Colin Schlitt ‘24
Brendan Schlitt ‘24
Aru Venugopalan ‘24
Photo courtesy of Maiah Islam ‘21
EA’s journey towards inclusivity took a big step in 1974 when EA admitted its first female students into formal education at the Devon campus. This change came almost 200 years after the 1785 founding of the school. Each year after that, every incoming class admitted female students, making the entire school coeducational by 1984.
Kimberley Farrell ‘84 joined the EA community in its second year of co-ed learning, which was also the first year her father was named Head of School. At the time, there were two Episcopal campuses, Devon and Merion, and there was a great difference between the number of female students enrolled at each campus. Farrell says, “I think there were only [about] two girls on the Merion campus in my grade the second year that we had girls, but I went to the Devon campus.”
The selection of sports was also very limited because there was such a small number of girls in each grade. Farrell explains that “in middle school, they didn’t quite know what to do with us with sports sometimes, so we played all kinds of sports.” Some sports the girls participated in were synchronized swimming, table tennis, and volleyball. However, when her class became seniors in the Upper School, they joined competitive sports. Many girls participated in the sports that had girls teams: field hockey, basketball, swimming and lacrosse.
In terms of academics, though initial adjustments needed to be made initially, teachers became more supportive of the co-ed shift with time. Socially, Farrell says, “I think a lot of my female classmates have said that it was really nice developing friendships with boys and how much they feel that helped them going into college and in their careers and not being in a single-sex environment, where you did not get to grow up and interact with the other sex as much.” Although there were some challenges for women in a heavily predominant male setting, the overwhelming majority of her classmates were grateful to have joined a co-educational learning environment.
Grace Limaye ‘90, who is now head of the science department, first came to EA in eleventh grade–sixteen years after the school’s first female students–from the all-female Baldwin School because she wanted to be a part of a co-educational schooling experience. At this point in EA’s history, girls had been integrated into all grades, but she still remembers feeling “like a girl in an all-boys school.” EA was going into its sixth year of fully integrating females but still was not equal in gender, and, as Limaye says, women “were only about one-third or one-fourth of the class, so we were greatly in the minority.” However, in her second year at EA, Limaye started to feel more comfortable as a female student.
Limaye says this comfort resulted from the “many strong female role models who were there to support us and who paved the way for us.” Limaye further explains, “So many women were already paving the way for future women like myself to be not only strong athletes but also to be good in academics.” Limaye believes, “coeducational learning is very important as it simulates real life. Children from birth on up should always be exposed to as much of a real life experience as they can get. Also, it is very important to be able to socialize and get along with the other genders, and to hear different perspectives.”
The co-educational environment at EA is still an integral part of the school’s success. As Logan Schlitt ‘23 remarks, it “ was one of the main factors in my decision to attend this school over an all-girls school. The previous women who have attended EA have shaped the school’s culture, and without them, my decision would have been different.”