, degrading, dangerous behaviors, physical intimidation, aggressive sexual encounters, and scores of verbal assaults on women students. In the third year of coeducation, this is one of my favorite dartmouth stories the winning entry in the annual intrafraternity hums competition was the song hour our hoe cohogs. Verses of outrageous sex ugly attacks on women and co hog was a nickname for women students. Wont explain further but trust me it was derogatory. The judge of the competition, the dean of college, chose the cohogs as the years most original submission and joined the Fraternity Members in an exuberant public rendition of the song. Let turn now to the specific case of radcliffe and harvard, given where we are located. Its a less lively story but a point of lesson in the complexities of institutional change. I will read some brief passages of from the book and other parts of the story as we go along. By all rights, harvard should have been the first mover in the coming of coeducation. The circumstances were radcliffe was a half mile up the street from harvard, with students whose academic qualifications fully matched those of harvard students. Radcliffe women had been taking classes with harvard men since the the 1940s. The colleges merged most of their Extracurricular Activities in 1950s. The president s of both institutions were enthusiastic. But realizing coeducation in cambridge turned out to be a surprisingly complicated endeavor. In april 1961, nathan marsh piercy, a classical scholar complete his eight years as president of Harvard University, approachedded hit colleague, mary burnting, microbiologist, beginning her second year as president of Radcliffe College wishes the equivalent of a proposal of marriage. Would radcliffe be interested, he asked, in exploring the possibility of becoming fully a part of Harvard University . The inare invitation came as roosevelt a proposal from bunting, who had told him earlier what her ambitions were for radcliffe. She wanted the Harvard Corporation to invite radcliffe to become part of Harvard College. She wanted to reorganize the radcliffe dormitories on a house basis, like harvard. She wanted to give up the graduate school to harvard, and then join Harvard College and Radcliffe College. She had in mind that harvard would take on the whole responsibility for womens education, and radcliffe, which functioned as an undergraduate college on an equal basis with Harvard College. Follow that road map turned out to be much more difficult than bunting might have imagined. Functional code occasion would be realized by 1972, the formal merger between harvard and radcliffe was not to be concluded until 1999. Understanding the long, often torturous path to merger requires reckoning with the deep investment oft Radcliffe Trustees and alumni in stream prestige of their college, and re helping quiching any part of that, compromising the institutions fundamental independence, was not to be undertaken lightly. A series of steps taken in the 1960s and early 1970s, mainly at president buntings initiative but what i have president piercys cooperation, both brought harvard and rad discloser together. Harvard first began awarding degrees to rad deliver students, graduate and under graduate in 1963. In 1966 the hard regard Registrars Office took eve radcliffes undergraduate recommending registration, including course enrollment and academic records and issue shoance of transcripts. Astonishingly in 1967 harvard opened it undergraduate library to radcliffe women. Women students had been excluded from the library for decade on the ground theyd would distract harvard men from their studies. The harvard crimson announced the news of the opening of la hospital to women with the headlines, la mont will open to cliffies after 20 sell but years, noting the move would have been inconceivable when lamont opened. The student quarterly described it as the crumbling of but one more male bastion in harvard yard. With embarracking on coeducation and harvard and radcliffe students lobbying for it, the radcliffe governing board voted in february 1969 to initiate discussions with harvard with a few to merging the two institutions. The criminal crimson declared in a banner headline, cliff proposes marriage to 10,000 men of harvard. The Harvard Corporation responded affirmatively. We can say at once, the president wrote to bunting, that in principle we welcome the prospect of a merger, which shall be happy to join with you in discussion of when and how a merger might be e affected. Pussy piercy promised bunting that harvard would get to work to identified the questions needing answers and expressed the hope that the questions could be resolved and the merger accomplished by the fall of 1970. But that didnt happen. It was not at all easy to accomplishment part of the issue was resistance on the radcliffe side. It was not simply a function of institutional chauvinism. Skepticism of harvard was ground net hard regards history. Harvard had had one tenured position created specifically for a woman faculty member, but no other tenured women among its faculty. There were a handful of women assistant professors, but faculty members who were not tenured have little influence in the university, and there was no path to tenure from the assistant professor rank at harvard in those days. Harvard had no women administrators and the number of male undergraduates at hard vair wad four times the number of students at radcliffe. So, there was reasonable cause for radcliffes trustees to worry about merging the college into a less than hospitable male university. The radcliffe alumni associations Merger Committee tried to envision a restruck tired relationship between radcliffe and harvard that would be consistent with their desire to preserve a radcliffe entity which they said could focus on the interests and contributions of women and to provide richer educational experience for undergraduate women. But the become part of harvard without losing radcliffes identity was a difficult proposition. The committee believed that the full incorporation of women into the mainstream at harvard would have to previous seed any further consideration of the dissolution of rad consecutive college. And that was Radcliffe College and that was not going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime the radcliffe alumni leaders believed Radmanovic Cliff tooth be doing what it could to aide women in completing and making full use of their education. A closer relationship with harvard was one thing. A merger, which would effectively eliminate Radcliffe College, they believed just should be off the table for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the other part of the problem was resistance on harvards side. The faculty of arts and sciences at harvard was simply not ready to be party to what they regarded as the disappearance of Radcliffe College. You could say they were also not ready to take full responsibility for the education of radcliffe students. So, there was plenty of evidence of cooperation between the two institutions, by the beginning of the 1970s, the harvard and radcliffe president s stood sidebyside in delivering welcome speakers to entering women and baccalaureate speeches, and women began to live in harvard houses and freshman dorms and parents of hard regard and radcliffe frenchman joint in the same freshman parents weekend. Women students became eligible to compete for prizes and traveling in post graduate fellowships reserved previously for men. Women and men had equal claim for tickets on big football games. The athletic departments were merged. Women gap very, very, very slowly to be appointed to the harvard faculty, and radcliffe alumni gained the right to vote in elects for the harvard board of overseer and the first two women took their seats on the governing body. Nathan piercy retired in 1971 from the presid