The Postwar Decline of Women Students

The Postwar Decline of Women Students

In the years after WW2, the university as a whole benefited from the well-known fruits of the Allied victory: it maintained its importance to the federal government’s defense needs, which allowed it to grow its faculties and facilities not only in science and engineering but also across the disciplines. The university’s women students and faculty, though, did not have an equal share in the postwar growth. For them, the postwar years might be seen as the end rather than the beginning of a period of progress. The drop in the proportion of women on the faculty will be explained in the next installment. In this essay, we'll look at the factors keeping women students' numbers disproportionately low as well as the consequences of their reduced minority status.   

Women Undergraduates Displaced

After the war, men far outnumbered women among both graduate and undergraduate students. As historian Barbara Solomon has shown, the disproportion was a national phenomenon: veterans were given priority in admissions and flooded into campuses all over the country; they were even admitted to some women's colleges (Solomon, 189-91). At Berkeley as elsewhere, women’s access was severely limited, and their share of the total undergraduates dropped abruptly from a high of 63% in 1944-45 to a low of 29% in 1948. Berkeley’s overall student population was enlarged by thousands of men using the GI Bill to finance their college educations. Enrollments rose from just under 15,000 in 1945-6 to over 20,000 in 1946-7. To be sure, the undergraduate numbers did drop again in the 1950s, but they continued to average a few thousand higher than the prewar enrollments. Even after the initial surge of new male enrollments subsided, Berkeley's student body remained disproportionately male. The absolute number of women students, moreover, stayed below the prewar level until 1960: in 1938-9 there had been around 5,500 undergraduate women, and twenty years later, there were fewer than 5,000. What kept postwar women both a smaller proportion of all students and a diminished minority on campus?   

Several postwar changes, in addition to the GI Bill, contributed to the decline and flattening of women's enrollments. Paradoxically, the drop at Berkeley was partly due to a growth in the number of college options for California's women. Middle-class high-school graduates of both sexes increasingly saw college as a normal step on the way to adulthood, and the marketplace in higher education expanded accordingly. Some were attracted to out-of-state liberal arts colleges across the country as long-distance travel became easier than ever. And within California, the options also increased. Stanford had discontinued its 500-woman enrollment cap in 1933, although it still aimed to keep women at approximately 40% of the student body until the 1970s ("Leland's Journal"). Other private college options in California were also growing, but most importantly, public higher education in the state expanded. UCLA, for example, had only 3,900 female students in 1939, but it averaged around 1,000 more throughout the late '40s and '50s. Berkeley's losses might easily have been UCLA's gains. The College of Santa Barbara, which had previously been in the California State College system, was made a UC campus in 1944 , and the Riverside campus opened its first classrooms in 1954 (Stadtman, 1970, 344-48; 352-55). The State College System, which was so angered by the loss of Santa Barbara that it sponsored a clause in the California State Constitution outlawing future UC depredations, soon embarked on its own expansion and became an ever more attractive option for commuting women, especially if they intended to teach. The State Colleges gave B.A. degrees only in education until the late 1940s. In the fifties, though, they opened their curriculum far beyond teacher-training and extended their geographic reach into all corners of the state: ten new California State Colleges were built between 1947 and 1960. ("CSU History"). In short, women's low enrollments at Berkeley were not due to a declining interest in getting a college degree. While veterans crowded into Berkeley, it made sense for many women to attend college elsewhere.

An additional reason to choose against Berkeley might have been the congested campus's derelict physical condition, resulting from years of neglect during the depression and war as well as from the university's stubborn refusal to invest in student facilities. In 1946-7, the California Alumni Association studied the state of the campus and concluded that the university facilities were pitifully inadequate. Stephens Hall, then the student union, was far too cramped. The size of its cafeteria was insufficient and there was nowhere else on campus to buy food. The campus lacked playing fields, a modern gymnasium, paved walk-ways, gathering spaces, and landscaping. The scarcity of nearby housing, moreover, forced students to drive to campus (50% of women still commuted from home), so roads and most open spaces were crammed with cars. The Alumni Association published a report in 1948 recommending major investments in grounds and facilities, but the university took no action for another decade. All students suffered from the postwar crowding and dearth of accommodations, but women were at a greater disadvantage, especially when it came to finding housing.             

As a dwindling minority, women were a low priority, and their needs were often sacrificed to the exigencies of accommodating the returning vets. For example, the university chose to house veterans in a project originally planned to house undergraduate women. Construction on what were to have been seven buildings, called the Fernwald Dormitories, was begun in 1940, but completion was delayed by the war and scaled back. An announcement as late as the spring of 1945 still stated that "Quarters for 480 women will be provided in three living units, two buildings to each unit, and a ‘commons’ will have central eating facilities. Two of the units will be completed by the opening of the Fall term October 25, [1945] . . . caring for 360 girls" (Smyth-Fernwald Historic Structures Report, p. 9). However, the completed four buildings, the first residences ever built by Berkeley using public funds, were instead given over almost entirely to the veterans. By 1946, the Fernwald complex housed almost 400 men and only 78 women. The story is typical of the times: it was specifically the women undergraduates who lost housing to the vets, just as they had lost seats in the admissions process. Boarding houses were also increasingly renting to the larger numbers of men, and only one new women's cooperative residence, housing around 50 women, went up, in 1953. The shortage of living space discouraged women's enrollment and heightened the desirability of sororities for undergraduate women. It was a major factor in the renewed prestige and power of the Greek-letter organizations after the war (Kerr, 97-105; "Student Housing"). 

In the fifties, the administration made other changes that left women students in a weakened position. Early in the new decade, the formerly independent Dean of Women was subordinated to a (male) Dean of Students, ending the era when women undergraduates had a direct channel to the Chancellor. Dean of Women Katherine Towle recalled that under the new chain-of-command she was sometimes left out of the decision-making on policies affecting all students. Her effectiveness, moreover, was decreased by the necessity to communicate with the Chancellor mainly through the Dean of Students. She managed to prevent a further demotion in her status when the Dean of Students proposed that her title be changed from Dean to Advisor, but the administrative reorganization nevertheless tended to mute the voices of the women students she represented (Hartman, 109; Towle, 167-73). 

In the mid-fifties, the administration took another step toward dismantling the women-centered institutions that had been put in place earlier to make up for the exclusions women suffered. Chancellor Clark Kerr announced that the Home Economics department would be folded at Berkeley and moved to the Davis campus. Its strongest academic program was kept and renamed the Department of Nutrition, but the rest of the "miscellany" as Kerr later described the department, was deemed unworthy of a great university (Kerr, 87). The banishment rid the campus of "embarrassing" courses; Kerr singled out "'Marriage' with ten lectures, the first on 'courtship' and the last on 'venereal disease'", familiarly known as "From Courtship to Venereal Disease in Ten Easy Lessons" (Kerr, 87). But it also ousted a chunk of the already dwindling women faculty, and getting rid of the program probably did nothing to assure women students that the administration was thinking of their interests. To be sure, relocating the Dean of Women in the Dean of Students office and closing Home Economics could be seen as progressive changes because they reduced the institutional segregation of the sexes. In the long run, the reorganized dean's office allowed Katherine Towle to become the first female Dean of Students in1960. However, in the postwar period, such changes reduced the number and power of the faculty and administrators who could serve as models or advocates for the already depleted ranks of women students.  

The Country's Incomplete Pivot on Gender Roles

The changes at Berkeley were part of the country's attempt to limit women's vocational roles and ambitions. Instead of being coaxed to learn new skills and explore new professional avenues, they were being told that they should expect to concentrate on domestic life after college. It's often said that postwar America returned to conventional domesticity, as if the nation merely defaulted to earlier gender relations. In fact, though, the switch from mobilizing women to sending them back home was more complex and fraught with contradictions than we sometimes realize. This was especially the case in relation to college women. Previous patterns of their behavior were altered when they were asked to prioritize family life, and family life itself was also eventually changed by their adjustments. 

College students were certainly receptive to the pervasive postwar cultural message that young people generally, and women in particular, should marry and start families early. Since the war had delayed courtships, some women students dropped out when peace came to complete earlier marriage plans. Most women apparently agreed with the national consensus that returning veterans deserved preferential treatment, not only in university admissions but also in the job market, so training for a career might easily have seemed futile or even selfish (Hartmann, 101-116). And despite the fact that more women than ever went to college in the postwar years, college was also increasingly seen as a place to meet a suitable future spouse. Most women students reported that they viewed their educational and career ambitions as ancillary to the goal of starting a family.  

The near unanimity of that ambition, though, was actually new among college women; it didn't signal a return to prewar attitudes. As we saw in a previous essay, undergraduates had been increasingly socializing together and dating each other since at least the 1920s, when extra-curricular activities became more sexually integrated. Yet despite the interwar rise of college as a potential setting for courtship, by1947 merely 69% of women college graduates were married, as opposed to 87% of women with only high-school educations. The proportion of women college graduates remaining single in the 1920s had been even higher, around 35% (Horowitz, 218). As this graph   from a recent paper on marriage and cohabitation shows, the gap began to narrow during the 1950s, when college women's marriage rates increased and noncollege women's decreased (Lundberg and Pollak, 8). Given the overall growth in college attendance and the postwar context, the merger of the two lines is not surprising: as it became more ordinary for middle-class women to attend college, their expectations about their futures also tended toward the norm for their sex. We might conclude that the postwar delivered the coup de grâce to the waning but nevertheless still viable category of the spinster. Planning for an unmarried future—a life course followed by a third of college women in the previous generation—came to seem downright eccentric. 

Single women in the interwar years had played crucial social and economic roles, which often determined their unmarried state. They had faced a starker choice than the postwar generation between marriage and employment outside the home. In the twenties and especially the thirties (to ration jobs during the depression), many large employers, including thirty-four state governments and a whopping 87% of all school districts, had explicitly banned the hiring of married women and fired women who married while on the job (Goldin, 1991, 516-519). The bans often applied to the positions for which college women trained: teachers, librarians, nurses, and social workers. Faced with the impossibility of marrying and working, a significant proportion of college women apparently chose to forego marriage.
  

In the postwar period, though, when the marriage prohibitions had been swept away by the wartime need for women to do men's jobs, it became legally easier for married college women to keep their work. Certainly barriers to equal employment opportunities persisted as well as some degree of social disapproval, but blanket prohibitions against hiring married women disappeared. The combination of those factors—fewer qualified single women and no bars to hiring the married ones—meant that the expanding postwar economy recruited wives; indeed, by 1950 the married portion of the female labor force was larger than ever before and growing. Thus the cultural emphasis on domesticity had an ironic economic outcome: more working wives. In earlier periods, working-class women had been the most likely to take employment outside the home, but employers after the war sought better educatedwomen to fill the rising demand for clerical, service, and retail workers in addition to the need for more teachers as the population boomed. The statistics on married women's employment in the 1950s and 60s show that the higher a woman's educational level, the more likely she was to be employed after her marriage (Goldin, 2006, 1-8). Despite the relentless depiction of married women as fulltime homemakers, the percentage of them entering the workforce shot up in the 1950s and 60s, from 25% to 46% for women in the 35 to 44-year-old age group. Far from permanently retreating after a brief working life into exclusively domestic pursuits, college-educated married women in the 1950s, whose children no longer needed their fulltime attention, were becoming common in the working world. 

These countervailing cultural and economic winds touched off a new postwar round in the old debate about the suitability of women's higher education to their actual lives. This time the discussion was not about their intellectual capabilities or social restrictions but instead centered on their chances for happiness and personal fulfillment. The disagreement was primarily among leaders of women's colleges over revisions to their curricula. In 1946, Lynn White, the male president of Mills College, provocatively recommended changes that would create a "feminine" version of liberal education, helping women to be more creative and knowledgeable family managers and community leaders. Although White's proposal can be seen as an early call for "relevance" in college courses, at the time it seemed a retreat from equal educational standards. In response, leading women's educators defended the traditional liberal arts curriculum as the best preparation for most roles women would be called on to play (Soloman, 191-4; Fass, 1989, 173-190). White's ideas had little resonance at Berkeley, but they were widely and heatedly debated throughout the postwar period, indicating the extent of the national disunity over the role of women in society and hence the purpose of their higher education. 

It's little wonder, then, that undergraduate women were often confused and discouraged by the contradictory messages they received about the purpose and value of their educations. Some signals told them that married life would itself be an all-consuming vocation, but that didn’t comport well with the message that they should take their studies seriously as preparation for the future. Nor did it tally with the social reality they saw around them, in which married women were an increasingly large percentage of people doing a wide variety of jobs. Even as the culture seemed bent on domesticating women's ambitions, the economy was actually in need of many more married women than it had employed during the war years, and that trend would only increase in the coming decades.

Mixed Messages and Opportunities at Berkeley

Berkeley's version of these contradictions might have been especially perplexing. The institution took no official notice of the low numbers of its women students and did nothing to better accommodate them. Whereas other universities started special courses for women in the postwar period, Berkeley eliminated them (Fass, 1989, 65-9). Simultaneously, though, the administration acknowledged the importance of domestic life at the university by providing special accommodations for married veterans. Almost half of the men on the GI Bill nationwide were married, and Berkeley took responsibility for housing its share of their families, first by leasing apartments for them to rent and later by building them a small village in Albany. The postwar campus was thus both male-dominated and newly family-oriented. 

These were striking departures from the university's earlier indifference to student living arrangements, and they had an effect on the campus climate, which seemed to exude a "domestic contagion" (Solomon, 190-1). As late as 1960, one researcher reported that Berkeley's undergraduate women lived inside an "anticipatory haze of romantic notions about matrimony", which inclined them toward earlier marriages upon graduation (Heist, quoted in Fass, 1989, 181). Indications of subsiding intellectual ambitions in women also began to appear. Although they continued to perform well academically, their enrollments in science courses dropped, and fewer of them reported plans to pursue graduate studies. There was a drop as well in the female proportion of graduate enrollments; above 30% throughout the thirties, it dipped below 25% in 1948 and stayed in the low twenties until 1962.        

The political atmosphere on campus, which had a bearing on gender relations, might also be seen as a locally aggravated case of a national condition. Campuses were generally apolitical in the 1950s, but Berkeley seemed to be suffering from an almost post-traumatic political numbness, a wary quietism about all controversial issues following its notorious Loyalty Oath crisis of 1949-50. That crisis occurred when UC tried to preempt the efforts of anti-communist crusaders in the California Assembly, who wanted to investigate and fire left-wing university employees. Imagining that the Assembly would back off if sufficiently assured of UC staff's patriotism, the Regents (at the suggestion of President Sproul) voted to require all employees to swear that they did not support "the overthrow of the United States Government". We'll return in the next installment to the issue of how the Loyalty Oath damaged Berkeley's academic status. Suffice it to say here that although it did nothing to dispel public suspicions about UC, the crisis constrained political expression and discouraged student initiatives like those that had been undertaken just a few years earlier by the women who led the ASUC during the war. Thus, although many American campuses became more conservative in the fifties, Berkeley had a particularly strong reason to hold itself aloof from all political controversy, which encouraged apathy in the student body until the end of the fifties.

Adhering to conventional gender roles and expectations aligned with the prevailing political and social conformity; the Greek-letter houses were the undergraduate institution that most actively enforced the norms. They quickly reestablished their dominance over the organized student body after the wartime interruption, partly propelled by the housing crisis. At the end of the fifties, 27% of the undergraduate women belonged to sororities, a higher percentage than at any time in the past, and their cultural influence was even more widespread (Green). When writer and alumna Joan Didion ('56) arrived on campus in 1952, it was simply assumed that she would join a sorority, which she did. Although she moved out and began living in a shared apartment in her sophomore year, she nevertheless depicted the experience of sorority life as typical of postwar Berkeley. In a famously devastating depiction of Cal for Mademoiselle in 1960, she recorded candid conversations with "affiliated" undergraduates:   

" ... I wish we could go somewhere besides fraternity parties," a pretty girl tells you wistfully, and another, a transfer from a smaller California college, adds: "I used to go out with boys I wouldn't dream of marrying. Sometimes now I miss that." She sounds quite as if she were expressing a desire to see the far side of the moon, and she is, in her terms, doing just that. Her entire modus vivendi is oriented toward the day when she will be called upon to pour coffee in her own living room. Losing sight of that eminently sensible goal is wandering down the primrose path indeed and is regarded with the same wonder in her circle at Berkeley as it would be in a Jane Austen novel. . . . They have come to Berkeley to prepare for adult life, and adult life is that "Scarsdale Galahad" or his California equivalent (Didion, 1960, quoted in Colvig, 114).

Granted, in this article Didion portrayed the most traditional slice of campus life rather than the one where she eventually found her appropriate milieu and intellectual peers: the editorial offices of the Daily Californian and the literary magazine Occident (Rainey). However, another contemporary, who interviewed "the most talented and creative college women" at Berkeley in 1960, encountered surprisingly similar attitudes, especially about the primacy of matrimony in their plans for the future. Paul Heist, a researcher at Berkeley's Center for the Study of Higher Education, reported that "it was surprisingly infrequent to find a young woman genuinely committed to a discipline, a professional future, or a career . . . For those senior women interviewed, not already married, all saw marriage as a culminating goal of great if not first importance" (Heist, 1962, quoted in Fass, p. 176).
 

It appears, then, that a large number of Berkeley's women undergraduates, like their peers at other universities, found it difficult to plan beyond the immediate horizon of graduation and the hope of an early marriage. And since they would tend to marry younger and at higher rates than previous generations, their expectations were often met. Moreover, they can hardly be faulted for not envisaging their subsequent working experience, for that part of their futures was seldom ever represented. College women's lives were becoming segmented into alternating stages of child care and employment outside the home. After graduating they would go to work, often in jobs for which they were overqualified; then they would marry and raise children; then they would return to work (Fass, 1989, 165-73). Even if they had recognized the likelihood of such a trajectory, it still wouldn't have pointed toward "a discipline, a professional future, or a career", the very things that Paul Heist was disappointed not to discover among the bright and talented undergraduates he interviewed. 

And yet it's important to acknowledge that the postwar graduates became the first generation in which large numbers of college women combined marriage with gainful employment, albeit often discontinuously. Somewhat accidentally, as a result of their determination to marry, they commenced a fundamental rearrangement of women's domestic and economic spheres of experience. 

Berkeley in the 1950s also did manage to prepare many women for distinguished careers, and in conclusion, we'll look at two alumnae, both ground-breaking writers, whose undergraduate training led to national fame. Joan Didion and Maxine Hong Kingston received the highest honors for their work: both won National Book Awards, the National Medal of Humanities, and the National Medal of Arts. They were born fifty miles and six years (1934 and 1940) apart in the central valley. Joan Didion's family had been in the Sacramento area for several generations, and Maxine Hong was the child of Chinese immigrants recently settled in Stockton. Growing up, both had mothers who spent a good deal of time telling them stories. Didion started at Berkeley early in the fifties, in 1952, and Hong arrived toward the end of the decade, in 1958.

Didion seems to have chosen a writing career early in her college years and to have pursued it single-mindedly. Part of her preparation came from working on campus publications and part from her English major. At the Daily Californian she was trained in one of the few professions, journalism, where women kept and even increased their wartime gains during the postwar period. In 1950, women comprised a third of the nation's editors and reporters (Solomon, 196). And Berkeley's campus publications conformed to the national trend: women held on to their positions of leadership at the Daily Californian, the Occident, and The Blue and Gold. Didion started writing for the Daily Cal shortly after her arrival in Berkeley, and she sharpened her skills with a summer internship at Mademoiselle in New York and a six-year stint at Vogue, her first professional position after graduation. The precision and economy of all of her writing are probably due to her rigorous training as a journalist.  

Even in Didion's undergraduate years, though, her goals as a writer went far beyond reporting. She published her earliest fiction in the campus literary journal Occident, which she also edited. Her way of handling both fiction and nonfiction was inspired, she later explained, by her English courses: "The whole way I deal with politics came out of the English department. . . . If you start analyzing the text of a newspaper or a political commentator on CNN using this same approach of close textual analysis, you come to understand it in a different way. It's not any different from reading Henry James" (Meyer, 1). Didion's habit of using the same tools to read fiction and nonfiction carried over into her writing style as well. She imported many techniques from fiction into her magazine essays, using detailed description, first-person point-of-view, and a mixture of opinion and detached observation. She thereby helped to launch the bold American literary movement, dubbed "New Journalism" in the 1960s, which melded previously separate categories of writing. Her broad knowledge and love of earlier literature shine through in her five novels as well as her seminal works of cultural criticism and memoir (such as, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)).   

Maxine Hong Kingston also invented techniques for intertwining fiction and nonfiction, especially in her first book, The Woman Warrior (1978). An experimental mixture of memoir, history, and myth, it was so original that a controversy broke out about how to categorize it. Didion and Hong Kingston can thus both be credited with developing the field of writing we now call literary nonfiction. The latter, though, came to Berkeley on the cusp of the sixties, in 1958, entering a student body that was beginning to demand change, and she faced a more tumultuous time in Berkeley. A left-wing political party (SLATE) had started that year in the ASUC; the next year, President Clark Kerr replaced the infamous Rule 17 prohibiting political speech on campus with a more lenient set of regulations controlling it; and in 1960, UC students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience in San Francisco to protest against the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of local leaders (Van Houten, pp. 30-33). 

Hong seems not to have been politically active in her student years, but her undergraduate decisions echo the calls for greater freedom of expression. She spent her freshman year fulfilling requirements for Engineering, but the program proved too restrictive for her. As she later explained, "I felt like I was in prison" (Knudsen). In her second year, she switched to English. Although Chinese American women students were then uncommon in the English Department, she felt liberated by the change: "To be an English major was fun. All we did was read and talk about reading. ... Just the whole process of learning in the English department is so free" (Knudsen). On graduating, she married classmate Earll Kingston and gave birth to their son in 1964. They inhabited the local bohemian arts scene and taught high school, but as Berkeley's counterculture became increasingly agitated in the late 1960s, they sought a peaceful refuge in Hawaii, where she taught for ten years. 

Then in 1976 The Woman Warrior became a national best seller. It's not hard to imagine why this rich and innovative work was so long in gestation. As Professor Colleen Lye of the English Department explained, it "was the first and most widely read work of Asian American literature. Indeed, it could be said to have launched the field itself, despite the fact that Kingston always insisted that her work was about the Chinese American experience specifically, rather than about Asian American experience in general" ("Maxine Kingston Wins National Medal of Arts"). The book was also taken up by feminists and treated as a primary instance of what has come to be called the "intersectionality" between explorations of ethnic identity and the awakening of feminist consciousness. Formally, the book was equally groundbreaking. Giving voice to various generations and cultures, it flows among the genres of memoir, fantasy, myth, historical speculation, and the coming-of-age novel. Two books later in 1990 Hong Kingston returned to the Berkeley English Department as a Senior Lecturer. She retired in 2003. "It is the most wonderful feeling to have a lifetime alma mater," she told an interviewer. "I wouldn't teach at any other school" (Knudson).

Such spectacular successes among Berkeley's 1950s alumnae remind us that the postwar setbacks for women students were, after all, temporary. And some of the postwar changes—especially the expectation of marriage—even turned out to be barrier-breaking. By 1961, women made up 40% of the undergraduates, a return to their historic average. Full gender parity would not be achieved until 1998, but at least progress toward it continued unabated after 1960.