No squashing this ‘Critter’

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.

The experiences of the female undergraduates newly admitted to Princeton paled in comparison to the national unrest in the wake of the Vietnam War, Scott recalled in an interview with The Daily Princetonian last week. But while campuses like Kent State’s were waging war against national policy, Princeton’s was undergoing changes of its own as the University’s first female undergraduates walked the lawns of Cannon Green.

“It was an unusual time; it really was,” Scott recalled. “Even the hardest times, in retrospect, have this rosy glow. They were wonderful, young, hopeful years of promise.”

While some of those first female undergraduates might have felt overwhelmed upon arrival, Scott was already familiar with the campus when the University began to admit women in 1969.

Scott first came to Princeton as a member of the Critical Language Program in 1968, part of a group of women known as the “Critters.” This program allowed Scott, who previously attended the all-girls Manhattanville College in New York, to come to Princeton as a visiting student to learn languages that the government deemed “critical to the intelligence diplomatic infrastructure” in the Cold War era.

Yet transferring to Princeton as part of the first group of female undergraduates the following year was hardly a “Pollyanna” transition, Scott explained. Initially, the University planned to admit only new freshman women, citing the Critters’ obligation to their home schools as justification for not accepting transfer students like Scott.

Still, Scott remarked, “One of the things we learned at Princeton was persistence and not to take ‘no’ as an answer.”

In response to the University’s refusal to accept women formally as enrolled undergraduates, the Critters put Scott up for office in the Undergraduate Assembly, the precursor to the USG.

“We thought that if we elected a member of the following year’s student government, how could they send us back?” Scott explained. “We kind of made it a referendum.”

Sure enough, the student electorate voted Scott into office, and she became the assembly secretary. She did add, however, that her election to a stereotypically female position did not in itself mark an ideological shift. Even after her election, the Critters continued to come up with ways to convince the administration of their value.

“As part of our campaign, we used as much charm as we could,” Scott explained, noting that such efforts included inviting then-University president Robert Goheen ’40 to dinner. “It was one of the most wonderful evenings ever.”

The extent to which the Critters’ charm earned them a place in the Class of 1970, though, remains unclear. “I don’t know whether that had any influence at all,” Scott explained. “More influential was the fact that we were a really unusual and capable group of students.”

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The women were judged by their male peers based on their abilities, Scott recalled. Her classes were entirely composed of men, and with women on campus few and far between, most of her friends were male. Though she “was shouted down at one time or another,” both in the Undergraduate Assembly and out of it, she said, “I wasn’t shouted down because I was female, but because I was in a minority opinion.”

At her all-girls high school, Scott explained, “argumentation was not really part of the atmosphere.” At Princeton, she had “to learn to think carefully about the arguments that supported [her] view and re-examine [her] point of view.”

Unfazed by such intellectual clashes, Scott described the common sentiment as one that was more than ready for the shift to coeducation.

The circumstances were “stressful,” Scott added, but being a woman wasn’t an impediment for her. “There were lots of pranks played on the women,” she said. “Some of it was fun, but it was never mean-spirited.”

In fact, though coeducation was important, other issues at the time loomed just as large. Instead of being divided along gender lines, the Princeton community united around the resistance to the war effort. Both women and men were distracted, as the Selective Service Act threatened to draft students’ friends and family members, including Scott’s brother.

She recalled, “Draft lotteries were started, and students were not deferred. We were all holding our breath as the lottery came up.”

After graduating from Princeton, Scott continued to break gender barriers wherever she went. Emboldened by her undergraduate experience, she went on to medical school at Columbia, where she was one of fewer than 10 female students. Later, she was one of two women in surgery training, a branch of medicine that, she pointed out, remains predominantly male.

Scott hesitated to take credit for how she has overcome obstacles and spearheaded the way for women in higher education, both socially and academically. Yet the orange and black tape on her surgical tools is a testament to the impact her time at Princeton had on her life, a legacy inherited by Princeton’s current female undergraduates.

In the words of this Princeton student, woman and surgeon, as e-mailed to the ‘Prince’: “We grow. We learn. We misjudge. We underestimate. We grow some more. We pull the next generation along by accepting and encouraging and rejoicing in their poking and prodding and nudging. Hard to say who benefits more: Princeton, for counting you and me among her daughters, or you and me, for now being a treasured part of her.”

This is the third article in a five-part series commemorating the 40th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton.