"Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Education Practice, Association of American Publishers" "One of Times Higher Education's Books of the Year 2017 (chosen by John Bowers)" Nancy Weiss Malkiel is professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, where she was the longest-serving dean of the college.
A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed
As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education-revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men.
In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male.
Drawing on unprecedented archival research, "Keep the Damned Women Out" is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject. "An important work of cultural history. . . . Malkiel writes with an insider's knowledge of her own institution and from a historian's meticulous reconstruction of what happened at the others."---Linda Greenhouse, New York Review of Books "Malkiel presents an absorbing, richly textured landscape of the experience of thousands of women who found themselves in elite universities that were bastions run by men for men who felt anything on a scale of muddled incomprehension to active aggression at the notion of gender equality."---Rachel Holmes, Times Literary Supplement "In an age when student activists at campuses across the country are focused on microaggressions and safe spaces, it's a bit surreal to read Nancy Weiss Malkiel's history of gender desegregation at elite American and British colleges. Fifty years ago, same-sex schooling in higher education had ended for many public colleges and universities in the United States and Britain, but it remained the norm at most elite universities. . . . How and why, between 1969 and 1974, these prestigious institutions decided to go coed--or not--is the fascinating story Ms. Malkiel tells. And although her narrow focus is gender admission practices, there are clues . . . about the obstacles that continue to prevent the harmony between the many diverse groups of students on campus today."---Lenore Tiefer, Wall Street Journal "One of the most thorough accounts ever written of the determination of highly educated and powerful men to keep women away from the places that endorse exclusive forms of power. . . . A superb, richly documented study."---Mary Evans, Times Higher Education "As well as examining the interplay of interests, egos and bureaucratic structures, Malkiel also shows that sexual politics gave a heightened charge to proceedings. For many people, the character – even the soul – of these institutions seemed to be at stake."---Helen McCarthy, London Review of Books "Fascinating. . . . [This] book offers a compelling study of i
