Perhaps no school in the Ivy League resisted coeducation as fiercely as Dartmouth College.

Alumni protested the effort and some threatened to withhold donations. Even after women arrived on campus, in 1972, hostility persisted, with female students derided as cohogs, rather than coeds; and menaced with letters that called them “the enemy” and objects for sexual conquest. A dean even awarded a campus prize to an offensive song, “Our Cohogs,” which described the newly arrived female students as “dirty whores.”

It was onto the lush green Dartmouth campus that two young women arrived about a decade after the college introduced coeducation: Kirsten Rutnik of upstate New York, class of 1988, and Wendy E. Stone of rural New Hampshire, class of 1982. The two women, now Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, 45, and Wendy E. Long, 52, are running against each other for the United States Senate in New York, with sharply different political views and understandings of the world.

To a remarkable degree, the traits that drive them today also propelled them when they were students bent on making their marks at Dartmouth, an institution still struggling to adjust to the presence of women.