The Women Come Back

The boys at Vassar and Sarah Lawrence were the B.M.O.C.s just a few years ago as women's colleges rushed to open their gates to men. The nationwide push for coeducation in the early '70s brought hard times to women's schools that chose to exclude men. Enrollment tumbled, alumnae panicked and school officials scrambled to recruit new students. Now, however, the picture is changing dramatically. All-women's colleges will open this fall with their highest enrollment in four years.

According to the Women's College Coalition, a Washington-based group representing half the nation's 140 women's colleges, enrollment is up 3% over last year. More significant, applications are up a healthy 7%. At some schools, among them Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, Chatham College in Pittsburgh and St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Conn., applications are nearly 50% ahead of last year.

Why the comeback for women's colleges? Keenly aware that feminism has sparked a new career-consciousness in women, many of the colleges are shaking up their traditionally liberal arts-oriented curriculums. At Mills College in Oakland, Calif., students can sign up for a special program that trains them for managerial positions in business or public service jobs. The College of St. Theresa in Winona, Minn., offers this fall a new major in law enforcement. Students will study penology as well as criminal law and the courts. At Hood College in Frederick, Md., the home economics department now offers consumer-affairs courses, and science majors can assist in projects at a nearby Army medical research center.

Other schools are setting up special programs to accommodate young mothers and older women who want to resume their education. Mundelein College in Chicago has pioneered a "weekend college" where students arrive Friday night for classes and depart on Sunday afternoon.

Although its importance in the women's college turn-around is uncertain, many schools have put a top priority on gaining more women faculty members. This is not always easy, since tenured positions are top-heavy with men now in their 40s and 50s who were hired in the 1950s, when many women's colleges sought male professors as a sign of progressiveness and academic seriousness. In any case, today 71 colleges--a record--now have women in the president's chair, including Hunter, Wellesley, Goucher and Wheaton. Last month Smith College, the nation's largest private women's college (2,600 students)--and the school that produced Feminists Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Sylvia Plath--installed its first woman president. She is Jill Ker Conway, 40, an Australian who grew up on a sheep ranch and obtained a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. A prime virtue of women's colleges, Conway is persuaded, is that they tend to take women's intellectual abilities and aspirations more seriously than other institutions.

Many other educators--and students--agree. Says Barbara Newell, 46, president of Wellesley: "Women coeds receive conflicting signals on the 'femininity' of intellectual vigor and do not take full advantage of college." Adds Susan Van Dyne, 29, a Smith faculty member: "In a coed school the dominant role for a woman is usually sexual." Evelyn Riedner, 21, a Wellesley senior, praises her school for the chance it gives women to learn leadership without strident aggressiveness. Says she: "Once you learn that in a supportive atmosphere, you develop yourself as a person first."

Hot Pants. For all the conscious emphasis on equality, many women students have found that in a coed environment the men still almost always end up with a disproportionate share of student offices. When men first enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, they quickly assumed so many top student posts, says Dean Robert Wagner, that "everybody was making jokes about it." In fact, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education reported last year that women who attend women's colleges are more likely to hold leadership positions and choose traditionally male career fields than those in coed schools.

Women students may again tire of single-sex schools, as they did in the early 1970s. But many feel that their schools have a vital role to play in helping women achieve the self-confidence to push for equality in the outside world. As the Wellesley News has put it: "As long as women are kept off boards of trustees, out of jobs and in hot pants, the world needs a Wellesley College."

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