New Yale Colleges

Elga Wasserman Posted In: Profiles

Elga Ruth Wasserman (née Steinherz) was one of Yale University’s most important champions of co-education. Yale women owe a lot to Wasserman, who was one of the chief implementers of Yale’s plan to admit women.

The Wasserman shield highlights Elga Wasserman’s effort to bring coeducation to Yale. The blue and green represent Yale College and Yale Law School; the balance of colors and laurel wreaths symbolize her commitment to gender equality in academia; and the pattern of hexagons across the top represents her personal study of organic chemistry.

The Wasserman shield highlights Elga Wasserman’s efforts to bring coeducation to Yale. The blue and green represent Yale College and Yale Law School; the balance of colors and laurel wreaths symbolize her commitment to gender equality in academia; and the pattern of hexagons across the top represents her personal study of organic chemistry.

Wasserman was born to Deszoe and Louisa Steinherz in Berlin in 1924. While her immediate family fled Germany in 1936, Wasserman lost several members of her extended family to the Nazis. The Steinherz family moved to Great Neck, NY, where Deszoe founded a legal practice and Louisa worked as a real estate broker.

Wasserman graduated at the top of her class in 1941 at the age of sixteen. She attended Smith College and organized civil rights protests on campus as a student. Wasserman’s deep-seated passion for issues concerning marginalized groups would define the rest of her life.

In 1945, Wasserman accepted a graduate fellowship to study organic chemistry at Harvard University. She was one of only two women in the department. After she married Harry Wasserman in 1947, her adviser promptly lost interest in her career plans. In 1948, the couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1948, for Harry’s faculty position at Yale. Wasserman continued her studies and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1949.

From 1950 to 1962, Wasserman held part-time teaching positions at several universities while raising her three children. At that time, female professors in science academia were scarce, and those who were married with children were even rarer. Inspired by her struggles, Wasserman wrote The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science (2000), focusing on gender parity and balancing work and family in a tenure-driven environment.

In 1962, Wasserman was appointed Assistant Dean of the Yale Graduate School, responsible for overseeing the physical and biological sciences. Six years later, when she spoke to the Dean about her professional advancement, he refused to assist or support her.

Nonetheless, Wasserman was soon appointed as Chairman of the Committee on Coeducation and was chosen by Yale President Kingman Brewster to fill the newly minted position of Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women. Wasserman spent the next four years preparing for and guiding Yale College’s transition to a co-educational student body. This involved considering housing logistics and establishing admissions criteria.

Elga WassermanIn 1969, Yale College’s first co-educational year, the student body was comprised of over 4,000 men and 588 women. Wasserman quickly recognized the educational and social barriers women faced in this environment and wrote, “Women students need an unusual sense of self to persevere in a predominantly male setting.” Henry Chauncey, Jr., who oversaw the administrative aspects of this transition, remarked that, “Both in terms of the academic realm and the extracurricular world, she wanted the new women to have the best. She was sensible and knew when an idea was too expensive, but she could make the very best out of what was available. No single person did more to assure that co-education went well than Elga, and today’s Yale women owe her a great debt of gratitude.”

Wasserman left her position in 1972, only to return to Yale as a law student, graduating in 1976. She then clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Afterward, Wasserman opened a private family law practice, where she worked until retiring from the law in 1995.

While American women are still struggling for equal pay and good family leave policies, Wasserman’s contributions have helped move us towards a more equal future. As she said, “Because women are now teaching at Yale, men can see that women can hold positions of power even at the most elite institutions. If they were taught only by men, they did not think of women as equals. Yale still needs more senior women in the sciences.”

2 Comments

  1. Nancy Cohen • April 10, 2015

    An extraordinarily inspired choice. Wasserman blazed trails in so many directions, and thousands of women have followed her -- over barriers to higher education where they were previously barred because of their gender; to positions of authority in educational institutions; to achievement in the sciences. As a child, I dreamed about attending then-all-male Yale. As I entered high school, it seemed my dream might be in reach. The Wasserman shield is elegant. Reply


  2. Gretchen Schmidt Bishay • April 17, 2015

    This is a wonderful biography. I do not find Dr. Wasserman's on Wikipedia. I have read that women are underrepresented there, as subjects and as contributors. I wonder if the author would consider sharing Dr. Wasserman's achievements with more people by posting a version of this biography there. Reply


Leave a Reply

We encourage you to share your thoughts, concerns, and questions. Please be advised of the following terms of usage. In the spirit of openness and civility, we require that you use your full name when submitting a comment and that you indicate your Yale affiliation (e.g., college and year of graduation). If you do not use your full name and/or indicate your Yale affiliation, we reserve the right to remove any content that you submit. In addition, please note that you are fully responsible for everything that you post. The content of all comments is released into the public domain unless clearly stated otherwise. We do not control the content posted. Nevertheless, we may monitor any user-generated content as we see fit and reserve the right to remove content for any reason whatever, without consent. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and may result in removed comments. We further reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to remove a user’s privilege to post content on the site.