When Tom Alexander ’70 came to Wesleyan in 1966, girls were not allowed in dorm rooms after hours. The school was still all male. Old-fashioned Italian ladies in nearby houses would provide rooms for weekend couples.
“It was pretty funny to take your date over to one of these places and kiss her at the door,” he said. “It was just like high school on the girl’s front porch.”
In the backdrop were the Vietnam War, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement. Times were changing, and Wesleyan was following suit. On May 11, 1968, after much debate, University trustees voted to admit women to B.A. programs.
The following fall, 23 women transferred to Wesleyan, marking the first time women had been full time students here since 1912.
This worked out well for Alexander. He married one of these first female transfers.
In the beginning, Wesleyan men had to adjust to the influx of women. Alexander was in the Glee Club at the time and said the group voted resoundingly against including women.
“We didn’t know how to deal with them, so we didn’t,” he said.
Before 1968, admitting women had been on the backburner for at least a couple of decades, according to Suzy Taraba ’77, University archivist and head of Special Collections. One plan floating around was to create a coordinate college on the Long Lane property.
According to an archived copy of the Argus, an Educational Policies Committee studied the possibility of coeducation in 1966.
“It was the way most universities were going,” Taraba said. “The alumni got used to the idea too.”
Wesleyan, of course, scrapped the Long Lane plan, opting for full integration.
“The Administration had a brilliant plan to make it work,” Taraba said of a plan to significantly increase the size of the school instead of turning away men who feared the girls would take their spots.
While Taraba, who attended from 1975-1977, was part of one of the early classes of women at Wesleyan, she said the girls did not feel particularly revolutionary.
“That’s not how we saw it,” she said. “Most of us had gone to co-ed high schools. I didn’t have any real sense of striking a blow for women. But that’s just me.”
It was different for those first women in the late ’60s.
“There was little interaction between men and women,” Alexander said. “Except for me; I figured it out pretty quick.”
Many of the women were lonely, he said.
Once the female frosh arrived, their numbers increased dramatically. In 1971, there were 180 women and 260 men in the freshman class.
Peter Kilby, Professor of Economics and Tutor in the College of Social Studies, arrived at Wesleyan in 1965, just in time to witness the major transition.
“I was an agnostic,” he said. “I neither supported nor opposed it.”
Kilby said he was surprised at how much the introduction of women changed class dynamics.
“It did improve the quality of what went on in the classroom, both because you have the female perspective, and it made Wesleyan males think twice before making their contribution,” he said.
Kilby added that when the number of women admitted was small, their academic performance was superior to that of their male counterparts, a distinction that disappeared when their numbers reached greater parity.
By the mid-seventies, girls were completely at home on campus. Alexander returned to Wesleyan in 1973 for graduate school and found a much more accepting environment.
“Things were totally different and women were pretty well integrated,” he said.
Arlyn Greenspan-Siegelaub ’77, who married Steven Siegelaub ’78 and is the mother of Jon Siegelaub ’06, said that Wesleyan in the late seventies did not look all that different than the Wesleyan of today.
“It seemed like everyone there belonged there, everyone got along very well, and it was a wonderful experience,” she said. “The kids still look the same.”
But things were very different at Wesleyan the first time the school tried to go coeducational between 1872-1912. In the beginning, only a few women enrolled, but by the 1890s, enough enrolled to roil the trustees. They passed a motion limiting women’s enrollment to no more than 25 percent of the student body, according to Taraba.
The women who did attend were kept on the periphery of student life. They boarded in town or lived in with their families. Some Middletown residents did not like the idea of women attending college and refused to rent them rooms.
Female students could not participate in the yearbook, Argus or numerous other student organizations.
In the end, male alumni thought women were weakening Wesleyan’s reputation among its rival institutions. In 1910, Wesleyan stopped admitting women. Some alumni went on to found Connecticut College to take Wesleyan’s place.
The Wesleyan men of the sixties and seventies were much more welcoming of women, even if they had some issues transitioning. Social life for these men was made up in large part of road trips to New England all-girls schools. On some weekends, the girls would come to Wesleyan for dances or parties. The lucky guys and girls would have pre-arranged dates. Some just hoped to get lucky.
When the first Wesleyan women came, the men were a little slow to adjust.
“Men only knew how to do road trips to women’s colleges,” Alexander said of the first years. “There was little interaction between men and women.”
In just a few years, men were well adjusted to the new campus social life.
“In 1975, women are a pretty hot commodity,” Taraba said. “Most men were thrilled to have them on campus. They didn’t have to travel to Holyoke or Smith.”
Taraba said that it was partly because of student pressure that contemporary coeducation came to fruition.
It came just in time for Alexander. He and his girlfriend were married by senior year.
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