Keep the Damned Women Out: the Struggle for Coeducation

Labyrinth Books and The Princeton Public Library continue their collaborative events series with a presentation and discussion on the history of coeducation with Professor Nancy Weiss Malkiel. We hope you can join us.

As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, “Keep the damned women out.” Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, Malkiel reveals how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men.