Less than a decade later, young women are flocking to women’s colleges and girls’ schools because they are single-sex. Barnard College’s essays for fall admission read like the Gloria Steinem (Smith ‘56) handbook: “Barnard interested me because of its empowering all-female environment,” one high-school senior wrote in her application. “Because it is a women’s college, [Barnard] would prepare me to deal with the hardships that come with being a female doctor,” wrote another. At Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., “we have some [applicants] who complain that this is not enough of a women’s college,” says Andrea Jarrell.
Far from the days of white-gloved socials and busloads of prospective hubbies on the weekends, single-sex education has made a comeback and even become E. C. educationally correct. Applications at most of the country’s 84 women’s colleges are up an average 10 percent this year for the third year in a row. And enrollment has increased steadily, too: once empty dorms are filled again. “It takes quite a lot to make a national trend,” says Ann Wright, dean of enrollment at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where applications have increased 34 percent since 1991. Anita Hill, Tailhook, Sen. Bob Packwood, Susan Faludi’s book “Backlash” and the American Association of University Women’s 1992 report on gender bias in schools (which made “Doonesbury”) are all part of “a collective wisdom that has gotten through,” Wright says.
College is now a buyer’s market, and women’s schools are selling every chance they get. Wellesley basks in the reflected glory of Hillary Rodham Clinton, class of ‘69. The schools have researched an array of talking points: even though only about 4 percent of college women graduate from women’s colleges, the schools boast that one third of the women board members of Fortune 1000 companies are their graduates. For the first time since the Ivy League went coed in the late 1960s (and ladled off the cream of women’s colleges), schools are outdoing themselves to be more single-sex than thou. It used to be, says Jadwiga Sebrechts of the Women’s College Coalition, that “reading the brochures, you never even knew it was a women’s college until the last line.” Now the cover of Smith’s new brochure reads, “Why choose a (SHH!) women’s college?”
Another question: why wait till college? According to Myra and David Sadker, authors of “Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls,” the problems begin in the earliest grades. Dispatching hundreds of “raters” to classrooms across the country, the two American University professors report that teachers call on boys twice as often and praise boys three times more often than they do girls. Teachers do lavish girls with praise for the appearance of their homework (“Pretty handwriting, Jane!”). “The research has all dovetailed nicely,” says Meg Moulton, executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools, who hopes the findings will mean even more girls’ school converts. Already, two thirds of the coalition’s K-12 members have seen applications rise 37 percent over the last three years. But with tuition and board as high as $18,000 a year, private elementary and secondary schools are a luxury that only about 1 percent of school kids can afford.
A handful of public schools in California, Maine and Illinois have begun to break the class barrier and started experimenting with all-girls math classes. “I remember in coed classes, I’d feel stupid. I’d be lost and afraid to ask questions,” says seventh-grader Danielle Schlapper of Anacapa Middle School in Ventura, Calif. “Now I feel a lot more comfortable.” Forget feelings: since she’s been in an all-girls math class, her grades have gone from C’s to B’s.
Why not go all the way and dedicate entire public schools to girls? The answer: Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which helped girls get into all-male schools. Already, one boy has used it to integrate an all-girls class in California. “Segregating the sexes doesn’t guarantee that boys and girls will get a better education,” says Anne Bryant, AAUW executive director. Her group is lobbying instead for legislation currently in Congress that would help better train coeducational teachers. “[Single-sex schools] are not a panacea for gender bias,” says Janet Lavin, director of admission at Wellesley College, which is just as picky this year as it was in 1969 (38 percent of applicants get in). “But 25 years after coeducation we see that it hasn’t been the answer.” In the meantime, many of the nation’s ablest young women have decided that young men are fine for weekends but for serious work they’re better off on their own.
