Women in the Ivy League
March 28, 2017 8:35 AM   Subscribe

 
This was a really interesting article, although I question the title. A lot of smart people don't go Ivy.
posted by OrangeDisk at 10:22 AM on March 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


A lot of smart women didn't have the choice to not go Ivy, unlike their male counterparts.
posted by rtha at 10:39 AM on March 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


Up until the year before the first cohort of female undergraduates arrived at Yale, the freshman handbook included this passage, as it had for years: “Treat Yale as you would a good woman; take advantage of her many gifts, nourish yourself with the fruit of her wisdom, curse her if you will, but congratulate yourself in your possession of her.”

Go fuck yourself.


(social comment from a female Cornell graduate)
posted by strelitzia at 10:40 AM on March 28, 2017 [27 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Don't troll here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:04 AM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Good posture. That's how they got the chance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
posted by surplus at 11:50 AM on March 28, 2017


It's mentioned in the link, but a bit buried. Harvard finally fully merged it's women's college, Radcliffe, with the full university in 1999. Here's some of the history of women at Harvard.
posted by msbrauer at 12:08 PM on March 28, 2017


I'm a higher ed scholar and some of my work has focused on history with time spent in university and college archives. Old student handbooks are *amazing* to read! Passages like the one quoted in the article (and above by strelitzia) are amazingly common (or at least they really, really stand out to someone reading these documents in the 21st century). I'm always surprised by the institutionalized hazing with ridiculous rules like "All freshmen must wear their class beanies until Christmas," "Lowerclassmen are forbidden from walking on the grass," and other similar nonsense that was written into the institution's "official" policies even into the 1950s. Of course, you also see institutionalized sexism (for coed campuses, or single-sex campuses that later became coed) in the policies. Much of my work has focused on residence halls and even into the 1980s there were blatantly sexist policies e.g., different visiting hours for men's and women's residence halls, different policies regarding curfews for men and women.
posted by ElKevbo at 12:10 PM on March 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


The first co-ed class at Columbia was the class of 1987. 1987. Some (not all) of the resistance came from Barnard, but still.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:22 PM on March 28, 2017


"Lowerclassmen are forbidden from walking on the grass,"

Still alive and well at Oxford (at least some colleges).
posted by praemunire at 1:01 PM on March 28, 2017


Another Cornell alum, here. (Hey, strelitzia!) FWIW, Cornell University was established in 1865, opened in 1868, and admitted women starting in 1870. (The first African-American women graduated from Cornell in the 1890s.) Cornell wasn't/isn't perfect, obviously. Women were required to live in the dorms until 1972, and women were kept separate from men in many social activities until the 1930s (and I'm sure, to a lesser extent, beyond), and though the first woman got her Veterinary degree from Cornell's Vet School in 1910, there were graduate school quotas for women up until 35 or so years ago.

But at least conceptually? Well, let's just note that the school's motto is, "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Not man, but person.

(To be fair, I believe Brown was only a couple of decades behind us in accepting women.)
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 1:53 PM on March 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


The first co-ed class at Columbia was the class of 1987. 1987. Some (not all) of the resistance came from Barnard, but still.

For what it's worth there are currently three undergraduate schools at Columbia plus the affiliated Barnard. The engineering school was coed for many decades before the College and General Studies was coed from its creation shortly after WWII. It's just the college that didn't start admitting until 1983, and the resistance from Barnard shouldn't be understated. Columbia had been pressuring Barnard to merge since the late 60's and coeducation at Columbia College was barred by written agreement between the two schools.
posted by NormieP at 2:05 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


But at least conceptually? Well, let's just note that the school's motto is, "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Not man, but person.

Thanks for the reminder, TWKoC! Totally slipped my mind. Cornell's creed is the right attitude for anyone to learn by.
posted by strelitzia at 2:30 PM on March 28, 2017


An interesting review of what sounds like a great book; thanks for posting it. Another piquant tidbit: "Every intermediate step was complicated, even merging the two schools’ admissions offices; it turned out that the highest-paid employee in the Radcliffe office had the same salary as the lowest-paid person on the Harvard side."
posted by languagehat at 2:37 PM on March 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


A female student who asked the head of Yale’s history department about offering a course in women’s history was told, “That would be like teaching the history of dogs.”
and
A Princeton English professor responded to a female student who wanted to write a paper on women writers: “I’m interested in auto mechanics, but I don’t try to bring that into the curriculum.”
Wow.

I was accepted into Haverford College's class of 1984, four years after it went co-ed. I had some trepidation that residual sexist attitudes might remain but it turned out, thankfully, not to be a problem.
posted by olopua at 3:22 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]




It's mentioned in the link, but a bit buried. Harvard finally fully merged it's women's college, Radcliffe, with the full university in 1999. Here's some of the history of women at Harvard.

Indeed, I was in the last incoming class of women to be admitted to Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Until I arrived in Cambridge I had no idea what the Radcliffe part was. Where I grew up no one had ever heard of Radcliffe, while everyone knew about Harvard but it did become important to be part of a history of women as poor relations of Harvard, simultaneously derided (as poor relations often are) as ugly blue stockings. It still feels like a loss that young women after me never felt even my tenuous connection with Radcliffe, and many older alumnae were, unsurprisingly, very upset.
posted by tavegyl at 5:19 PM on March 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I attended a Columbia-Harvard women's rugby game (played as a club sport) within the last few years and the Harvard team cheered for Radcliffe (in addition to Harvard), which I found surprising and cool. Kinda funny since Columbia cheers don't really ever include references to Barnard (and they wouldn't be expected to...Barnard students compete athletically under the Columbia banner), despite the significant number of Barnard students on the team.
posted by R a c h e l at 12:46 AM on March 29, 2017


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