<p><a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things/index.html?hpt=hp_t5”>http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things/index.html?hpt=hp_t5</a></p>
<p>Before looking it up in the article take a guess? It varies. I had no idea.</p>
<p>As a Barnard Mom, I know it wasn’t until the early '80s for Columbia. Others began accepting women in the 70s but there were some who did it much, much earlier than that. I remember seeing something on the news when Harvard began accepting women. I do wish all of the seven sisters had remained women’s colleges. </p>
<p>Harvard had Radcliffe, Brown had Pembroke, Tufts had Jackson. UPenn was coed early on. I graduated high school in 1969. People cannot imagine how the world was then. While I applaud progress for women, I also want to say that this article has a certain agenda, and looking at changes since the 1960’s needs to be more nuanced, complex and careful. For instance:</p>
<p>If a woman stays home today she still cannot get a credit card very easily and may need a co-signer. This would also be true of a man, but it still remains true that more women than men stay home with kids.</p>
<p>I think states should go back to exempting a parent from jury duty if responsible for the care of children under 6, and also if breastfeeding.</p>
<p>Betty Friedan has stated regrets over some of the unexpected ramifications of her first book which was written after she had raised kids. It is not well-known that she was battered by her husband for many years (to the point of near disfigurement), so she certainly did not have only the “problem with no name,” as she called her situation, living in her suburban house with nothing to do that she could call her own once the nest was empty. Also, she has publicly stated that the feminism that was stoked by her book should not forget about children’s needs.</p>
<p>Birth control has led to the hook up culture our kids are struggling with today. I am sure many of this have had this conversation with our sons and daughters. Maybe we need to bring back chaperones! Alcohol plus hook ups seem to equal a prescription for sexual assault issues.</p>
<p>I have no idea what the answers are. Every change has unintended consequences and things tend to balance out over time.</p>
<p>But the main point: yes, of course, Ivy League schools were all male bastions of the establishment. There have been other changes in terms of racial and socioeconomic diversity. In 1969 Ivies were an aristocracy (many students coming from all male boarding school, which are also now co-ed). Now they are a meritocracy, at least in theory. The campuses look very different today.</p>
<p>You barely ever saw a female doctor or lawyer in the 60’s either. As for race, try watching “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” with Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier. Lots of changes over 5 decades.</p>
<p>IIRC. late 60’s/early 70’s for most. I think my sister looked at Yale and she was college class of '76. </p>
<p>There was a thread on this years ago. It’s amazing how all the Ivies (save Cornell) were SO late to the game on this one, when so many other elite schools, plus of course state flagships, were coed from the get-go. </p>
<p>Class of 1973, at least for Princeton. </p>
<p>I myself am very aware as a SAHM that a woman without a steady income will have trlouble getting credit, even if she has worked steadily as a caregiver and housekeeper and has a decent amount of assets. </p>
<p>Also, I was in fact exempted for jury duty when I was raising an autistic child with break except during the hours he was at school. This took some negotiation, since the jury duty folks were incredulous that I was not entitled to and receiving all sorts of “services” that would include respite. </p>
<p>They offered that they had trained child care staff available, but balked when I mentioned that my non-verbal school-aged S, especially in an unfamiliar situation, might attempt to elope, tantrum, bite, scratch, disrobe, urinate or defecate or smear excrement if not monitored, or engage in other unruly behavior. </p>
<p>Yeah, I was guessing 1973. When I applied to colleges in the late seventies, women were still rare at the Ivies and the military academies. Remember all the stories about women at West Point? I was courted pretty heavily by service academics and certain engineering schools. Princeton was only about a third female in the late seventies/early eighties. </p>
<p>Okay, showing how the world has changed but also my old fogey-ism: I remember when groups like Rotary and Toastmasters didn’t allow women. Our local Rotary used to to choose Young Rotarians every month to come have lunch with them and say a few words. My senior year was the first year they chose girls, and only two for the year. I remember attending a Toastmasters meeting, I don’t remember how exactly that happened, and one of the men told me he didn’t believe girls and boys should compete in debate and public speaking! </p>
<p>Okay, I don’t know if women were forbidden from belonging to these groups where I lived. It is fairer to say that no women did belong until I was older. Ten years later I had friends who were members. </p>
<p>Frazzled,I too got exempted with three kids with asthma and one with hard to manage type 1 diabetes. But I went through a lot of fear while waiting to hear. I had NO person on the planet to handle the type 1 and she would have been in danger. Had to get MD documentation etc.</p>
<p>Interesting perhaps: just had a talk with my daughter who is a composer attending a music festival in Europe. Participants are pretty well balanced but faculty and administration are all male, with all female assistants.( No child care either.) One issue seems to be that fields requiring mentoring, like composition, seem to afford fewer opportunities for that mentoring at the moment, when mentors are still mostly male. It will take another generation or two.</p>
<p>Penn and Cornell had women matriculants before the 70s. I’m not sure when it started. Women transfer students were admitted to some Ivy’s beginning with the fall of 1970.</p>
<p>Prior to that there were some women at the Ivy’s on various types of “exchange” programs, where they took courses for a semester and received credit at their home college…but they couldn’t receive a degree from the Ivy in question. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That would be particularly exciting…</p>
<p>Not an Ivy League school but my H was at Notre Dame when it was all male in the early 70’s. He had daily maid service, laundry service, and 3 meals a day every day. I wonder if the school was afraid of what things would look like if they left everything to their all male student body! They did have an arrangement with St. Mary’s (also in South Bend) where students could cross-enroll in classes. When a proposal to merge with St. Mary’s didn’t work out, ND started accepting women in 1972 when he was still a student. </p>
<p>Correction from above. It was fall of 1969. </p>
<p>From a news source in that era.</p>
<p><a href=“Dartmouth to Admit Women in Fall '72 | News | The Harvard Crimson”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/11/22/dartmouth-to-admit-women-in-fall/</a></p>
<p>According to this article:</p>
<p><a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?;
<p>the primary force to move forward toward co-education at two of these colleges was to “get the best boys.”</p>
<p>We have progressed a long way in the past 50 years (Would the riots in 100 cities in 1969 help to accelerate the pace of the movement back then? After all, the number of African Americans admitted to some of these schools were doubled in just one year. Somehow I have the impression that women were allowed to vote at the same time when the minority were allowed to. See what the elite can managed to do to one half of the population for so long if their power is unchecked or challenged. Today, maybe the elite are those in the top few % in SES, rather than a specific race or gender - considering the fact that they continue to increase their wealth and the power associated with it, while most others lose out little by little in the past several decades.)</p>
<p>I could not locate the source. But it seems I read somewhere that in some short 1-3 years in either 1990 or 1991, the percentage of Asian American students who were admitted to several or most of these 8 schools were decreased quite significantly and the percentage had not been increased by much for a long time (maybe) until recently. I guess they found out (or decided) that this group of students became dumber all of a sudden in that year or the year after that. (Or there is “no money or “profit” there” after some careful “calculation”.)</p>
<p>We just closed one thread for political discussion. I’m happy to join in, but it would be nice if this weren’t a one way street. (inappropriate snarky comment deleted)</p>
<p>Barnard has been part of Columbia University for generations. In the mid-1970s Columbia College attempted to merge with Barnard on multiple occasions, only to be thwarted by the Barnard administration. A Barnard president (prior to the excellent Ellen Futter) lost her job because of her severe hostility to accepting additional links with Columbia.</p>
<p>Incidentally, the initiation of co-education at Columbia was a hot topic in the 19th century. Columbia President Frederick Barnard was a staunch advocate of providing a classical education to women. Legend has it that he was on the verge of convincing enough Columbia trustees to vote for co-education, but opponents engineered a last gasp proposal to avoid admitting women. They voted to create a women’s college that would be affiliated with Columbia; Barnard College.</p>
<p>I graduated from high school in 1973 so I remember a lot of this. </p>
<p>This isn’t quite true:
In fact the admissions offices combined in 1975. I know because I applied to Radcliffe only, took a gap year and ended up graduating with the first class to get only Harvard University degrees. Radcliffe college didn’t completely disappear until 1999.</p>
<p>The dorm, Hill House, was originally a women’s dorm built in 1960 by Eero Saarinen. So, Penn had to have women students before 1960;</p>
<p>dadx, Agree with you that it is better to keep this thread away from being a political one again. Another thread, “5 little tips…” has recently been strayed into that direction unfortunately. After all, the title of the current thread starts with “for fun.”</p>
<p>Black men got the right to vote in 1869 (15th amendment) and women got the right to vote in 1920 (19th amendment). Of course, there were various obstacles to black men and women voting, especially in the South, until the 1960’s. But the amendment for black men was almost 50 years before the amendment for women’s suffrage.</p>