The history of university coeducation is particularly interesting at this moment in America, when the country is poised to elect its first woman president. Hillary Rodham, who would later become Hillary Rodham Clinton, was a student at the all-female Wellesley College around the time when elite, all-male institutions were considering whether to enroll women. Elite, all-women institutions were similarly grappling with what their future would be. Clinton graduated before conversations about the possibility of coeducation at Wellesley began in earnest, Malkiel said in an interview, but the speech she gave at her senior commencement in 1969 speaks to the era in which she came of age. She spoke about protest, and encouraged her fellow students to try and improve their imperfect world. While she would go onto Yale Law School, where she and her female peers were surely not “drags,” in that moment she spoke from a world—Wellesley—in which women’s leadership was the default.

While the first women showed up as enrolled students at schools like Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton nearly 50 years ago, their experiences may seem eerily similar to the women who are still becoming “firsts” today—including, perhaps, Hillary Clinton. I spoke with Malkiel about the history and legacy of coeducation on college campuses; our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Green: Perhaps this is naive, but I was stunned by the sexism you described on campuses during this era. Was this surprising to you?

Malkiel: Certainly, the sexism is enormously striking. The unfettered ways in which older men and even male college students expressed their disdain for women, and their sense that women belong in a different or lesser category or status—it is really stunning. One has to work hard to remember an era in which that was just the way it was.

But remember also, this is the way people grew up. This is largely before the women’s movement. This is at a time when women are still unable to do basic things like get credit in their own names, or take certain legal actions on their own authority. It’s an era that we aren’t really so familiar with anymore, but the dominant mode was clearly: Men are in charge, and women don’t belong here, whether “here” is in the corridors of power or on an all-male campus.

Green: With the upcoming election, there’s potential for a new “first” for women: winning the White House. What were some of the challenges you noticed for the women who were in the first coeducational classes at these schools, who were also “firsts”?

Malkiel: They were constantly under a microscope. Everybody was watching them. They were constantly asked for the woman’s point of view, in every class—whether it was in engineering or mathematics, where there is no woman’s point of view, or a class in history, literature, psychology, or sociology. It may have been that their male teachers thought they were paying appropriate attention to the women who were new students, but that isn’t the way it worked. It worked to make those students feel very self-conscious, as though they weren’t just students—they were representing their gender.