OWL presents panel on first female students

For female students at Princeton, finding a bathroom in any campus building is not a problem.

This was not the case, however, for Margaret Cannella, Ellen Ebert, Sally Fields, Harriet Hawkins and Robin Krasny, all members of the class of '73. As members of the first class to admit women to the University, they often found themselves scrambling to find a ladies room on a campus that was just beginning to adjust to the presence of female students.

The five women spoke yesterday evening about their experiences as the first women at Princeton and what it has meant for them after graduation. The event was titled "The First Class: Princeton 30 Years After Co-Education" and was sponsored by OWL.

Because no women had entered the University before them, the women of '73 were a distinct minority with no clear precedent to follow when mapping out their Princeton careers, Cannella said.

"When I came here I essentially felt like a stranger in a strange land," she said. "I felt like I was a woman attending a man's college. There just was not context for my experience. We all knew what a Princeton man looked like but we didn't know what a Princeton woman looked like."

The women also lacked many female mentors and role models, since the number of women professors at the University was quite small.

"Late in my life I had no idea how to balance a career and kids in part because of the lack of female role models," Ebert said. "I felt a lot of guilt because of that. Today I can see all kinds of [daycare] facilities available but there weren't a lot for prekindergarten kids back then."

While academic discrimination was not common, social pressure was prevalent on campus, Krasny said.

"There was antipathy between men and women in our class, and there still is at reunions," she said. "Even now, we are the only class with different male and female blazers at reunions. This seems to maintain the dichotomy into posterity."

While some of the panelists said they felt discriminated against while at the University, others pointed to their male friends as major supporters of their goals and ambitions.

"I have an image in my mind of sitting on the porch of Colonial with my male friends and talking about where we were all going to grad school," Cannella said. "The men's hopes and aspirations for careers were transferred to me. We were so focused on what we were going to get out of Princeton and do after it."

If the 1970s was characterized by women moving into the workforce, the late 1990s and early 2000s have been characterized by some well-educated women moving out.

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The New York Times Magazine recently noted the phenomenon of professional women leaving their careers to start families in an article that drew upon the example of Princeton alumni.

Krasny expressed disappointment over this development while other panelists said that feminism was about the right to choose one's own path.

"I've always had a feeling that I had a responsibility to use this chance of being at Princeton to do something afterwards," Krasny said. "Is feminism the right to choose, or a responsibility to other women? For me at least, I felt like I had a special opportunity here and that I better do something with it."

Princeton has become more diverse since the day the women of '73 entered the University, the panelists noted with pride.

"I was walking in the P-rades with a classmate recently, and looking around at everyone she said 'Wow, this isn't our fathers's Princeton,'" Krasny said. "I turned to her and said 'Hell, this isn't our Princeton either.'"