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E-PrinceWomen at the Gate: 40 Years After Coeducation
Miss Bikini U.S.A., Class of 1973
They called her “Miss Bikini.” “A statuesque blonde from Elberon, N.J.,” the Time magazine article said, a “lovely Tigress” whose photo graced the magazine in the summer of 1969.
Not just a ‘cunning linguist’
Sitting in the stands at the 1968 Princeton-Harvard football game, Mary Procter GS ’71, a graduate student in the Wilson School, was disgusted. The University band was making jokes referring to Princeton’s small female population — a group of women studying critical languages — as “cunning linguists.”
No squashing this ‘Critter’
Susan Craig was the only one of the Undergraduate Assembly officials in the room who didn’t shave before that day’s meeting in 1969. A model of resilience, the Undergraduate Assembly secretary who became Susan Scott ’70 was such a graceful pioneer for women at Princeton that perhaps even she failed to discern the lasting significance of her achievements.
Spurring sports without a budget
Princeton’s 17 varsity women’s athletics teams have earned Ivy League titles and All-American accolades, but when women first came to Princeton 40 years ago, Dillon Gymnasium did not even have a women’s locker room. The first female Tigers broke into intercollegiate athletics at Princeton largely thanks to the pioneering work of Merrily Baker, who started the women’s sports program following the advent of coeducation at the University in 1969.
Bursting open the bubble
It was the end of a particularly “slow semester” in 1969 when Mier Ribalow ’70 and his roommates decided to turn the ongoing dialogue about coeducation at Princeton into a case study. Their ideas took shape as “Co-Ed Week,” an event held on Princeton’s campus from Feb. 9 through Feb. 14 of that year. Roughly 800 undergraduate women would be chosen from 30 women’s colleges scattered across the Atlantic seaboard to experience Princeton and attend classes as female students.