them equally? How can we ensure that equality of access translates into equality of experience? Since the merger, only four of PA’s 40 elected student body presidents have been female. As long as that’s the case, as long as outspoken girls are accused of being “aggressive” and soft-spoken girls interrupted by their male classmates, as long as girls feel demeaned at campus dances, the goal of educational parity has not been met. “Historians have a saying: ‘Today’s solution is often tomorrow’s challenge,’” says Henningsen. “The merger wasn’t the end or the culmination of something, but the beginning of something much harder: working out what a coeducational Andover—really, a completely new Andover—would be. And we forget that that’s a continuous process; it really doesn’t have an end.”
Richard Graber
In the big picture, the merger itself marked just another step on Andover’s long and fitful path toward coeducation. As early as the 1850s—two decades after Abbot’s founding— girls trekked up the hill to attend science or literature lectures at PA. By the 1950s, Abbot girls mingled with PA boys at weekend mixers and “could actually sit with boys during the second half of a football game and walk with their callers in the Grove at specified hours Saturday afternoon,” writes Susan McIntosh Lloyd in her definitive history of Abbot Academy, A Singular School. In 1969, the two schools embarked on a trial program of “coordinate education,” opening up more than 70 classes to both boys and girls.
“The merger wasn’t the end or the culmination of something, but the beginning of something much harder: working out what a coeducational Andover… would be.”
—Vic Henningsen ’69
“To us, it felt like, ‘Of course we’re going to go coed! It was exotic, exciting, and fun to have the girls there.”
—Peter Currie ’74
“The boys were particularly intrigued by our sex-ed classes,” recalls Donahue. “They would come down and we would all hang out, smoking cigarettes in the ‘butt room.’” To be sure, Andover’s transformation reflected the sweeping social changes of the era. “When I showed up in the fall of 1970, the school switched from coat and tie to blue jeans and T-shirts,” says Board of Trustees President Peter Currie ’74, who graduated in Andover’s first coed class. Between the Vietnam War protests and the women’s liberation movement, “it was a time of real upheaval,” he says. “Everyone was exploring and trying to figure out the new boundaries.” Coeducation was in the air; by the late 1960s, 94 percent of students in single-sex high schools in the Northeast favored coeducation, according to Lloyd’s book. Yale welcomed female undergraduates in 1969 (a full century after it began admitting female graduate students). That same year, Brown men and Pembroke women began sharing dormitories, and the two schools officially merged in 1971. Andover’s boys—along with most of the younger faculty members, who had come out of schools like Yale and Brown—couldn’t understand why anyone would oppose such a change. “To us, it felt like, ‘Of course we’re going to go coed!’” says Currie. “It was exotic, exciting, and fun to have the girls there.” Not all trustees and faculty members saw it that way. The Board voted down an Abbot merger three times before it finally passed. They were worried not only about Abbot’s finances, which were shaky, but about the quality of its students. “There was a real sense that Abbot was an inferior Andover | Spring 2013
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