Helen Huynh

I don’t lay awake in bed at night thinking about my femininity. I don’t wake up taking score of how I will be perceived by the world. I don’t sit in class drumming my pencil to the sound of my thoughts reminding me that if I were born 50 years earlier, I wouldn’t be sitting here. The table beneath my notebook may bear generations of men’s names carved into the wood, and although it perpetuates them, my seat at the table is an opposition to the very notion that Yale is only for men.

We are remarkably self-centered as a species. Humans of our age demographic have notably ephemeral attention-spans. You’ll forget about this article within the coming week. It’s eerily easy to let the fraught past of women and Yale drift into the background. Yale rectified its blatant lack of women undergraduates, in many ways, it seems a past left far behind. The acceptance of women at Yale is now celebrated, Maya Lin’s elegant Women’s Table reminds us daily. But it’s a quiet reminder, it’s rarely anything more than an underlying ambivalence. I suppose the tension of a woman’s place is so integrated into living that you don’t notice it except when asked to.

To be a woman at Yale is to be a woman. I do my duties. I celebrate Women’s Month, I contemplate my place in this world and this academic institution as anything but a white man. But I can only imagine the change in the student demographic between 1968 and 1969. Imagine yourself to be a man attending Yale College, class of 1971. The year is 1969, the first that Yale admitted women undergraduates. It’s your junior year at Yale, you walk into an English class and a woman is in the classroom. Do you strike up a friendship with her?

When I was a high school senior on the college search, Yale was advertised to me as one of the institutions with the kindest student population, a university in which people are accepting and foster a friendly atmosphere between peers. I remember hearing sentiments along the lines of, “Yeah, the education is great, but it’s the relationships you’ll really remember.”

When I asked Olivia Telemaque ’26, if she had any thoughts about what it means to be a woman at Yale, her mind first went to relationshipsm too. She commented on a perceived difference between female and male friendships: “Women, I love the way we have friendships. I’ve been noticing that [men] cannot seem to reach that level of depth of friendship with a man unless it’s with a lifelong friend.” 

These deep, long lasting connections aren’t always easy to make. At Yale, many people come from backgrounds where, Telemaque says, “It wasn’t the coolest thing to be really smart and proud of it, where you had to be some kind of humble and downplay your accomplishments,” a sentiment pertaining to women in particular. 

There’s an understanding there. One of shared experience, resulting in a mutual respect for other academic women rather than a condemnation of intelligence. This sense seems to foster a sort of sisterhood, perhaps contributing to the atmospheric friendliness perceived at Yale.

To exist is to be perceived; to be aware of perception is to act. Everyone at Yale plays a role to a certain undeniable degree. Do you act exactly the same here as you do at home? Do you perform for your classmates? Do you plan the exact wording of your comment in section before it leaves your mouth? The groups touring our movie set glance at us out of the corner of their eyes. You walk past Sterling Memorial Library and catch a snippet of a tour guide preaching about the Women’s Table to a semi-circle of glazed eye high schoolers and bright-eyed parents: “built for the 20 year anniversary of accepting women at Yale college, it serves as a daily reminder for …,” you hear a tour guide say. 

When we are in Starr Reading room, in Bass Library, in Commons, we’re perceived, we’re observed and we act. Judy Nguyen ’26 noted that there is a certain expectation to “perform the Yale experience.” Whether you want to or not, being a Yale student puts you on display. Nguyen commented on the performative aspect of the Yale experience, particularly that of a woman, an identity that casts certain elements into an even harsher stage light. 

Effort — aesthetic, academic, social — and interpretation of it is a function of perceived gender. It’s the classic double standard: a woman works hard for grades, social standing and visual appearance, yet she’s condemned as a tryhard, type A, OCD. A man does the same and he is exalted for being a go-getter, a real productive guy. 

Nguyen referenced the Gone Girl monologue: the expectation to be perfect but God forbid you put any effort into it. It should come naturally, being the cool girl. But this is an image that is largely contingent on class. Why is a cool girl cool? Maybe she does a capella, maybe she’s really nice, maybe she has the money and connections to dress a certain way, to have “name-brand experiences,” and to be cultured in the arts and sciences. Nguyen states that “a lot of people play into their femininity with money.”

Furthermore, Nguyen noted the social pressure that “to be a fulfilled Yale woman, you have to be pursuing something romantically. It’s part of the performance, part of being a well-rounded woman fulfilling the college lifestyle. If you’re not coupled, you have to perform the image that you’re a youthful college girl ready to mingle, or partake in the hookup scene.”

Telemaque also commented on the same social pressure, her initial response not only pertaining to platonic relationships but also romantic ones. There’s a pressure to always have something going on, whether in a relationship, talking to someone, or searching for someone. Being a woman with no romantic interests is seen as an anomaly, even at an academic institution. “We’re not anti-relationship! We just don’t have time,” Telemaque exclaimed. Focusing on one’s studies at Yale is not necessarily an aversion to relationships, but this perception is a testament to the pressure.

Hook-up culture and intra-institutional relationships may well have existed long before women were accepted to the college but not in the same way that both homosexual and heterosexual relationships are now. Pressure to date within the institution’s student body is a newfound phenomenon yet still one that seems to more keenly affect the demographic that causes it.

Implied in dating is the question of physical attractiveness. Yale’s official website’s timeline of Women at Yale includes the quote from April 1969: “Jokes about the looks of women are popular. Dean of Admissions R. Inslee Clark responds by declaring that the beauty of an applicant is not important except in contributing to the ‘attractiveness’ of the applicant as a whole.” 

Does the presence of beautiful women at academically rigorous institutions make the institution itself more attractive? Does it draw in a crowd of lookers? Is it the external validation? External to ourselves that affirms our beauty, and external to Yale that affirms some sort of superiority.

I’ve been mulling over how the female experience at Yale is particular to Yale. It seems to me that being a contemporary woman at Yale is more dependent on the former than the latter. In many ways Yale has naturalized gender diversity — but with the change brought the same complicated questions bubbling under the surface tension of being a woman at a university created for and by men.