125 Years of Co-Education
125 Years of Co-Education
October 23, 2009
By Sara Jenks and Erica Schiffres
Writer
The University will celebrate 125 years of coeducation during Homecoming weekend, marking the landmark year the University opened its doors to women.
“It is difficult to capture in a concise way what this celebration means, but the answer will come through in the stories,” said Tracy Shaynak, Interim Director of the Women’s Resource Center. “Speakers and attendees alike will share the experiences that led to an environment where male and female students study together without question.”
The University was the first of any school in the Patriot League to begin coeducation, nearly 85 years before many other private colleges and universities, including Princeton and Yale Universities, began to do so.
In 1883 the first women enrolled at the female Institute—a meager but monumental three females. Welcoming women was a decision William Bucknell “warmly favored,” wrote Eveline Stanton Gundy in a 1905 edition of the Bucknell Mirror. “Those who [knew] him well assert that he was influenced to this policy by his belief that a woman should have an education if she wanted it as well as a man, and that economic reasons led him to favor coeducational institutions rather than separate colleges for women.”
The University has continued with these strides towards gender equality in the decades since. Laurie Hinrichs, who graduated in ’79, a declared management major said that “The male/female ratio was 60/40 back then and there definitely was an inequality with the sports in that era in general. There were no courses such as gender studies.”
Those realities aside, Hinrichs said, “I can honestly say I felt fairly treated in the classroom despite being in an “old school” male dominated department. In my experience, women were respected and challenged to achieve a potential without limitations. Bucknell has evolved with the rest of the world and reflects those changes in the varied course offerings, sports expansion and reversal of the male/female ratio.”
Biology major Barbara Loeb ’44 remembers the time without co-ed dormitories but echoed sentiments that she “felt respected” and “remembers no sort of problem.”
Today, females enjoy equal funding in sports mandated by Title IX and women outnumber men on campus. While admissions cites that females comprise 25 percent of engineering students, civil and environmental engineer Sara Biggar ’10 has had classes with 15-20 students and has been the only female.
“It can be intimidating at times, but other times, it is my drive,” she said. “I know that I’m a girl, but I can still get the highest grades in the class.”
This weekend, various speakers and panelists will share how coeducation shaped their experiences both at the University and after graduation.
“Students of today can put the idea of coeducation into context, what it really means today,” Shaynak said.
