1970 marked the first year that Hopkins accepted women into its undergraduate program. In honor of Women’s History Month, The News-Letter is featuring some of the women who enrolled in the undergraduate program in its first coeducational year.
Forty years ago, Carol Stansfield transferred from an all-girls school, Hood College, to Hopkins, which had been an all-men’s school until that year.
“Hopkins was my first choice,” she said. “I liked the style of the students.”
She had gotten into Duke University and University of Virginia as well, but she decided to enroll at Hopkins.
“A friend that I went to grade school with was there, and I met a number of people through him,” Stansfield said. “That was an exciting factor for me [and] it already had a great academic reputation.”
Even though she had come from an all-girls school, she didn’t find the atmosphere to be very different. “It was a very smooth transition,” she said. “Going to a [formerly] single-sex school was very appealing to me. People were greatly focused on their studies.
People had fun as well, but they had a more focused direction of students at Hopkins. That comfortable environment was appealing to me.”
Stansfield, who majored in English, liked the fact that she was able to take upper-level classes right from the start. “I was able to take a much heavier course load from the start. I had the chairman of the department, Dr. Paulson, Earl Wasserman . . . a number of very well known, excellent professors,” she said.
“The classes were tiny little seminar classes, it was very engaging. It was like going to graduate school instead of college.”
Stansfield also really enjoyed the city of Baltimore. “It was a very charming town and easy to get around in,” she said. “It was a great time, [with] very happy days [and was] a lot of fun. A couple of my closest friends to this day were in my class or the class behind.”
In her senior year, she was a class officer and she also tutored. However, getting involved with the student body was not a big deal in 1970. “We weren’t really into the student kind of stuff,” she said. “[It] was not a big deal at the school the way that it is in some places.”
Stansfield seems to have been very involved in some aspects of the school however, as she was part of the group that created the first Spring Fair in 1972.
“We had beautiful weather, it actually was very nice. They had musical groups and little booths. It wasn’t like the ones that you have now, with the full-blown carnival aspect that goes on at the campus. It was more bands, music, very ‘60s, relaxing. It wasn’t a real structured Hopkins at the time.”
Spring Fair was first created to involve the Baltimore community with the school. “I guess all schools have the town and gown dynamic where you have a university that typically is looking to engage the community around it, which may be a very different environment,” she said.
“So I think that the school fair was not just, even at the beginning, conceived to be something for the entertainment of students. Although, that was important because Hopkins, being a single-sex school, wasn’t built around social events at all.”
She went on to say that though there were seven or eight fraternities, there wasn’t much socializing going on. “It wasn’t like a co-ed school where you had various school-sponsored events,” Stansfield said.
“[Spring Fair] was to create interest in the community as well to come onto campus and have an enjoyable afternoon. I think that worked because you can see to this day that you have quite a variety.”
She especially enjoyed working on this project because it allowed her to meet other students that were also interested in socializing. “At the time that I was there, Hopkins drew a pretty serious student body, but many people seemed like they were more introverted and serious than extroverted and interested in socializing and parties,” Stansfield said.
“But among the people that were interested in more social events . . . everyone met those types of people [while] conceptualizing what the fair would be like.”
She feels that the first Spring Fair reflected the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, much like today’s Spring Fair reflects the current generation. “It was a product of its era. The kinds of parties and food that people like to eat over different generations pass and something else comes along and takes [their] place all the time.”
Though Stansfield had an easy transition, Hopkins itself had to accommodate for women living in the dorms. However, she saw this as an extra perk, because she was able to live in an apartment.
“The first year I lived in McCoy. It was just an efficiency with a bathroom, but it was still nice to be in an apartment building,” Stansfield said.
“My senior year, I was in Wolman. I had a living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen all to myself. We were pretty much where they had graduate students in graduate housing. It was quite nice, and of course, right across the street.”
While Stansfield greatly enjoyed her experience of being one of the first women at Hopkins, she notes that there were some who came later who were frustrated by the school’s lack of accommodation for women students.
“I have read in the classes that came behind us a few years later that there was disappointment and frustration. I have read, by some of the classes behind us, that the school had not completely converted over the women’s bathrooms and sports facilities,” she said.
However, she did not feel this way, as she was excited enough to be attending Hopkins. “When you went in the fall of ‘70, with only [a few] women, you’re like a pioneer. You’re not looking for a full-built town. You’re coming into a new environment that by definition is not set up to fulfill your every need right from the start, but it definitely met and exceeded all of my interests in the school. It was just a very relaxing and intellectually challenging environment.”
She felt very comfortable and welcomed in all of her classes and in the school environment. “I found the professors to be terrific and they were also helpful and engaging. I know I’ve read on schools when women first started going to them in the ‘70s that sometimes women felt like they weren’t very comfortable in the environment, or that they didn’t feel very welcomed,” she said.
“I never once felt like that at Hopkins. I think, as a student, it was sort of like being an exchange student in a way. From your perspective sitting in class . . . your experience is just like anybody else’s.”
Stansfield noted that, though she didn’t have any female professors, it did not affect her experience at all. “I actually never thought one way or the other about that. I didn’t have any female professors, and I didn’t know if there were any.
There well could have been female professors throughout many departments in the school, [but] there just didn’t happen to be any [in classes] that I took.”
Though all of the professors at Hood had been women Ph.D.s, she does not think that there would have been many female professors in other universities around the country.
“In the early ‘70s, women with doctorates were not very common. It was difficult for women to be accepted into graduate and professional programs,” she said. “It would be challenging for them to get jobs in universities.”
Stansfield thinks that it would have been very impressive for women to have gone to graduate school back then.
“I think there was a different social expectation for women in that the women who were earning advanced degrees and professional degrees, for them to have been teaching in 1970, they would’ve had to have already completed this by the mid-‘60s. The number of women who had those credentials is small compared to the number of men,” she said.
“I would attribute that to advanced degree programs preferring to admit men over similarly qualified women, I don’t think it was easy at all. You had to be over-qualified as a woman to be admitted to advanced degree programs of any sort and to get hired [as] faculty at that time.”
Stansfield notes that back in 1970, women were not as aware that there were differences between male and female experiences. “For someone in my generation, at 20 years old in 1970, when you’re not out in the world, and you have not had social studies or history classes that would point out the differences between the male and female experience . . . we were not really clued in.
“We didn’t care that the facilities weren’t up for us, didn’t feel that professors were unfriendly or unwelcoming. People’s experiences were dependent on what classes and departments they were in. I don’t know anyone who was an English major that wasn’t very pleased. I think that maybe there were some other departments that had sourballs that weren’t welcoming, but that’s also pretty par for any university. Everyone is going to have some professors that they don’t like.”
If there had been any people that did not believe that women could succeed, that would not have stopped her from enjoying her Hopkins experience. “I was glad to have the opportunity to attend a school of Hopkins’s caliber and academic prowess. I don’t think that women came into school and wondered if they were able to do the work if someone else didn’t think it would happen.
“I didn’t feel defined by somebody else’s expectations for me coming in at all,” she said. “I was interested in what the school had to offer, interested in making the most of the opportunity to be in the classes that I was in. It was great. Who knows and who cares what they thought; I didn’t care at all: didn’t look for it, didn’t find it.”
Since Stansfield lives in the D.C. area, she frequently returns to her alma mater. She’s a member of the Johns Hopkins Club and sometimes brings guests with her to eat. She also comes back for lacrosse games every year, and visits Spring Fair every three to four years.
Forty years after she entered Hopkins as an undergraduate student, she is a student again. She is currently completing a masters degree in health communications at the Hopkins campus in D.C.
“I am just now writing my masters thesis, so I am in fact a current student at Hopkins. That’s an interesting thing, to be a student today and to be a student almost 40 years ago.”
Though Hopkins may be different in some ways, Stansfield feels that the parts she loved about it are exactly the same, which is why she loves to come back and visit. “Do I come back? Yes, I do, which I think shows a lot of affection for this school. I think it’s fair to say that people never go back to schools that they didn’t like,” she said.
“Not very much is different. It has new buildings, it has a lot of women, it has a bigger international community that it did. But, I think, in terms of look and feel, it’s very much the same.
“As a graduate student at Hopkins in the D.C. facilities, the feel of taking a class at Hopkins today is exactly the same as 40 years ago. They have the teaching style, the types of professors, the engaged students. It’s all the same. That’s very gratifying that the school has a gelled-up identity that has stayed true over the years.”
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