Before 1974, women and men matriculated at separate Penn schools. On the eve of the merger, College for Women alumnae reflect on the University of a different era.
When 1964 Penn graduate Judy Berkowitz arrived for her first statistics class in the fall of 1960, she was surprised to discover that out of nearly 100 students in the room, she was the only female. Prepared to tackle the challenge, Berkowitz proceeded to a desk until her professor stopped her dead in her tracks.
"Excuse me, are you sure you're in the right class?" Berkowitz recalls him asking. "I said, 'Yes,' and he replied, 'I don't think you are,' so I walked right back out," Berkowitz remembers.
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Such blatant gender discrimination is almost inconceivable to students today, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the integration of the separate College for Women into the School of Arts and Sciences. However, as recently as the 1960s and '70s, these types of occurrences were all too commonplace. Women were either officially or functionally barred from several arenas of University life, ranging from residential life to extracurriculars to athletics, but most notably, academics.
Although Penn first enrolled women in the 1870s, it was not until 1925 that the University opened Bennett Hall as an academic center for women. The College of Liberal Arts for Women was finally established in 1933, with only 11 students and no female faculty members. As a student of the College for Women, Berkowitz attended a University that was quite different academically than the University of today.
In contrast to many of its peer institutions at the time, the College for Women permitted students to enroll in any course which was offered to males after 1954.
"Penn really became coed in practice in 1954," University Archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd says. "That's when all the classes were thrown open to women in Wharton, [the School of Engineering and Applied Science] and all of the undergraduate schools."
But despite the theoretically equal opportunity, most female students at Penn found themselves in an institution visibly dominated by males.
According to University President Judith Rodin -- who graduated from the College for Women in 1966 -- only about 30 percent of the undergraduate student body was female when she attended Penn. "One really felt that although there were lots of women on campus, the truth was that it was still very largely a school populated by males," Rodin says.
Additionally, there were few, if any, females in most of the traditionally "male" classes, such as statistics. For years, women continued to be restricted in practice to classes in the more conventional fields of nursing and education.
"When I was on campus, there weren't many careers open to women," Berkowitz says. "As a result, women prepared for careers as nurses or teachers and didn't really take very many other courses. Although they had the opportunity to enroll in any class they wanted, women certainly didn't have equal access to everything."
Reflecting the general trend of academic inequality felt by students, at the head of the classroom, the inequities were exacerbated. In 1970, only 7 percent of women's professors were female.
"If there were few women in classes that were untraditional for women, there were even fewer female faculty members, and certainly no female senior administrators," Lloyd says.
Though most salient in the field of academics, this unequal access pervaded all areas of campus life prior to the 1975 incorporation of the College for Women into the School of Arts and Sciences, creating vastly greater opportunities for female students.
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The most dramatic difference between the Penn of the 1960s and the Penn of today can be seen in residential life. In the era of the College for Women, all female students were relegated first to the now-demolished Potter and Sargent halls -- located at 34th and Sansom and 36th and Chestnut streets, respectively -- beginning in 1961, to what is now known as Hill College House.
In contrast, today all dormitories are coed, and an Undergraduate Assembly proposal to institute coed undergraduate rooms is under serious consideration.
"Women had to live in a University residence hall or sorority until they were 21," recalls Associate Provost and '71 graduate Janice Bellace. "That limited the number of women who could be enrolled, because there wasn't sufficient housing for women. It was thought acceptable for a man, but not a woman under 21, to live in a private apartment unchaperoned."
The University's decision to build Hill House, the first Penn dormitory constructed especially for women, enabled a considerably larger number of women to attend Penn.
However, merely adding a new women's dormitory did not equate to equal treatment for female students; to the contrary, Hill Hall actually facilitated the University's strict gender discrimination policies. Women were required to eat in the Hill cafeteria -- separately from men, who ate in Houston Hall. Even more strict behavioral supervision over female students' lives was imposed in the forms of curfews and restrictions on guest access and visitation.
"Women were not allowed in the [Quadrangle] and men were not allowed in Hill Hall," Berkowitz says. "There were extremely strict curfews in which we had to be back by 11 p.m. during the week and 1 a.m. on weekends."
"In Hill Hall, there was a big file-card box," Bellace adds. "You wrote there where you were going and put it in an envelope in the box. If you weren't back in time, they would open the envelope, and if you came back late a certain number of times, you were put on 'social probation.'"
To compound the isolation of women caused by Hill Hall, prior to the College for Women's 1975 merger into the School of Arts and Sciences, female students were frequently not permitted to participate in any male extracurricular activities. They were instead restricted to their own separate -- and not always equal -- versions of these activities.
"We had our own newspaper, student government, performing arts groups and limited sports teams," Berkowitz says. "But the University definitely didn't give them the same degree of attention or commitment which it gave to the male activities."
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Despite this perceived inequality between genders on Penn's campus, however, the University was surprisingly one of the more progressive institutions of the time, leading the pack among Ivy League schools in terms of gender equality.
Fellow Ivies Yale, Dartmouth and Princeton had no female students at all until the late 1960s, and Harvard, Columbia and Brown relegated women to separate, affiliated colleges. Penn and Cornell distinguished themselves as the only Ivies to not only include undergraduate female students but also to award them a regular University diploma upon graduation.
"Penn was more progressive than several of its peer institutions," Lloyd says. "Unlike places like Harvard, where women were getting a Radcliffe [Women's College] diploma until the 1990s, women always got their diplomas from the University itself, beginning with their arrival to Penn in the 1870s, which made it a lot easier to achieve gender equality at Penn."
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Although always at the vanguard of gender equality among collegiate institutions, it was not until the turbulent era of the late 1960s and early 1970s that the University began to more fully reflect characteristics of equality viewed from modern standards.
By the mid-1960s, the tide of gender inequality on campus began to turn, albeit ever so slightly, as the University begrudgingly granted increased privileges, frequently only in incremental steps.
"The administration was very resistant to change and gave ground very reluctantly," Lloyd says. "Starting in 1966, there was a gradual, gradual displacement of an old disciplinary code, which changed things like the rule which prohibited men from entering Hill Hall."
For example, Lloyd explains, "the University first changed the rule [allowing] men to enter Hill at all. Then, they let men in females' rooms in Hill, but only with the doors open. The next year, they agreed to allow the doors to be closed before a certain hour. The next year, they finally lifted the restrictions completely."
Extending curfews, abolishing the dress code that prohibited women from wearing pants to class and, most notably, modifying the strict housing regulations allowing residences to become coed were all among the momentous changes which began to transform the campus in the late 1960s.
"Penn first experimented with a coed dorm in 1969," Lloyd says. "Although it was inconceivable as late as 1965, by 1972 coed living was common practice on campus."
Although these changes came very gradually at first, once they began, abetted by the gender equality campaign and sexual revolution sweeping across the nation, Penn's female empowerment movement rapidly gained momentum, resulting in a number of drastic changes throughout the early 1970s.
The most revolutionary change resulted from a sit-in at College Hall following a series of campus rapes, which led to the creation of the Penn Women's Center 30 years ago.
"The University has been awfully good at growing with the maturation of society and evolving," says Fels Institute of Government lecturer and 1963 graduate Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky. "Once it started to change, the transformation occurred very rapidly so it could keep up with the rest of society."
As evidence of this rapid progression toward equality, in less than a decade the College for Women was formally abolished and merged into the School of Arts and Sciences, culminating in women receiving diplomas bearing the same title as those of men in 1976 and signifying a complete incorporation of women into each and every aspect of University life.
With completely coed housing, dining and extracurriculars, essentially equal numbers of male and female students, and with more female faculty and administrators than ever before, it would seem that Penn has indeed managed to keep pace with the times and match, if not lead, the advances which have been made by women in American society.
As the first Ivy League university to have not one, but two female presidents, Penn has shown its continued commitment to gender equality.
"The University did a really good job of incorporating and integrating women," Margolies-Mezvinsky says. "The whole atmosphere is quite different, and the University really works hard to encourage and embrace women."
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Yet although the University has made great strides, it has not completely succeeded in eliminating all vestiges of past inequitable treatment of women. The continuing disparity in representation of women on the faculty, senior administration and the University Board of Trustees indicates that work remains to be done.
"Women have won the right to personal freedoms that are equivalent to those of men, and it's clear that women have achieved entry into every rank the University offers -- student honors, faculty, staff and senior administration," Lloyd says. "Whether that is the same as equality is a matter of considerable debate which remains to be seen."
