<p>She won a prize for the biography she wrote of her mother-in-law, “Grandmother Brown’s Hundred Years,” which was a popular book back in the early 1930s and went through quite a few printings. I believe it has been used in some women’s studies courses. It is unique in its perspective: An early 20th-century “feminist” telling the life story of a 19th-century pioneer woman. (A fascinating book–I’ve recommended it on CC before.)</p>
<p>“Black men got the right to vote in 1869 (15th amendment) and women got the right to vote in 1920 (19th amendment).”</p>
<p>In fact some women and African-Americans did exercise the right to vote in some, though undeniably few, states before the Civil War. There were female property owners whom voted.</p>
<p>My great aunt got her bachelors and masters degrees from Notre Dame – not St. Mary’s – in the 1950s. Impossible, you say? Well, interestingly, there was a little-known exception to the all-male rule for nuns. After graduating, my great aunt became very active in alumni affairs, became president of one of the local chapters of the Notre Dame alumni club and was voted “Notre Dame Man of the Year” some time in the 1960s. </p>
<p>Interestingly, before she was elected president, the alumni club held its meetings in a prominent city club that did NOT allow women through its doors (at least to the portion of the club where the meetings were held). She somehow stormed the premises and managed to get admitted to the club as a guest decades before other women were admitted. </p>
<p>I have an extremely large family. She was the only person in that generation (my grandparents’ generation) or in my parent’s’ generation to go to college.</p>
<p>What a great pair of ND stories, I will be sure to tell the young woman I know who is attending this fall. The great aunt sounds like a singular character.</p>
<p>Vance Packard wrote in The Status Seekers in 1959 that Princeton had only recently (i.e. late 1950s) started admitting a majority of students from public schools. In those days, the public schools were the source of the academic strivers who gave HYP the academically elite status, while the the boarding school graduates were the scions of the SES elite who mostly showed no special academic inclination, being content with “gentleman’s C” grades and looking down on the academic strivers who needed to do well in school because they did not have the advantages of family connections and inheritance. I.e. it was back then that inheritance and breeding were far more important for social status relative to individual merit or achievement, compared to today.</p>
<p>The preference for the SES elite boarding school graduates had a lot to do with keeping the donations flowing, similar to how legacy preferences (and the less common “developmental admits”) exist today.</p>
<p>Not all state flagships were open to women “from the get go”. Wisconsin was started in 1849 but only a few segregated (from the men) women allowed much later in that century. They named one of the first women’s dorms after the U head who did not want women on campus, Chadbourne (later rebuilt as a tower, now coed like all of the dorms).</p>
<p>Being “a part of” a men’s college was not good enough for me. Aside from no need blind admissions in my day and living in the Midwest I decided there was no way I was going to Radcliffe instead of Harvard (although they were merging around my time). HS class of 1971- in time to see the end of the Vietnam war protests et al at UW. I have had oldies stations on my car radio forever- I notice they never play any of the protest songs from that era.</p>
<p>Women had it tough in my mother’s generation. You should read what a 1950’s housewife was supposed to do! There were plenty of kids- one neighbor lady had 5 girls then birth control came and no more kids! She was an RN but all of the others were at home- they used to coffee klatch as a way to have some adult conversation (and of course there was no way we could get away with saying so-and-so’s mother let her…). My mother was bored.</p>
<p>I am a little sensitive to the word " political" . Someone got a recent thread shut down by purposefully adding political statements, stating she was trying to close it and then requesting it be closed to moderators for politics. Can we keep it for fun?</p>
<p>This thread:</p>
<p>I was just very surprised that I could not have gone to Harvard if I wanted to.</p>
<p>I guess keeping my maiden name back then was much more outlandish than I thought. </p>
<p>At Penn, prior to 1933 women could enroll in selected courses and could obtain a Bachelors Degree in Education (which was the way for women to get a degree at Penn, even if they had no intention of teaching)</p>
<p>In 1933, a separate College of Liberal Arts for Women was formed (after the faculty, students and alumni of the College of Arts and Sciences rejected the idea of going coeducational) and that school existed until 1974:</p>
I suspect that, to a lessor degree, this is still true. However, it is a big improvement that the gentleman C’s may no longer be entitled to be at such a place like the big 3. But I noticed that those with the “right” inheritance and breeding tend to have more freedom in “learning for learning’s sake” (this is good), and tend to believe that "the major does not matter at all to them - which oftentimes means they flock to an easy, not so serious major (this could be bad - as this is still a mild form of gentleman’s C club.) but it generally does not cause any problem at all for these students with the right breed when they choose an easy major. This is because their families will take care of the rest as long as they graduate with any major (like what career to take, if any inspiration exists by the time they graduate).</p>
<p>DS once commented that those on the premed track (and stay on that track) were mostly from a public high school, because the grinding nature of that track does not appeal to a certain segment of student population. Even when they are completely capable of continuing on that path, they tend to try a few courses there and say “no, thanks” to that career path. Also, it seems female students tend to be more resilient on staying on this career path as compared to the male students. I heard that a club like “Political Union” which may groom our next generation of political leaders, is full of males.</p>
<p>I have a bunch of relatives who are part of the pre-war/post-war cohort at Harvard who all attended prep schools. They are no dummies. I’m not saying that there weren’t plenty of Gentlemen C types coming out of the prep schools, (both Kennedy and the younger Bush fell into that category), but painting with such a broad sweep of the brush is a bit unfair. </p>
<p>I also think that the elite colleges are probably a healthier place if there’s somebody in the happy bottom quarter of the class.</p>
<p>I have a nice women-at-Notre Dame story. I had a friend who grew up in the same city I did (which was, in general, a very Catholic, Rust Belt kind of place). She graduated from Notre Dame, not St. Mary’s, in 1978. At the time Notre Dame admitted women to its engineering programs because St. Mary’s did not offer an engineering degree.</p>
<p>Anyway, one vacation her senior year of college she was hanging out at a sports-bar in our city that was sort of the Catholic high school jock alumni bar, and a nice-looking guy started to chat her up. Which was great, except he told her he went to Notre Dame, and she knew perfectly well he didn’t. (A: she knew everyone from our city there; B: she was pretty sure she knew every boy that cute there.) Of course, he never bothered to ask where she went to school, since the probable answer was community college, a local small Catholic college, or nowhere. She kept flirting with him, while asking him more and more specific questions about his life and friends at Notre Dame, until she finally told him that she went to Notre Dame and he didn’t, and he ought to explain himself. He was . . . the all-Ivy starting quarterback for Yale, a molecular biology major on his way to medical school. Except, in our city, in that bar, hardly anyone knew what Yale or molecular biology were. If you wanted to impress girls there, merely attending Notre Dame – he couldn’t claim to play football there – was much better than being a bona fide Ivy League football star.</p>
<p>Although Radcliffe had separate admissions and residence life from Harvard until the early 1970s, all classes at Harvard/Radcliffe were coeducational beginning in 1943.</p>
<p>Taking classes together is nice but not getting the same credentials is the reason I didn’t want Radcliffe (and who knows if I would have been accepted, even if finances were no issue). If, as a woman, I was getting the same education I should get the same diploma. I never had an east coast mentality. That story above about location and prestige is so revealing. It would be interesting to see students from many schools known in the east to come to the Midwest and try to flaunt their schools- and receive blank looks. “Everybody” knows varies with location.</p>
<p>I went to Notre Dame in 1979 and had no idea that women were only recently admitted. I stayed in the Womans graduate student housing during the school year which was right off campus and very nice.( 4 bedroom townhouse for 4 women) There were nuns on campus (housed in my dorm in the summers) and also enough women that it seemed to me like they were there forever.</p>
<p>There were a fair amount of profs dating students back then which totally surprised me.</p>
But although classes were together, exams weren’t. Radcliffe had an honor code and and didn’t procotor exams Harvard did. (According to my Mom who attended Radcliffe in the 50s.) Apparently women were more trustworthy!</p>
<p>Harvard degrees said, “Harvard College, Harvard University” and Radcllife ones said, “Radcliffe College, Harvard University” I think, so I don’t see what the big hoopla was about not going to Harvard. (Well it said it in Latin back then IRC.) H-R was more integrated than Barnard was in those days. I remember being told that you could cross register between classes at Barnard and Columbia, but it sure didn’t look like that much was happening when I sat in on a couple of classes in the 70s. Coming from a girl’s school that was a big minus. Harvard/Radcliffe had co-ed dorms and co-ed classes which was what I cared about especially since I was coming from an all-girls school and really, really wanted a change from that.</p>
<p>Maybe it was the fact that my grandmother was Radcliffe '19 and president of the local Radcliffe Club, but I never had a sense that the Radcliffe diploma she had was any less valuable than the Harvard ones her brothers and brothers-in-law had.</p>
<p>Cornell admitted its first woman in 1872, 4 years after it opened (1868).</p>
<p>Dartmouth admitted women in 1972, which also yielded it infamous D-Plan quarter system. (By requiring a full summer term for Juniors, Dartmouth was able to add females without a major expansion of its residential housing (or reducing the number of men).</p>