In 1978, University President Frank Loucks Hereford Jr. told the University Union's Faculty Forum Plus the story of Carol Ann Preston Davis.
In 1892, Davis, one of the only women at the University at the time, took a math exam and performed extremely well on it. Faculty members disapproved.
The very next year, those faculty members passed an edict that barred women from attending classes or taking exams at the University.
This fall marks the 30th anniversary of women's full admittance at the University. Since Davis's test in 1892, women fought opposition to gain admittance to the University, finally winning full admission in 1970.
In 1892, the same year as Davis's test, an extremely progressive Board of Visitors ordered a faculty committee to examine the possibilities of coeducation, but the full faculty -- at the time more conservative than the Board -- would not vote to allow women at the University.
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Hereford ended the talk on women by saying, "But thank goodness we all saw the light and thank goodness you ladies are here now."
Although women were not admitted into the College on a regular basis until 1970, women were studying to be nurses at the University starting in 1901, said Barbara Brodie, professor of Nursing and the director of Nursing History.
She added that the School of Nursing was opened under the auspices of the Medical School when the hospital was built, also in 1901. The School of Nursing became part of the University's academic degree program in 1950.
Female Nursing students lived in a dorm on Grounds, since they had to be available for their residencies at the hospital at any time, Brodie said.
The Education School also admitted women much earlier than the College did, accepting women into its summer session classes as early as 1911 and 1912. But these women could not apply these classes toward a degree.
"Sometimes there were more students in the summer session than in the regular session -- 1,200 or 1,300 women would be here during the summers," said Professor Phyllis K. Leffler, director of the Institute for Public History.
She said that in 1920, the Board of Visitors passed a resolution allowing women to enroll in graduate programs throughout the University, but only after they had attended two years of college.
Leffler added that women were allowed into undergraduate programs on a case-by-case basis, depending, for example, if they were related to a faculty member or would require University housing.
In addition to this change, the number of women varied with economic and political circumstances.
According to Leffler, greater numbers of women were accepted to the University during the Great Depression and World War II, when many college-age men were looking for jobs or fighting in the war.
University Historian Raymond C. Bice said that during his tenure as Director of Admissions from 1950 to 1954, a law barring women from entering the College of Arts and Sciences was changed to allow daughters of professors in the University.
Bice said that during the '60s, when most other public universities were admitting women, or were making the change to coeducation, the University faculty was mostly in favor of co-education, but some alumni had initial concerns about it.
Arguments against women at the University abounded. Some said women in the College would not be able to do math and science as well as men, but in fact when they did arrive in 1970 "academic standards went way up," Bice said.
Another argument Bice heard was that women would be a distraction to men. However, Bice said male University students often went "on a roll"-- driving to visit female students at nearby all-female colleges like Mary Washington, Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon on the weekends, and were already distracted.
Finally addressing the issue in 1968, then-University President Edgar F. Shannon Jr. appointed a committee chaired by French and Spanish Professor Thaddeus Braxton Woody to examine the possibility of full coeducation at the University.
Woody previously had not been a supporter of coeducation, but after reviewing the issue, he and his committee recommended allowing women into the College, and Shannon agreed. A committee formed by Student Council the same year also recommended full coeducation.
According to Annette Gibbs, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education and former associate dean of students, three women students who were denied admission to the University and did not want to attend Mary Washington College sued the University, but only after Shannon had called together the Woody Committee.
Gibbs said some of the arguments against coeducation included that women would destroy the honor system and that they "would destroy the character of the institution."
She said the Woody committee's arguments in favor of coeducation included likely enhancement of the quality of education, more diverse perspectives, a more realistic society at the University and a reinvigoration of the humanities, which "were on a down side" at that time.
She added that obviously none of the negative predictions happened, and that all the positive predictions did happen.
Leffler said the University had a reputation as being a "Virginia gentleman's school" and being a big party school in the 1960s, and the women who came here were "much more committed students" and that "U.Va. became a much stronger school academically" after the women arrived.
In 1970, Shannon allowed 350 women to enroll in the College -- increasing the number to 450 in 1971. Gibbs was hired from Florida State University in 1970, where she had experience as a dean and vice president of student affairs, to help the new women students and the University with the transition.
Gibbs said that when she first arrived at the University, there were very few women's dorms, athletic facilities, sports, or restroom facilities. But women were very interested and quickly got involved when a women's sports program was implemented. They were assigned to live together in a few of the Alderman Road dorms, which Leffler described as "like a sorority."
The Grounds were dark and very poorly lit, which gave some people an excuse not to allow women to live on the Lawn, Gibbs said. But that was also fixed and by 1973 their peers had selected women to live on the Lawn. The University also installed the ancestors of the blue-light phones that are now all around Grounds and set up escort services -- although busses were still a few years off.
Leffler said the women who came to the University for the first time in 1970 included two different types of students -- those who were upperclass transfers from other colleges and state women's colleges like Mary Washington College -- the University's sister school -- and those who were part of the "controlled number of first years."
Leffler conducted a survey in 1998, trying to get in touch with as many alumnae as she could find who attended the University from the 1920s until the early 1970s. She found the women students who had the most difficulty adjusting to life at the University were the upperclass transfers, who said they "found themselves in upper division classes with men who had no experience with women in their classes." They were used to saying whatever they wanted in their classes at their previous colleges and often the male students at the University resented their presence.
She said first-year women had a slightly easier time, but many of the women felt excluded, very conspicuous. In some cases, "professors made it clear they didn't want the female students in their classes" by ignoring them, she added.
Some women "thought the environment was great for dating," according to Leffler, but many of the men did not want to date the University women and still continued to go "rolling down the road" to visit the women at all-female colleges.
Leffler said the University was one of the last major public universities in the nation to admit women, as well as one of the last in the state due to its association with the all-women's Mary Washington College. She said the College of William and Mary started admitting women on a regular basis in 1918 and Virginia Tech admitted women in 1968. James Madison University, established as a school for women in 1908, began regularly admitting men in 1966.
Gibbs said social sororities did not come about in large numbers at the University until the mid-1970s. Mostly nursing students had been involved in Zeta Tau Alpha, Chi Omega and Kappa Delta in the first half of the century, but since there were so few women they were not very active.
Gibbs said women made their "first impact on student life at the University through the Residence Life programs." It took a little longer for women to make a big impact on other organizations around Grounds, although the founding editor of The Declaration was a female student, Ann Brown, who broke away from The Cavalier Daily in 1972. Eventually women began assuming leadership positions in other organizations like Madison House, the Honor Committee and Student Council. Women students also were highly involved in non-University service activities in the city and through their churches, for example.
Since Carol Ann Davis made her pioneering step toward women's equality in higher education over 100 years ago, women have become influential members of the University community and continue to follow and expand upon precedents women before them struggled to establish.
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