Miss Bikini U.S.A., Class of 1973

And thus June Fletcher ’73 started her Princeton career.

As Time went on to acknowledge, Fletcher was more than just a “ringer.” The physical attributes that garnered the attention of the national magazine were only complements to the speaking talents and academic credentials of the “lovely Tigress.”

Yet Fletcher had a lot to prove. One hundred women marching through FitzRandolph Gate may no longer seem out of place at a Princeton Pre-Rade. But in 1969, Fletcher, now a Wall Street Journal columnist, was part of the University’s great coeducation “experiment,” the results of which would influence not only Fletcher’s career, but the future of women in elite higher education.

“Princeton had been a single-sex college for so long,” Fletcher said of her arrival at Princeton as part of the first coed class. “It wasn’t just going to college, but representing your gender at a time when gender rights were very much in the air … Coed would have failed if we failed.”

This sense of responsibility motivated her to do “nothing but study” throughout her freshman year. “Everybody was watching us,” the administration included, Fletcher explained. “There was a lot of pressure to succeed, to get good grades. But pressure is good, because when you get out of school, there is more pressure.”

Though she said she originally wanted to attend Vassar College, Fletcher referred to her rejection letter for early admission there as “a blessing” for the opportunity it gave her to be challenged at Princeton.

The small classes and the tutorial system did not allow anyone remain passive observers, she explained. “You don’t get to hide behind the class, you get called on,” Fletcher said, adding that she did not particularly need such encouragement. “I was one of the few women in my classes,” she explained. “I felt a need to speak out.”

Princeton’s social scene during Fletcher’s freshman year also posed unique difficulties. For one thing, 3,200 male Princetonians far outnumbered the 100 freshmen and 30 transfer students, prompting Fletcher’s quotation in Time: “I’ve met so many boys today, they’re all just one big blur.”

Social interactions were “awkward and difficult at times,” Fletcher said, though her “academic experience was 100 percent positive.”

The kind of attention that female students received from their male classmates was not what one might imagine. “People would stare at you but not approach you,” Fletcher said. “It felt like we were inside a bell jar, under a microscope.”

The pool of potential dates was further reduced by social “mixers,” for which female students from other colleges would be invited to campus even after the first coed class came to Princeton. Male students categorized the visiting women as “imports.”

“You would think men would be happier,” Fletcher noted about the introduction of coeducation to Princeton. But, she said, “There was nobody happier to see more women come to Princeton than the women already there.”

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She added, though, that as more women were admitted in subsequent years, the awkwardness surrounding interactions between male and female students gradually subsided.

After graduating from the University with a degree in English in 1973, Fletcher pursued English graduate studies at Oxford.

“Going to Princeton and having to put yourself out there pretty much all the time, at all levels, gives you an extra boost of confidence,” Fletcher explained.

This “extra boost of confidence” proved invaluable when she entered the world of journalism and began writing about real estate, both highly male-dominant sectors. “I felt comfortable,” Fletcher said. “I had learned that I could succeed in a male-dominant world.”

Fletcher’s ambitions of being a journalist began early, when she wrote a review of her school play at age 9. Yet despite her strong educational background and self-confidence, becoming a female journalist was not easy.

Initially, Fletcher tried to enter broadcast journalism. But when she applied for a radio job, Fletcher said, “The employer told me, ‘Nobody wants to listen to a woman’s voice.’ ”

“It’s hard to blaze the path by yourself,” Fletcher said, noting that there weren’t many female role models for her generation to look up to. “When we went into the business world, women tried to dress like men, talk about sports as opposed to things we cared more about. Women emulated men because they were the only role models.”

Despite the difficulties, Fletcher said she felt a sense of accomplishment for “having paved the way for the following generations.”

“People used to care more about how women look as opposed to what goes [on] inside their heads,” the former beauty queen said. Now, though, people don’t dwell on women’s fashion choices, she said, except for Michelle Obama’s. “But we had to prove ourselves intellectually to be taken seriously.”

Women no longer need to dress like men to be taken as equals, Fletcher said. “Hillary Clinton wears yellow pants, and so can you.”

This is the first article in a five-part series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton. Each profile highlights a different aspect of the process of integration of women into Princeton’s undergraduate program.