Coeduation in Princeton: it started at the Graduate School

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In Sep­tem­ber 1969, more than two years after Pres­i­dent Goheen asked for­mer Woodrow Wil­son direc­tor Gard­ner Pat­ter­son to inves­ti­gate the intro­duc­tion of coed­u­ca­tion, Prince­ton wel­comed its first under­grad­u­ate women to cam­pus. Within the Ivy League Prince­ton was rel­a­tively late: while Yale made the move at the same time, only Dart­mouth (1972) and Colum­bia (1983) went coed­u­ca­tional later. It was not the first time, how­ever, that women entered Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity for a degree. In 1961 Sabra Fol­lett Meser­vey, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of his­tory at Dou­glass Col­lege in New Brunswick, became the first woman to be enrolled at the Grad­u­ate School as a full time degree can­di­date in Ori­en­tal Stud­ies. Meser­vey pro­vides a humor­ous account of her meet­ing with Goheen to arrange the ‘test case’ dur­ing the cel­e­bra­tion of coed­u­ca­tion at the Grad­u­ate School on June 3, 1989 (14:45).

Fea­tured here is a ninety-minute forum dur­ing which five speak­ers dis­cuss their expe­ri­ences as women at the Grad­u­ate School and after. After a his­tor­i­cal intro­duc­tion about women in higher edu­ca­tion by the orga­nizer of the event, Lisa Drake­man *88 (1:35), Sabra Fol­lett Meser­vey *66 is the first speaker (10:26). She is fol­lowed by T’sai-ying Cheng *64, the first female recip­i­ent of a degree in Prince­ton (28:04), Phyl­lis Thomp­son *76 (50:15), Mau­reen Quirk *82 (1:08:38), and Sindee Simon *92 (1:19:34).
This VHS video is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no.1306).

 

 

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