A viewing of the show “American Dreams” last night had me remembering my own college years (1970-74) and how I signed up for the first co-ed dorm on campus back in 1971 (not sure my parents were too happy about that one, btw!). American Dreams is set in 1965 currently and it shows the dorms at University of Pennsylvania as being very permissive even to the point where it seems that they might be co-ed. I don’t think this was the case in 1965, though. Does anyone know when co-ed dorms first began to show up on college campuses? On Penn in particular? My freshman year (fall of 1970), we still had a midnight curfew, locked doors and codes to get in, no men on the floor after a certain time, etc. Certainly has been making me go “hmmmm!” all day long. Okay, I need to get a life, I know!
I was a (male) freshman at Cornell in 1966. The womens’ dorms as I recall them (or, more precisely, as they were described to me - I never actually got inside one) were pretty much as you described the UP dorms. The University was seen as being responsible for their female students, and keeping men away from them was seen as part of that responsibility.
By 1970 things had gotten a lot more liberalized. Many of the women lived in off-campus apartments, where the (non-University) landlords treated them just as welll/shabbily as they treated their male tenants.
In the Fall of '69, my (small, Midwestern) college had hours ( = curfew) for women, particularly restrictive for freshmen. Intervisitation was allowed only from 2-4 pm on Sundays. That all changed a lot within the ensuing year, and a bit more over the next couple years. When I graduated in Spring of '73, there were no hours, co-ed dorms, and 24-hour intervisitation.
In the 69-70 year, my girlfriend’s large, Eastern state university was no less restrictive than my school. Methinks the show’s writers didn’t do their homework. It probably never even occurred to them that this was yet another aspect of life was different in the '60s.
You might discover that Oberlin or (more likely) Antioch had co-ed dorms as early as 1968 (no earlier), but I doubt it. My guess would be that the first truly co-ed dorms in the U.S. occurred during the 1969-70 school year. (You can find older “co-ed” dorms dating to the early 20th century, but they were generally winged buildings with a common room joining the separate single-sex wings. Even when they allowed both sexes in the same wings, many colleges put them on separate floors, initially.)
First ones were at UCLA in 1959 or 1960. I haven’t researched it beyond that. Don’t know just how they were laid out.
By 1965, there was only one all-girl’s dorm left at UCLA and the residents were protesting the plan to do away with it.
IIRC, my freshman year at Cornell in 1969-1970 all dorms were still segregated, with many restrictions on visitation at least in women’s dorms. (I well recall the gossip after our first 2 AM fire drill freshman year, when several women were evident shivering in the snow among the crowd of guys as we waited for all-clear). In 1970-71 I was in one of the first co-ed dorms (Risley), which was segregated by floor (in order to avoid sharing bathrooms).
The residential colleges at Rice University were all single-sex until 1971, when a few of the colleges went co-ed. The last two single-sex colleges at Rice did not finally go co-ed until the fall of 1987 (my sophomore year).
My dorm at MIT went co-ed in the early 1970s. My floor went co-ed while I was living therte, in 1974. There were male and female “suites”, with a group of bedrooms grouped around a central living room/kitchen area and bathroom. One suite, however, was itself co-ed, and I lucked out in getting a place in that one. It didn’t exactrly live up to Animal House-like fantasies. Co-ed living was more like suddenly having a lot more sisters, whop tended to tie up the bathroom and added to the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink.
Heck, when I started college in 1987 we still had “visitation” rules prohibiting people of the opposite sex from being on the floor after a certain time. We also had to meet opposite-sex guests at the entrace to the building and escort them wherever they wanted to go.
Remember Robert Rimmer wrote The Harrad Experiment sometime in the 60s. And this became a “shocking” film. . .all about sharing rooms at Harrad College with the opposite sex.
In 67-68 I was in grad school at a major midwestern university. The senior and grad student dorms were totally open during the day until about midnight, 2AM on weekends. Different sexes on different floors. Freshman and sophomore dorms were totally by sex. I don’t know about "visitation’ because I didn’t visit any freshmen or sophomores.
More parochial schools remained same sex until about 70.
I was wondering the same thing when I saw that episode.
Here in Mississippi, state law still requires segregated dorms. The closest to co-ed is a winged building at MS State where females have the north wing and males the south with a common lobby. Visiting hours there were 10am-2am, at the maximum. Here at USM, the hours are 12pm-12am.
All of the public state universities also have apartment dorms, but only married couples may move into them - although I know several groups of Chinese exchange students who were living in them at State. Single parents were also accepted, but unmarried couples weren’t even considered.
I was surprised when I visited Auburn to see co-ed hallways. The housing people from Mississippi would have had a heart attack.
I moved into the first Co-ed dorm in Colorado in the fall of 1968. The only restriction was no “official” freshmen residents. They, the freshmen, had the traditional dorms of guys on one side of the commons area and the girls on the other.
I cannot speak to any other state, but for obvious reasons I know when Colorado was.
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