South Orange Campus Now Coeducational

“Pleased, happy, disappointed, confusing, messy, indifferent.” These “were [the] words used by both male and female students [in 1968] to describe their feelings about coeducation at Seton Hall.” At the start of the spring semester in 1968, 640 women started taking classes on the South Orange campus after the Newark satellite campus closed. One female student said, “I feel as though I am now in college.”

It was quite shocking considering how less than 10 years ago, in his introductory interview with The Setonian in 1959, Seton Hall University President John J. Doughtery had laughed at the possibility of a coed campus in South Orange. In regard to “whether he had given any thought to converting Seton Hall to a coed basis,” after a “hearty laugh,” the President responded that “no, he had not.”

Bob Windrem, who was then editor of The Setonian, reflected on those first days in an interview from 2017: “It was an earthquake on campus because for the first time you had more than those few humanities honors women moving across campus. As I can recall, the first mixing of the sexes was sort of tentative because nobody knew what to expect.”

The girls did not have a dedicated dorm for them on campus yet, so many of them commuted by car or bus or train. As the 640 female students walked across campus, they took in their surroundings. Some noted that it was “nice to go to a college that has a campus instead of office buildings surrounding it.” Another noted how it felt “like freshmen year all over again.” Another remarked that “all the guys have been surprisingly courteous and friendly.”

Despite the apprehension, there was no real gender clash. Just four weeks after the arrival of the female students, The Setonian took stock of the state of the campus and noted, “The novelty has worn off and the girls have rapidly incorporated themselves into… the South Orange Community.” There were very few complaints found on campus, and even fewer found in The Setonian. The majority of complaints boiled down to the lack of parking available on campus, which many Seton Hall students today will tell you continues to be a chief complaint of the student body.

The Setonian noted that there was “no unusual crowding of classes.” For the most part, many of the women were separated from the men. Most of the first women majored in either elementary education or nursing, so in many of their classes they were surrounded by other women. But in some of the large general education classes, and in classes outside their majors, they were often surrounded by men.

Despite being surrounded by the male students, many of the new female remarked that they didn’t notice any discrepancies in how they were treated. One student, Anita Campisi Whitehead, noted, “You were certainly looked at, but everybody was always very equally treated, I thought. I didn’t notice any kind of talking down to us.”  Another student, Diane Garbini remarked, “It wasn’t like a girl coming on the football team. I never got the feeling that you weren’t welcome, or that this was an all-guys’ school and that you shouldn’t be here.”

Honestly, the relative ease in integration of women into the South Orange campus should hardly have been unexpected. Despite initial hesitations, women have always had a presence at Seton Hall, going as far back as its inception as the university itself was named after a woman in Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. From the university’s inception, Sisters of Charity, a religious order, contributed as nurses, cooks, and in domestic roles. The university welcomed its first female students in the 1930s at its smaller Newark and Jersey City campuses, where not only did women outnumber men, but these campuses also had higher enrollment figures than the main campus in South Orange. Women also served on the faculty and led academically, with Miriam Rooney becoming the first dean of the law school in 1951.

However, there were issues in accepting women students. Even something like bathrooms had shown a slow embrace of change. The men’s bathrooms on campus had undergone a basic gender change through a simple, new sign on the door. The urinals were hilariously still inside.

Additionally, there were struggles to accept women who chose to step out of the traditionally accepted gender norms. As previously mentioned, most female students were resigned and encouraged to be either nursing or early education majors. While there was encouragement for joining clubs and extracurricular activities, with “representatives from WSOU, the IFC, football club, and Student Senate” all urging women to participate, these invitations can be interpreted as attempts to confine women to their traditionally accepted roles. Moreover, when The Setonian included a woman on their editorial board, her title was “editorial assistant” — essentially, a glorified secretary.

Despite these modern interpretations, the female students were happy to be on the South Orange campus, nonetheless. Even with the strict dress code, which dictated that women needed to wear skirts every day, and never slacks, many students felt a proud to be on an actual college campus. One student evoked Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when she told The Setonian that one of her favorite parts of being on the South Orange campus was having her own space in the library.

The first female students were exclusively commuters or off-campus housing residents as a residence hall for women didn’t open until that first coed class reached its senior year. The final step of the coeducational process was marked by the arrival of the freshman class in the fall of 1968 in South Orange, many of whom were unaware that they were breaking a century-old tradition. One of the first female students Anita Whitehead remarked, “The first I knew that The Hall had been all male was at an orientation session the day before classes began. A guy in my group complained that he had not been told there would be women on campus, leaped up and ran out.”

While at first there had been great excitement over the arrival of the female students, it quickly became the norm. It was a fast-moving time. Within a few years, that strict dress code was repealed entirely. As early as 1969, there were articles written by women encouraging women to participate in sports, like Sue Bentele’s article, “It’s a Man’s World?” A few years later in 1973, The Setonian got its first female editor-in-chief, Patti Williams. And now, it’s almost impossible to imagine a world without female students at Seton Hall, where women make up close to 55% of the student body.

Dr. Dermot Quinn, a professor of history and author of Seton Hall University: A History, 1856-2006, told The Setonian in 2018 that the decision to make the South Orange campus coeducational was a natural progression. As he said, “If you look at the years between 1955 and 1966 you have, throughout the country, an increase of about 140/150 percent of women looking to get degrees. It was thought to be revolutionary in 1968, but in some respects, it is much more sensible to think of it as a natural evolution.”