30 YEARS OF COEDUCATION: Women on College Walk

This story is part of a special issue examining the Barnard-Columbia relationship, 30 years after Columbia Columbia decided to go coed and Barnard decided not to merge with Columbia. Check out the rest of the issue here.

Thirty years ago, Columbia’s new president Michael Sovern decided that the time had come to admit women into the undergraduate program. Columbia was quite the latecomer to change its male-only identity—our peer schools survived the decision to become coeducational more than 10 years earlier.

I graduated from Barnard with a B.A. in philosophy in the class of 1981, so I was in one of the last classes in which women who wanted a Morningside Heights undergraduate education had no choice but to attend Barnard. That said, I chose Barnard not because I was barred from attending Columbia, but precisely because it was a women’s college, and because it had very strong women in its philosophy department, a field that otherwise was, and remains, very male-dominated. Professors Sue Larson and Mary Mothersill drew me to Barnard and were important mentors for me while I was there. They were both strong feminists and amazing philosophers—something I could not have found in Columbia’s philosophy department.

When I reflect on my time at Barnard, before Columbia College admitted women, I remember a very different campus than the one I found when I re-entered the Columbia community in 2000 as a tenured member of the law faculty. College Walk in the early 1980s was on fire with political activism. But not just any activism: feminist activism. On any given day, when you walked across the campus passing in front of Low Library, you could not avoid being confronted by students with posters, leaflets, megaphones, and performance art, all trying to engage you in the hottest women’s rights issue of the day. What was most amazing about this time on campus was that you didn’t hear only one feminist view: No, you heard feminists disagreeing with each other. Feminist discourse on campus was diverse, complicated, hotly contested, and everywhere.

Much of the disagreement was about sex. There was an almost daily protest by the group “Women Against Pornography” that was always accompanied by a blown-up poster of the famous 1978 cover from Hustler Magazine of a naked woman being fed into a meat grinder. Not far away would be protesters who characterized themselves as “pro-sex,” who advocated for greater sexual freedom and against the legal regulation of sex. They argued for the decriminalization of sex work and against the portrayal of all women as sexual victims.

Of course, this debate exploded the spring after I graduated. Just two months after the University decided to admit women undergraduates into Columbia College, Barnard’s Center for Research on Women held its annual Scholar and the Feminist Conference in April 1982 with a thematic focus on “The Politics of Sexuality.” The conference was scheduled to unpack familiar feminist orthodoxy that understood sex as something that was inevitably dangerous, if not injurious, to women. Conference organizers proposed to explore the ambiguous and complex tension between sexual pleasure and sexual danger in women’s lives and in feminist theory. Unfortunately, supporters of the WAP perspective on sex and sexuality hijacked the conference, convincing Barnard’s president at the time, Ellen Futter, to confiscate the conference handbook that the organizers had planned to hand out to all participants after working on it for a full year. Heather Love, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has recently published an article in the journal GLQ about the 1982 Scholar and the Feminist Conference that includes the handbook confiscated by President Futter.

I remind us of the Barnard conference, the daily feminist debates on College Walk, and the presence of dynamic women in the Barnard philosophy department in conjunction with Columbia’s decision to admit women into Columbia College 30 years ago, because I don’t think it was an accident that all these things happened in Morningside Heights in such close proximity to one another. Columbia came to the realization that it was undermining its mission as an outstanding institution of higher education by premising that education on the exclusion of female students. Those young women were being admitted to our peer schools and were thriving there, as were those schools by virtue of their diversified student bodies. The vibrancy of the feminist community on campus clearly had an effect on making this change possible in 1982.

There remain justifications for Barnard to retain its identity as a women’s college—foremost among them is the ongoing effect of the scholarship and political work of Barnard faculty and students that continue to make change possible at Columbia.

The author is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. She serves on the executive committee of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and is an affiliated faculty member in Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies.