This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
Fifty years have passed since Dartmouth granted degrees to a four-year class that was all-male. Although a few women had joined the Class of 1975 as transfer students, the first four-year coeducational class did not graduate until 1976.
The Dartmouth caught up with six of the first women to graduate from Dartmouth and dove into the archives of our newspaper to understand how coeducation came to be.
From its founding in 1769 until the official decision to become coeducational in 1972, Dartmouth was an all-male college. It was, and in some ways still is, a place designed for and built around men — and it instilled in many of its students a belief in male dominance.
The first mention of coeducation in the archives of The Dartmouth is a front-page editorial from Nov. 2, 1894, which argues in explicitly misogynistic terms that “coeducation would never succeed” at Dartmouth because “men and women do not require identical education.”
Discussion of coeducation rarely reappeared in the pages of The Dartmouth until the 1960s, when the College began making concrete moves towards coeducation.
Some of the first women to study at Dartmouth arrived in the academic year of 1968-69 as exchange students, though they were not allowed to live in the dorms. In 1970, the Board of Trustees formed a Trustee Study Committee on Coeducation, which recommended in 1971 that the College become fully coeducational.
John Kemeny became Dartmouth’s 13th president in the spring of 1971, and on Nov. 21, 1971, the Board of Trustees voted to admit women in September 1972 as degree candidates.
‘We were not fully welcomed’
There was fierce resistance from the all-male student body, reported in the pages of The Dartmouth. The experiences of the first women at Dartmouth were often harrowing.
Women described being treated as objects by their male peers. Male students hung banners reading “No Coeds” and “Better Dead Than Coed” and shouted numbers meant as ratings of attractiveness at women entering the dining hall.
When coeducation was approved, it was voted in with the plan that the number of male students would not decrease. There were 177 female members of the Class of 1976, and including transfer students, about 300 women to about 3,000 men on campus as undergraduates in 1972.
Being one of only 177 women in her class felt lonely, Marian Shelton ’76 said.
“It was rough,” Shelton said. “We were not fully welcomed. I felt isolated.”
Shelton has been to many of the reunions and stayed in touch with many of her female classmates, bonded together by their shared experiences.
“It seemed to me that many of us had kind of the same feelings,” Shelton said.
Kathy DeGioia Eastwood ’76 said her first year was “very tense” and “not very fun” because there weren’t very many women.
“A lot of the students there did not want us there,” DeGioia Eastwood said. “The three classes above us had gone to this school because it was an all-male school. They didn’t like having this rug pulled out from under them, and you could tell.”
In 1973, an obscene and misogynistic letter was slipped under the door of every room in the all-female Woodward Hall referring to Dartmouth women as “the enemy” and including sexual demands and threats.
Alumna who spoke to The Dartmouth described episodes of insults and harassment. They said their first year, the 1972-73 academic year, was the most difficult.
They remembered being called “cohogs” by male students, an insult combining the words “coed” and “quahog,” a highly derogatory reference to female genitalia.
“I do remember, the first part of my freshman year, being called names that I didn’t know what they meant,” DeGioia Eastwood said.
In the spring of 1975, the winner of the intra-fraternity song competition called Hums was a song called “Our Cohogs,” which featured ten verses of extremely misogynistic and sexualized attacks on women. The lyrics include dehumanizing insults and a line which says women have “ruined” Dartmouth’s “masculine heaven.”
On campus, Martha Beattie ’76 remembers the sexist banners and listening to the Hums “in horror.”
Shelton also said she didn’t feel that the dean of the College at the time, Carroll Brewster, set a good example, as he was the one who awarded “Our Cohogs” the most creative and original submission for the competition and joined in a public rendition of the song.
There were times when male students said and did things that were “really hard and challenging,” Ann Fritz Hackett ’76 said. She lived on the first floor of North Massachusetts Hall, and they got a brick through their window in the middle of the night the first week they were there.
‘You were a pioneer’
Beattie said she went to Dartmouth without the expectation that it would be “perfect” for women. She said she was right.
“If you thought that it was going to be the perfect place for women, after it had been all-male for over 200 years, you probably hadn’t done your homework,” Beattie said. “You had to go into it understanding that, in a sense, you were a pioneer, and the pioneer in life blazes a trail that is often fraught with disaster.”
The idea of being a trailblazer also appealed to Sara Hoagland Hunter ’76. It was a thrill, she said, when Kemeny greeted the incoming class as “men and women of Dartmouth” and highlighted it by saying that it was the first time in history students had been welcomed to the College in that way.
“There were so many ‘firsts’ during those years,” Hoagland Hunter says.
Sharon Ali ’76 said many aspects of college life took time to change to reflect the decision to become coeducational. She cited the school song as one example, which at first only referred to “Men of Dartmouth,” before eventually being changed.
“You can say that it’s co-ed, but in our day-to-day life as women on campus, it was apparent that the College was evolving in order to make coeducation a reality over time,” Ali said.
Fritz Hackett agreed, saying that changing the ingrained male-dominated culture of Dartmouth is hard.
“Dartmouth was an institution that was going through enormous transformation, and many of the people who had chosen to go there had chosen an all-male institution,” Fritz Hackett said. “Change takes time, but from the very beginning, I was excited and wanted to be a part of that change.”
Ali said that she was very aware of her presence on campus during that historic time.
“There was a day-to-day heightened awareness of being a woman, especially an African American woman, on campus,” Ali said.
Shelton, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, said she felt out of place on a campus that was steeped in elitism.
“I was an urban Jewish girl from a public school, rather than a girl who had gone to prep school and played hockey, someone who might have eased more readily into that milieu,” Shelton said.
Alumna also spoke about a fraternity culture that engaged in degrading behaviors and verbal assaults on women and having a hard time finding social spaces where they could go.
Shelton felt that the drinking ethos and the dominance of the fraternity system in the campus social scene fostered an unwelcome atmosphere for women — concerns she isn’t convinced have been fully alleviated today.
DeGioia Eastwood also did not connect with the fraternity culture.
“I did go to a fraternity exactly once and discovered that it wasn’t my idea of a good time,” DeGioia Eastwood added.
Instead, she discovered many of her friends through the radio station, and then junior year she started getting involved with Cabin and Trail, a sub-club of the Dartmouth Outing Club.
DeGioia Eastwood remembers being picked to speak to a group of alumni while she was a student. She said she was chosen to represent extracurricular activities because she had been active in the radio station and the Outing Club.
“It was to show off to the alumni: ‘Here are some current students. We haven’t ruined them by adding in women, for God’s sake!’” she said.
DeGioia Eastwood said that as soon as she walked into the room, she felt animosity from the alumni.
“I had never walked into a room of hostile people before, realizing that they really didn’t like me and the fact that I was there,” DeGioia Eastwood said. “I think I did, at some level, win them over. I told them that the Dartmouth women loved Dartmouth every bit as much as the Dartmouth men.”
Friendships that made the difference
There were 177 experiences in that first class, and many bad ones. Some women left before four years were over. But all six alumna said it was their friends who helped them get through the difficult experiences, and expressed gratitude for the education they received.
Overall, Ali described her college experience as “life changing” and having an “indelible impact” personally and professionally.
“I had a number of new experiences as a member of the first fully coeducational class and made some lifelong friends and lasting memories,” Ali said.
Beattie says she went into Dartmouth with the sense that it was an “incredible privilege” to be making history there.
“Sadly, there were also negative experiences, so it was a mixed bag for sure, but in hindsight, Dartmouth totally changed my life, and I’m eternally grateful for it and always will be,” she said.
Shelton said she has a “love-hate” relationship with Dartmouth. She feels grateful for the education she received and the friends she made.
“I’m certainly very proud to have gone to Dartmouth,” Shelton said. “Those four years were an extraordinarily formative experience for me. Dartmouth is a very special school.”
DeGioia Eastwood also said she is very grateful for her Dartmouth education, which helped prepare her for a long career as a professor of physics and astronomy.
“I really loved it, and I felt like I grew an enormous amount,” DeGioia Eastwood said. “I was much more confident. It really was good training for being a physicist, for being the only woman in the room for many, many years.”
Beattie spoke about the hidden heroes that she encountered during her time at Dartmouth. The man who cleaned the freshman dorm, for example.
“Just this lovely local guy who could not have been more supportive and more helpful … he was so respectful and so fun,” she said. “He was just a wonderful guy, and he just made us feel at home.”
Another of her “heroes” was men’s heavyweight coach Peter Gardner, who coached women’s rowing unpaid on his own time during her freshman and sophomore years before women’s rowing became an official varsity sport.
“There were heroes like that that made this place incredibly special and wonderful for women at the time,” Beattie said.
Fifty years later, what’s changed?
Five decades on, it is clear that Dartmouth has more to do to achieve gender equality. Sexism is persistent on campus — a recent survey conducted by The Dartmouth revealed that 91% of female student respondents reported having experienced sexism on campus.
At the same time, alumna all said there has been immense positive change since the early years of coeducation.
Fritz Hackett went on to become the first alumna member of the Board of Trustees, during which she had a “front row seat” on the changes. She sees significant positive change over the decades.
Beattie, who volunteered as a rowing coach for 49 years, said so many things are “remarkably better” that it’s difficult to list them all.
“Women are so much more confident, and so much more automatically a member of this community, where when we were there, we were somewhat of an intruder, and we had to really prove that the College belonged to us as much as our male classmates,” she said.
Beattie said these changes took a lot of time and dedication from Dartmouth women.
“It took a long time for the College to get where it is today,” she said. “Honestly, most of us just wore baggy overalls and flannel shirts and kept our heads down and did what we needed to do to say, ‘I’m a Dartmouth person, too.’”
Kent Friel ‘26 is an executive editor at The Dartmouth.
