Fifty years ago this month, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with her lousy high school in New York. She was thirteen, with arching eyebrows that made her look as if she was questioning everything about the world. Her father, Joseph, was a psychology professor, and her mother, Margaret, was an educational therapist; the family had moved around between college towns before settling in Brooklyn, where de Rivera enrolled in John Jay High School, the local public school. “I was good at studying and skipped third grade, which is why I was so young when I was at John Jay,” she told me, recently. She was always a bit of a tomboy, and, though shy, she was unafraid to stand up for herself. She sometimes ran her brother’s morning paper route, a job that few girls she knew undertook. As a freshman, she was named the editor of John Jay’s underground newspaper, the Streetfighter. Later, to a reporter, she described herself as “cerebral,” and argued that being smart shouldn’t hurt a girl socially. “It’s good if a boy asks you to help him with his homework,” she said.

De Rivera was especially strong in math and science, and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on a city-wide math examination. But John Jay was poor in those subjects, and teachers showed no interest in mentorship. She lived a twenty-minute subway ride away from Stuyvesant High School, a specialized public school in downtown Manhattan that was widely regarded as the best secondary school in the country, and one that focussed on math and science. But, since its founding, sixty-five years earlier, Stuyvesant had been all-male, so de Rivera was barred from applying. In the fall of 1968, at the student union, de Rivera met Mia Rublowsky, a tenth-grade math whiz who was also feeling stifled, and considering applying to Stuyvesant despite the sex restriction. In the lunchroom, the two of them talked about the unfairness of the system, and how to fight back. “My parents were not unmoved, but both of them, especially my mother, did not see it as an atrocity on the level of Vietnam,” de Rivera said.

The pair met with Ramona Ripston, an activist at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had fought cases on behalf of the Black Panthers and conscientious objectors to the draft. Ripston informed the girls that Rublowsky couldn’t apply to Stuyvesant, because she was too old to transfer in, even if she were a boy. (The school accepted only freshmen and sophomores, and Rublowsky would soon be a junior.) But de Rivera was a perfect plaintiff. “As a freshman asking to transfer into a specialized high school, I was a clean case,” she said. Ripston convinced Eleanor Jackson Piel, an activist lawyer, to take on the case pro bono, and de Rivera was soon meeting regularly with the two women about her case and taking notes in a three-ring binder. Fighting educational sexual segregation was a radical idea at the time: most Ivy League universities, prep schools, and specialized public schools were still all-male. But Piel felt that barring academically talented girls from attending an élite public school violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, and intended to take the school to court.

At the women’s encouragement, de Rivera requested an application from Stuyvesant. The principal at the time was Dr. Leonard J. Fliedner, a stuffy, sixty-nine-year-old chemist who had authored the textbook “Chemistry: Man’s Servant.” Students called him the Flea. (This was also, cheekily, the name of the school’s underground newspaper.) At the school’s commencement ceremony, in 1960, after he gave an American Legion award during a period of growing counter-cultural sentiment, they booed him so loudly that it made the Times; one journalist pointed to the incident as a sign of unrest among the youth. Fliedner whacked down de Rivera’s request with a nasty letter that read, in essence, “NO GIRLS.” He later told a reporter, “It wouldn’t be just her. There would be a couple of hundred others. And we simply haven’t got the facilities. We’d need a girls’ gym and medical facilities, and a dean of women.” On January 20, 1969, de Rivera filed a lawsuit in New York against the state’s Board of Education.

Hearings for the case began in late January, and de Rivera drew immediate attention. The Daily News called her a “crusader in miniskirts,” and another paper said that anyone would believe she was sixteen. The Post described her as “looking kicky in her inevitable jeans.” “Do you think you’ll have a disruptive effect at Stuyvesant?” a student reporter asked her. “I intend to be disruptive not with my presence, but with my ideas,” she replied. By February, with hundreds of articles about her in the papers, she had become a national icon of the youth movement. After one interview, in which she said she liked rock music mixed with soul— and remarked, “My favorite used to be The Doors . . . and of course I like Jimi Hendrix”—the guitarist sent her a copy of “Electric Ladyland.” On the front, he had written, “Stay Sweet, Alice,” and, on the inside, he drew a heart and wrote, “Good luck on the school thing,” and “Love and Happiness—thanks for listening to our life and love. Jimi Hendrix.” She told me that the gift made her feel “cared about by this person who has been abstractly a wonderful spirit guide to me.”

De Rivera saved some of the newspaper clippings about her, and her insecurities as an adolescent girl are more evident there than in the court records. On one “less attractive” photo of her face in the Spanish-language daily El Diario, she scrawled, “Oh my God,” and over another from the same article she wrote, “Oh Jesus these pics have got to go.” Much of the coverage focussed less on her thoughts and more on her appearance. “One paper printed a picture of me sitting in a short skirt on a couch with legs bare and no shoes on,” she told me. “I looked at that and many of my clippings much later on and I realized the newspapers added lipstick. They sexualized me. I was only thirteen and a half. I didn’t wear lipstick!” She also started receiving calls from anonymous men, who breathed heavily on the other end of the line or said dirty things. “All very humiliating,” she told me, “but I didn't even know how to disengage.” She didn’t tell her parents.

“The morals of Stuyvesant are being corrupted!” one student wrote in an editorial for Stuyvesant’s official student paper, the Spectator. But the majority of students cheered her on. On January 21, 1969, after the first articles about the case appeared, some students proclaimed International Alice Day. Five Stuyvesant boys began showing up at her court appearances, maybe hoping to convince her to be their girlfriend. “The school’s too stuffy anyway,” one told the Daily News. Alice became friends with them, and, at one point, she told a reporter, “The boys coming to court tell me they’ve named the cafeteria Alice’s Restaurant, so I don’t expect any trouble at the school.” She began dating Michael Hill, a Stuyvesant student who called her directly after hearing about her case, and one of few African-American boys at the school. As an interracial couple in the nineteen-seventies, the couple endured looks on the subway, and hurtful comments. But he was also her first kiss, and they dated for seven years and remain friends. “In retrospect, getting the support of kids my age mattered the most,” she told me.