First-person stories: May Day

These stories were written by women responding to our request for memories of their experiences as the first female undergrads at Yale. See other stories on these topics: In the Colleges, Gratitude, Yale Administration, In the Classroom, and Yale Men.

You’ll see that some writers’ names are asterisked. These women submitted their stories also to the Written History Project, founded by the 50th Anniversary Committee so that all alumnae of the time can contribute to the history of coeducation at Yale College. (There’s also an Oral History Project and an Archives Project.)

And finally: we invite all readers to send their letters and reactions—including stories of their own experiences of breaking boundaries at Yale—to editor@yalealumnimagazine.com.

Julia Preston ’73 (graduated ’76)
Contributing writer, The Marshall Project

For me, at least, being a pioneering woman at Yale that year was not even the main event. In 1969, Yale was a gateway into a national vortex of protest and change. The Black Panthers. Vietnam. The invasion of Cambodia. By April, the turmoil was so intense that the faculty suspended classes. Yale College without women was already a distant past. 

Kathleen Virginia “Kit” McClure ’73 (graduated ’75)
Jazz saxophonist and band leader; founder of Women in Jazz, Inc.

At the time of the May Day 1970 demonstrations, I was taken aback to see policemen throwing tear gas canisters over the Vanderbilt gate into the courtyard of our dormitory. I ran from police charging us at the demonstration and observed them from our room.

Leslie Danoff ’73
Former broadcast journalist at CBS and PBS, now cofounder and COO of the conservation nonprofit Global Forest Generation

The first year of coeducation coincided with an expectation of impending campus doom in the spring of 1970, amid the widespread fear that there would be blood—students’ blood—on the streets of New Haven. Everyone took themselves very seriously. It was a grim and humorless time as we prepared for the anticipated apocalypse of May Day 1970. Yippie radicals Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and an army of outside agitators were coming to the New Haven Green. There they would join Yale students at a rally in support of Black Panther Bobby Seale, on trial in New Haven for murder. The National Guard was expected, accompanied by tanks, and all hell was forecast to break loose.  My roommates trained to be student marshals. Wearing white armbands, they would offer first aid to the fallen until ambulances arrived.

But the master of my residential college could be a force for calm and reason. Vincent Scully, Morse’s master, was among the small group that had gathered in our courtyard that clear, balmy night to talk about what to expect and how to prepare for the following day’s invasion. The Yale student who addressed us—a charismatic black power advocate—warned that if we weren’t willing to pick up a gun and be prepared to fight, then we should leave campus. After Master Scully said, “I endorse every word that he’s said,” I didn’t want to stick around. If there was to be violence, which everyone expected and too many in the Yale community appeared to relish, I would watch it from a safe distance in nearby Hamden. On television. Ultimately, despite some rock throwing and tear gas, the protest turned out to be mostly peaceful. For this lifelong liberal Democrat, five decades have not dulled the memory of how quickly a venerable institution dedicated to rational discourse can be overtaken by its most strident voices.