Debates about coeducation have a long history in American colleges and universities. Many of them occurred within a few years of a private institution opening its doors, such as Cornell, where coeducation began in 1868, four years after its founding. At Oberlin, coeducation was instituted when African Americans were admitted, four years after it opened in 1833. The University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley experienced no debate about coeducation until women's enrollment equaled or threatened to exceed men's enrollment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nancy Weiss Malkiel's “Keep the Damned Women Out” focuses on the coeducation debates, processes, and results at elite male and female institutions in the United States and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.

Malkiel's study includes Yale, Princeton, Harvard/Radcliffe, Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, and Dartmouth (Wellesley and Smith remained single-sex), as well as Churchill, Clare, and King's at Cambridge, and Brasenose, Wadham, Jesus, and Hertford at Oxford (eventually all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges chose coeducation). She focuses on the elites because, she argues, they had a strong influence on other universities. Specifically, she examines the institutional decision-making processes: why colleges and universities “came to embrace a particular kind of institutional transformation” and then to “take stock of the consequences of their decisions” (p. xvi). She uses the coeducation decision-making process to compare and contrast institutional structures—what roles different constituents played, who exercised power over the course of the process, and how constituents’ thinking changed over time before and after the decisions were made. She also attends to cross-institutional information-sharing, competition, and timing. In the case of American institutions, although faculty and students exercised some power, trustees, presidents, and alumni exercised more influence, or at least played more decisive roles in the process. In fact, one common finding across all institutions was the determining role presidents played—either in supporting or in resisting coeducation. In the case of the British universities, alumni played no role; faculty and college masters were key in the process, and students generally supported decisions to coeducate both the men's and women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Malkiel offers clear similarities and differences between the ways US and British universities are governed and transformed through policy, in this case admissions policy.

In addition to the role of leadership, Malkiel found other common themes, including process: more analysis and planning resulted in better containment of opposition. When colleges and universities did not adequately consult faculty, students, alumni, and trustees, women were less likely to be enrolled in the men's colleges and universities. Self-interest was also a key element in all cases. Many institutions in the 1960s were motivated to consider coeducation because they feared a decline in enrollments, as more high school seniors expressed a lack of interest in single-sex institutions and instead chose coeducational universities and colleges. Elite institutions feared a decline in the quality of applicants, as measured by SAT and ACT scores, GPA, and class ranking. And alumni were moved by the potential for their daughters and granddaughters to enroll in their alma mater.

The final common theme Malkiel identifies across institutions was the complexity of institutional change. Complications in each institution were particular to their histories and institutional cultures, but the most successful were those universities and colleges that anticipated new students’ needs, planned for their academic and campus life opportunities, and exercised humility and flexibility in recognizing and addressing emerging problems. Yale, for example, led in admitting women to the undergraduate college in 1968, but neglected to address the extent of male orientation in the curriculum, the lack of adequate housing and athletic opportunities for women, and the preparation required for male students and faculty to treat women equitably in classrooms and public spaces on campus. At Dartmouth, women encountered appallingly demeaning treatment by both students and faculty during the first decade of coeducation. Princeton, which engaged in more inclusive planning, experienced less disrespectful treatment of women students. The contrasts with colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, where women were accepted with little resistance, are stark.

Malkiel pursued a prodigious and impressive amount of research to produce this volume. She explored a large number of archival collections to offer extensive detailed analysis of the processes and outcomes. She devoted a great deal of attention to Princeton, in part because, as a former dean there, she gained access to more recent archival material. She suggests that social movements, including civil rights, feminist, and antiwar activism, played a role in alerting higher education institutions to the need for change, particularly in expanding student diversity, freedom, and rights on campuses, but that they were not causal factors in the institutions’ coeducation processes. Yet, in the case of Smith, alumna feminist Gloria Steinem, who delivered the commencement address in 1971, seemed to have had a decisive influence at a crucial moment in the discussions of coeducation at that institution. At the same time, concerns about maintaining women's equality and increasing racial, ethnic, and social class diversity were important. Smith's proximity to other institutions and the president's hesitance about coeducation also were critical. Malkiel's treatment of the changing historical context captures the influence of larger national transformations on these institutions—moving them to initiate discussions of coeducation and then to attend to students’ shifting needs and priorities.

Malkiel does miss moments ripe for gender analysis, however. For example, when Vassar began admitting men, the college administrators noted that the types of men who chose Vassar tended to be “arty” as opposed to “all-around guy[s],” and that the feminist “aura” (p. 338) was likely driving certain kinds of men away. That may well have been true, but the implications for a more thorough gender analysis are obvious. What kinds of narrow masculinities were American higher education institutions nurturing in this period? In addition, though Malkiel provides very brief summative founding and early histories of the US institutions, which works well for such a lengthy study, she might have better contextualized the alumnae's impact on Vassar's decision-making process had she explored the ways Vassar alumnae developed a strong voice in institutional policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Similarly, institutional cultures are sometimes overwhelmed and underexplored in the telling by her attention to the most minute details of structural decision-making processes.

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of how administrative personnel and structures interacted with trustee, alumni, faculty, and student constituents at American universities. Specifically, Malkiel analyzes the ways those structures shaped how debates about coeducation unfolded and the extent to which they transformed American higher education in the 1960s and 1970s. The comparison with UK institutions illustrates how those governing structures operated to obstruct and facilitate institutional change. At the same time, her epilogue makes clear that, despite the transformative impact of coeducation at elite institutions, gendered patterns of behavior, expectations, and institutional responses to them persist. Though her argument about gendered patterns of achievement is confusing and does not really make sense, her case for the durability of gendered fields of study does—as seen in the stubborn persistence of gender inequality in women studying engineering, computer science, the physical sciences, and economics, as well as in the endurance of gender inequality in the workplace and in responsibility for home and child care in American society. Both examples suggest there is much work to be done to understand how institutional efforts to reduce discrimination at colleges and universities whose avowed mission is to train leaders provide only limited intervention in larger structural and social inequalities.