In September 1969, more than two years after President Goheen asked former Woodrow Wilson director Gardner Patterson to investigate the introduction of coeducation, Princeton welcomed its first undergraduate women to campus. Within the Ivy League Princeton was relatively late: while Yale made the move at the same time, only Dartmouth (1972) and Columbia (1983) went coeducational later. It was not the first time, however, that women entered Princeton University for a degree. In 1961 Sabra Follett Meservey, an assistant professor of history at Douglass College in New Brunswick, became the first woman to be enrolled at the Graduate School as a full time degree candidate in Oriental Studies. Meservey provides a humorous account of her meeting with Goheen to arrange the ‘test case’ during the celebration of coeducation at the Graduate School on June 3, 1989 (14:45).
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For an early women architects from Princeton University (Class of ’70 and ’71):
An academic presentation by Dr. Meral Ekincioglu at MIT
[…] van Rossum, Helene. “Coeducation in Princeton: It Started at the Graduate School.” […]
[…] 1961 Princeton offered Sabra Follett Meservey acceptance in the graduate program in Oriental Studies. She was the first woman in the […]
[…] classes of ’70, ’71, ’72, and ’73. (The Graduate School had begun admitting women in […]