This is the third article in a series of profiles on the first class of women to join the Hopkins community in honor of Women’s History Month. This week, The News-Letter presents a profile of Susan Woolhiser who enrolled as a junior in 1971 and graduated in 1973.
As a transfer student, Susan Woolhiser applied to Columbia and Hopkins, and decided to come to Hopkins. Some of her friends, including Carol Stansfield, profiled in a previous article, had already transferred. Far from being intimidated by the prospect of being among the first women at Hopkins, Woolhiser was excited by the prospect.
“I wanted a more challenging intellectual environment, and I liked the idea of a coed school. The fact that we were newly coed was exciting,” she said. “Was it a problem? No, it wasn’t a problem, it was fun.”
1971 was the first year that female freshmen were allowed at the university, although female transfer students were welcomed as early as 1970. The unprecedented influx of women in 1971 led the university to open up parts of the AMRs as residences, rather than house all the women in apartments.
The new female students were housed in Adams, Baker and Clark houses in AMR II, which remains freshman housing today. Woolhiser lived on the first floor of Clark house. During her undergraduate years, she saw the university transition from a relatively small population of female transfer students to a fully coed environment.
“It didn’t feel like we were a sprinkling of just a few women . . . By the time I was a senior there were two full classes of women. Going coed was pretty much accomplished.”
Despite being a woman on a campus that was all male only a few years ago, Woolhiser felt comfortable.
“For the first year that I got there I was living in three dorms where there were lots of women, so we didn’t feel out of place on campus at all.”
To the students of Hopkins, integrating women was a quick and easy process. However, some members of the administration and the Hopkins community may have found the change more difficult.
“I think the students really had no problem with the school going coed. It think it was a bigger deal for people who had been with the University a long time. For students it was like, ‘Okay, it’s fun.’”
Woolhiser recalled that the transition to being coed was seen as a positive change by some of the male students.
“I remember talking to some of the guys and they said they liked it better with women on campus,” Woolhiser said.
Woolhiser had no complaints with the accommodations for women. Although the women were housed in single-sex hallways, the accommodations were essentially equal to those of the men.
“The dorms were fine. They were the same dorms that everybody had. They weren’t fancy then, they probably aren’t fancy now. They were what they were, we didn’t really have a problem with them. They weren’t different from the guys’ dorms really.”
Woolhiser shared a humorous anecdote: “The first fire drill, you know, people came out of the houses, and of course men and women came out of Adams, Baker, and Clark.”
“So really, it wasn’t such an earth-shattering thing,” she added.
Although Woolhiser and her peers had a positive experience at Hopkins, she recognized that perhaps some women felt that living in a newly coed university was difficult.
“People wanted [Hopkins to be coed], they were happy with it, and it seemed very welcoming. I know not everyone had that experience, but we didn’t have a problem.”
Some women’s dissatisfaction could be credited to the relative lack of opportunities for women in sports compared to athletic offerings today. Although she took dance classes at Peabody as an undergraduate and enjoyed going to Lacrosse games, Woolhiser was not interested in participating in sports.
“I’m not particularly athletic and in my high school there were not a lot of athletics — this was before Title IX; a long time ago. So I had not had that in my undergraduate or high school so I didn’t really miss it when I went to Hopkins.”
Of being a female athlete in a newly coed environment, Woolhiser said that, “For some women that might have been an issue, but I don’t remember people bringing it up as a problem at the time . . . I wasn’t disappointed when [sports for women] wasn’t there because I hadn’t anticipated a need for it.”
Woolhiser credits her satisfaction with Hopkins in part to her work as with The News-Letter as an undergraduate. Convinced by her friend, Stansfield, she became a News-Letter writer, which would help her find her place in the university and beyond.
“I was a News-Letter person,” she said. “That was a very good way for me as a transfer student to get to know the university pretty quickly, and get to know people and professors. It was a really great way to integrate myself into the school.”
Working on The News-Letter helped her develop a skill set that would be useful years later, in her current job in the marketing department of a insurance company in Baltimore.
“I learned a lot on The News-Letter,” Woolhiser said. “I work in marketing now in an insurance company, so I’m still involved in writing and putting things together.”
Unlike today, in the ‘70s The News-Letter was published twice a week, and writers could receive class credit for their work. The same students took on all the tasks required to publish the paper, from writing to distribution. According to Woolhiser, The News-Letter also provided a supportive social environment, since students cooperated to write articles and run the paper smoothly.
“There was a lot of camaraderie too,” she said. “We taught each other, and we did everything — we did the layout, we did the copying, the advertisements, we delivered it. It was really a self-contained operation. People would really help each other — like I’d be doing a story and get stuck, and they’d help [me].”
Woolhiser spoke highly of her academic experience, and the power of the University to influence young women in their choice of career path. She mentioned the small classes and access to graduate level resources.
“As a junior, you could . . . have very small classes, almost graduate school level. You had access to graduate school professors, which was a real opportunity. I think in some larger schools you never really get that.”
Although she ultimately decided against a career in academia, Woolhiser felt she benefitted from the opportunity to learn about her options and to pursue her academic interests.
“I think it gave women the idea that academics could be a career. For example, you’d see a lot of graduate students, say in English and history, who might be going on to their doctorate and then teaching. And since you had contact with those people, you might have considered that a possible career path. Whether you pursued it or not, at least you had the opportunity to see what the path was.”
As a student of literature and history, Woolhiser found that most of her professors were male. However, she remembers having some female professors, including one memorable art history teacher.
“We had some women professors. I remember Phoebe Stanton very well. She was an art history teacher, fabulous teacher. I was a humanities major, so I did a lot of literature and history, and [the professors] were mostly men . . . More men professors than women, but I think that was pretty common at the time.”
After getting her undergraduate degree in American history and literature, Woolhiser went on to earn yet another degree from Hopkins, a masters in Liberal Arts, and then an MBA from NYU. “I’ve always liked school,” she said.
New York City was incomparable to Baltimore. “Bigger. More job opportunities. More culture, more fun. New York is great. You can’t compare New York to Baltimore. There aren’t many places on the planet like New York.
However, Woolhiser still has affection for Baltimore, a city that was her home for many years.
“Baltimore’s a lot of fun. It’s a quirky, interesting city. Easy to get around, enough sports and cultural things to keep me busy . . , It still has a lot of charm, I think.”
Since her undergraduate years, she has seen Baltimore’s industry change and diversify.
“Baltimore’s gone through quite a bit of a renaissance, you know, the Inner Harbor, and bringing industry, different types of industries into Baltimore, more diverse than the industrial base it used to be — more of a science, multi-industry kind of an atmosphere.”
Then, as now, some students still lived in the “Hopkins bubble,” opting to spend time on campus rather than venture out into the city. “Some of us [explored Baltimore], some of us didn’t. I think it was kind of an individual thing.”
Woolhiser saw the University increasingly urging students to get out into the city. “I think the students were somewhat isolated on campus and I think there’s been an effort to make the students more integrated in the town . . . ”
The Inner Harbor was not the sparkling tourist attraction that it is now, so one popular student haunt was Fell’s Point. However, since owning a car was not the norm, students mostly socialized on campus.
“The harbor wasn’t renovated then. But we did go to Fell’s Point, and other places in the city. Fells Point was our Canton,” she said. “We did stay on campus a lot, not having cars . . . Visiting people’s apartments, kind of low-key.”
Having studied at Hopkins in the early ‘70s, lived in Baltimore for several years, and visited campus often since her undergraduate years, Woolhiser has seen the University change. Among other changes, the food has improved, and students now hang out more on the beach than on the freshman quad.
Mason Quad is actually a relatively new edition. When Woolhiser was an undergraduate, the area currently occupied by admissions and various academic buildings was a large parking lot.
“[Mason Quad] used to be a parking lot. An ugly parking lot. They used to have Spring Fair there. It was just an open flat parking lot. They put the parking below ground and a new fancy admissions [building]. The first building you used to come up to was Garland, and that was where the admissions were.”
Woolhiser approved of Hopkins’s new look.
“The campus looks great. I think it’s kept the feel that it used to have, it’s just a little spiffier than it was.”
When Woolhiser studied Hopkins, social interaction was less structured and there were fewer extracurricular activities in which to participate.
We made a lot of our own fun. I don’t think we had so much planned activities, [and we were] not so much plugged in.”
In her time, students enjoyed sports, religious groups, political movements and to a lesser extent, Greek Life.
“There was lacrosse, very little football. There was the chaplain’s office. There was a lot politically going on — Vietnam, so there was focus on that. And there were some fraternities. There might have been a Catholic group and a Jewish group.”
Her time also saw the launch of Spring Fair.
“We did Spring Fair — that was a big student-run thing. That was new at the time. That was a big deal.”
Today, there is a greater diversity of extracurricular pursuits available to students.
“I think Hopkins has more variety going on right now. They have that Mattin Center, maybe more [of a] focus on the arts, I’ve noticed . . . It’s good that they should have more of that available, because people are not one-dimensional.”
Another, perhaps less positive change, is the increased hype and stress of the college admissions process.
“I think for you, there’s a lot of talk about ‘college, college, college’ since you’re a little kid . . . I know from my godchildren and other people’s kids who are college age. There’s so much pressure, it seems.”
Furthermore, as college students in every university know, tuition hikes have far outpaced inflation. Woolhiser believed that tuition was only $3000 in 1973, and stressed the increased burden of student loans.
“It’s a lot more expensive than it was,” Woolhiser said.
“I think it was $3000, but I think that was just tuition] . . . So if you took loans out you came out with loans that were significant at the time but nothing [compared to now]. “
Other aspects of the undergraduate experience have stayed the same, however. Until the Brody Learning Commons is completed, students will still study in the Hut or the depths of MSE, just as they did in the ‘70s.
“The library’s pretty much the same,” Woolhiser remarked.
“I used to go to the Hutzler Reading Room, the Hut . . . The library is dark and underground. Not very appealing to be in those metal carrels, stuck in the deep basement . . . ”
Unfortunately, it seems that the incessant mispronunciation of the University’s name is here to stay as well.
“I think if you say ‘Johns Hopkins,’ first of all people leave the ‘s’ off. What you’re going to do for the rest of your whole life is correct people. That’s your legacy of being a Hopkins person,” Woolhiser joked.
Woolhiser is still involved with her alma mater, attending events on campus and visiting her godson, who is currently an undergraduate.
“My goddaughter has graduated from Hopkins and my godson is at Hopkins right now. So I’ve kind of influenced them to come to Hopkins, and they like it. We do alumni things together, and I see him on campus, so that’s contributed to my attachment to the school.”
Just a few days ago, Woolhiser saw the HSO performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”
“[The soloist] did that Korsakov piece — that was a hard piece, I was, like, holding my breath. She did a really good job. I was proud.”
Woolhiser felt that she had a good experience at Hopkins “It was a good time. I was glad I did it. I enjoyed going there and being an alum.”
The university has changed in many ways, renovating its campus, expanding its academic offerings and adapting to a new century. Woolhiser lived and studied at Hopkins during one of the most marked changes — the transition to a coed environment.
However, Woolhiser and thousands of students after her have held on to friendships that have remained invariant even after their undergraduate years were over.
“I’ve made wonderful friends there, that I’ve kept over the years. My roommate and I are quite close, and Carol [Stansfield]; there’s a group of us. That’s one of the most important things we got out of college: the friendships we made during the time we were there.”
