Posts Tagged ‘Princeton’
Tigers and Tigresses: 40th Anniversary of Coeducation at Princeton
This post is generously shared by its author, former New York Times reporter (she was their first female sports reporter) Robin Herman. It was originally published Sept. 12 on her blog girlinthelockerroom. Robin was also in the first class of women at Princeton University.
Forty years ago this September, on the first weekend after Labor Day, a group of just over 170 young women set foot on the Princeton campus as bona fide members of the University’s 3,400-strong student body. Their steps onto the ivied campus and into the old stone classrooms constituted an historic milestone for the more than 200-year-old Princeton, but it was also recognized as a symbolic act for a nation that was grappling with issues of equity in civil rights and women’s rights. For until that fall of 1969, young women, no matter their intelligence and potential, were still excluded from some of the greatest centers of learning in the United States — Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth — while several others of the Ivy League colleges maintained a technical distance from women by admitting them only through “sister schools”.
Although Yale University also went coed that same fall, it was Princeton that attracted television cameras, high jinx and hoopla as we arrived at the designated women’s dormitory, Pyne Hall, on a sunny afternoon, the yellow bees buzzing around the juice and cookies that had been placed on tables in the courtyard. Princeton and its Gothic architecture, beauty and fraternal traditions had been advertised for decades to thousands of high school English classes through its best publicist, Princeton alumnus F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his semi-autobiographical novel “This Side of Paradise.”
Princeton’s decision had come haltingly and hastily in the spring of 1969 as a means to blur its “old boy” image and stay competitive, recognizing that top high school students were showing Woodstock-era preferences for coed colleges. By admitting just a sprinkling of young women, Princeton became a coed institution that year in name only, our presence serving as a test case. Would we make it?
And so that September we were greeted by a welcoming committee of male student guides who gallantly carried our luggage up the steep flagstone steps to our dorm rooms. But we also soon heard about the outraged alumni who saw in us teenaged girls the slipping away of the all-male Princeton paradise that they’d known. In letters to the University and to the alumni magazine, furious male alumni baldly suggested that Princeton was wasting student slots on women — who would only get married and tend house afterwards — even mounting a discredited movement some 10 years later to “Bring Back the Old Princeton.”
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Helen Zia: A Disobedient Daughter and Her Passion For Justice
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I am delighted to welcome a very powered young woman, Lee Taylor, as a regular guest poster. Lee is a writer and feminist activist who is a senior at SUNY Purchase College majoring in History and minoring in Women’s Studies. She is currently working on her senior thesis about Helen Rogers Reid, her great-grandmother, and former President of the New York Herald Tribune. After she graduates she plans on teaching high school. I’m especially thrilled that her first post here is a profile of my friend and Women’s Media Center board member sister, Helen Zia.
Helen Zia was born into a Chinese American family in New Jersey in 1952. Although the fifties was a time Lee Taylor and Helen Ziaof great conformity, the seeds of revolution were sown the day that Zia was born. Zia was brought into an immigrant family which observed traditional Confucian beliefs, including the Three Obediences: a daughter must obey her father, a wife must obey her husband, and a widow must obey her son; the trajectory of Zia’s life proves that she was truly a radical visionary and community organizer who broke seemingly insurmountable social and cultural barriers.
Helen Zia graduated from Princeton University in the first class that accepted women. She was also breaking racial boundaries as one of the few female, Asian American members of the prestigious university. Zia attended Princeton on a full scholarship, working her way through school and majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
She was highly conscious of and became an active participant in the political transformations taking place in her young adulthood. Zia and her generation witnessed the nascent feminist movement, and the full-fledged civil rights movement, as well as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Hers was the baby boom generation – huge numbers of young people who were dissatisfied by their government’s war in Vietnam and inequality at home – they were idealistic about the opportunities for peace and sisterhood.
Zia’s career experiences after Princeton, however, showed that the youth-led social justice movements had not reached all areas of society. After graduation, Zia enrolled in Tufts Medical School in Boston. She moved to Boston’s South End; a neighborhood then predominantly inhabited by low-income Chinese, Puerto Rican, and African Americans, far from the glamorous place it is today. Helen soon discovered that medicine, a conservative white and male institution at the time, was not a friendly place for an Asian American woman committed to progressive social change. After two years of medical school, Zia felt a sincere urge to get involved in grassroots efforts to change troubled communities – she quit medical school and became a construction worker in her South End community, which offered Zia a way to create change, educate herself on community needs, and pay the bills.
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