The SpectatHER: The Pioneers

Alice de Rivera

By Talia Kahan

Alice de Rivera made headlines in the spring of 1969 for spearheading a case against Stuyvesant High School. At that time, Stuyvesant was all-boys and did not admit girls, even if they scored above the cut-off on the SHSAT. De Rivera sued the Board of Education (BOE) on the basis that the maintenance of a public all-boys school was not in compliance with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

But before this all occurred, de Rivera attended John Jay High School. Her experience there was unusual: the teachers went on strike for a large portion of the school year (consequently, students were not in attendance for weeks at a time), and once they returned from their strike, the schedule had to be changed to make sure that all the material would be taught on time.

She initiated the case during the fall of her freshman year at John Jay, and it was not resolved until the spring of that same year. In some senses, de Rivera was disappointed with the result of the trial because the BOE voluntarily repealed Stuyvesant’s sex restriction. This prevented the case from creating an important precedent. Unfortunately, de Rivera was never able to attend Stuyvesant because her family moved to upstate New York at the start of her sophomore year.

Today, de Rivera is a practicing doctor at a free clinic in Lewiston, Maine. She finds this work very meaningful because she is able to form relationships with each of her patients.

Suzanne Rose Shapiro

By Talia Kahan

Susanne Rose Shapiro (’73) entered Stuyvesant in the fall of 1969. A majority of Stuyvesant students then were Jewish, many of them coming from yeshivas. As a result, Hebrew was offered as a language course. This was convenient for Shapiro, since as a child she attended weekly Hebrew school sessions.

Interestingly enough, DeWitt Clinton High School was Stuyvesant’s biggest rival at the time. Shapiro’s father had attended DeWitt Clinton, so when Shapiro’s brother decided to go to Stuyvesant due to its convenient location and high academic caliber, a friendly family rivalry was brewing.

The most startling difference, though, was that in the spring of 1968, Stuyvesant had admitted the first class of girls to enter in the fall of 1969. Among the 13 women, 10 were rising sophomores and only three, Shapiro included, were rising freshmen. “I felt a little umbrage in the idea that just because I happened to be born a female, things were not available to me. That seemed kind of weird. I understood that if I didn’t pass the test or something like that—I totally got that part. But I didn’t understand why my gender would interfere with my ability to do things,” she said.

Shapiro faced a variety of responses to being a girl at Stuyvesant. Some of her male classmates made fun of her for being flat-chested and not dressing in a stereotypically feminine manner. But she was vindicated by the fact that those classmates did not do very well academically and were no longer in her classes. Shapiro also felt teachers’ attitudes toward her. “I felt a little bit like if you didn’t do well, it was because girls were stupid, and if you did do well, it was because they were favoring you,” she explained. Many more girls came to Stuyvesant at the beginning of her sophomore year, which relieved her of the pressure of being one of three girls in a class of more than 800 students.

Despite these negative experiences, Shapiro was extremely successful at Stuyvesant. She was the first girl to ever win a National Merit Scholarship, became the first female Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of The Spectator, and was involved in the Student-Faculty Show, the predecessor of SING!. “In other schools, there are ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups,’ and you get to Stuyvesant, and you’re never in the out. No matter how weird or strange someone is, there is probably somebody weirder or stranger than that person,” Shapiro described. She felt very at-home and accepted within her extracurriculars, especially in The Spectator. “I could always go down to The Spectator office and eat my lunch there, and there would be a whole crowd of people. I think that sense of belonging—that sense of camaraderie—was really important to me,” she said.

After graduating from Stuyvesant, Shapiro has had four different careers; she has worked in cable television, film, politics (the City Council), and fundraising. This wide range of careers has taught her that “you can’t have tunnel vision like, ‘I need to get into an Ivy League school and become a lawyer or a doctor,’” she said. “You don’t know what’s coming. The whole digital revolution—no one could have predicted that when I was in school. You need to have an education that gives you the most flexibility rather than worrying about where you get into.”

Evelyn Horn

By Ahmed Hussein

Fifty years ago, Dr. Evelyn Horn (’72) was faced with a dilemma. She had just been accepted to the Bronx High School of Science but also had the opportunity to go to a bigger and better school: Stuyvesant. Dr. Horn decided to challenge herself by entering Stuyvesant as a sophomore in the fall of 1969.

As one of the 13 female students, Dr. Horn struggled at first with teachers who “were used to only having guys in their classes [and walked] around in a T-shirt and shorts, cracking lewd jokes,” she recalled. Nonetheless, Dr. Horn eventually adjusted to Stuyvesant when she discovered her passion for math. Interestingly, she found that most of the spectacular math teachers were women, all of whom were role models for her. What really struck her, though, was the level of achievement her peers attained in her English classes, and she realized that “these students were also spectacular non-math students as well,” she said. “This is something I have noticed with current students, and this phenomenon seems to have been ingrained in the Stuyvesant community for decades.”

Despite Stuyvesant’s reputation for being cut-throat, Dr. Horn received constant support from her peers. She advised, “Work hard and make sure you still find the things you love to do”—and challenge the precedent that society has set for girls. Indeed, one of the most important lessons Stuyvesant taught her is perseverance. She learned not to let male-dominated fields intimidate her. She is a cardiologist now (a field largely dominated by men), and after going to a school with just 13 girls for a year, she was not afraid to challenge the status quo again.

Eve Berman

By Maddy Andersen

“At Stuyvesant, I learned that I could be right, and everyone else could be wrong, which is a powerful lesson to learn,” Eve Berman (’72) said. Berman became one of the first 13 women who gender-integrated Stuyvesant in 1969. Her experience gave her the tools to later work in computer science and software engineering, a male-dominated field, for over 30 years.

Like many others, Berman decided to attend Stuyvesant because it was closer to her home in Jackson Heights, Queens. She lived near Evelyn Horn (’72), and the pair decided to go to Stuyvesant together. They were both unaware of how few girls would be attending with them. “I assumed there would be several hundred. [...] Evelyn Horn, who lived on the next block from me, chose to go to Stuyvesant because otherwise she was going to go to private school,” Berman explained. “She asked me, ‘We can go to Stuyvesant. Do you want to come?’ and her mother told my mother to write a note [to the city, requesting my transfer from Bronx Science to Stuyvesant]. That’s all we knew.”

Berman initially felt isolated at Stuyvesant. She often felt like she would go through the motions of her day without making any real connections with her classmates. “We had the sense that we had all been sort of sized up. One felt like an object, rather than a person. You would walk down the halls and hear, ‘I saw one,’” Berman noted. While her classmates seemed to know who she was, Berman could not reciprocate.

Ironically, the temporary closure of Stuyvesant due to student strikes in 1970 helped Berman connect to her community. “There was this big student strike in May of 1970. At Kent State University in Ohio, there were four college students who were shot by the National Guard because of protesting the Vietnam War. After that, the whole school shut down. The front doors of Stuyvesant were actually chained shut by some of the more revolutionary students,” Berman recalled. “We all thought we were super intellectual and sort of head of everything by protesting. During that time, I somehow got to meet all of these people and was like hanging out with everybody. After that, I felt more integrated into the school.”

Still the prejudiced undertones of Stuyvesant’s environment were clear. They influenced the way that she saw other women. “They thought that women weren’t open, and there was this feeling women were sexually repressed and stuck-up. When I got to college, I realized that women weren’t actually anything like that,” Berman discussed. “It wasn’t an intellectual understanding, but it shaped the kind of person I became.”

After graduating from college, Berman went into computer science, obtaining a job at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). “Often, I did have to compete with a lot of men,” she said. “I’ve led groups that were composed of men or mostly men.” While working on the technical side of IBM, Berman noticed a disparity between the number of men and women in executive positions. “At IBM, there is a two-tier promotion strategy where you can go up on the technical side or you can go up on the management side. On the management side, there are a lot of women. On the technical side, once you get past the first couple of levels, there are very, very few women,” she said.

Berman found that the same prejudices against women she had seen at Stuyvesant were also present at IBM. However, with the experience she gained from being a part of the first 13 women, Berman was prepared to overcome these obstacles. “I was very comfortable. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t as good as them or I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I felt like I could be myself, and I had a part of myself that I could revert back to,” Berman explained. “However, there was the same kind of internalized discrimination against me. A women had to be technically really, really good to be considered as good as a guy.”

Berman’s main advice based on her experiences at both Stuyvesant and IBM is to be confident, even if you are the only woman in the room. “We learned to be more tentative about things. I would write, ‘I think blah blah blah might be the right answer,’ because it felt presumptuous to be too direct. Now, when I write something for some sort of business or for any kind of purpose, I write it and then I go back. I take away all of the words that sound self-effacing,” Berman said. “You write it out once, and then you look at it again, and you take out the ‘I think’s, you take out the ‘maybe’s, you take out the ‘in my opinion’s, you take out all that stuff. Then you just say it. Because a guy would just say it.”

Paula Marcus

By Brian Zhang

During her time at Stuyvesant, Dr. Paula Marcus (’72) described herself as being a radical activist in a time of immense political change. She argued against the Vietnam War and was an active participant of the women’s movement in New York City—a series of campaigns that demanded reform on women’s social rights - even managing to discover a group of peers at Stuyvesant that supported similar ambitions. Unfortunately, as a conservative institution, Stuyvesant did not approve of such political activity coming from a female student; Dr. Marcus received her fair share of “‘[You] must not do this’” and “meetings at the principal’s office,” she said.

But it was more of the subtle comments that “made her feel very out of place at times,” she described. For instance, she still vividly recalls the moment that her math teacher asked her—the only girl in the class—to straighten his desk because in his eyes, such tasks would train her to be an adequate housewife in the future. Dr. Marcus, though extremely upset, chose not to cause a scene by arguing; instead, she took a more indirect approach to advocate for her beliefs, such as disproving stereotypes that girls should have little say in the education system by having the Board of Education accept an academic curriculum that she had helped to design.
Following graduation, Dr. Marcus continued to focus on her political pursuits at Antioch University and ultimately became an assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Montefiore Medical Center. “Just have fun,” she advised. “You all work very hard, but remember to de-stress. Sometimes, due to the challenges that we face, we forget all that life has to offer us.”

Abby Sheck

By Erin Lee

Abby Sheck (’73) was one of the first female students to walk the halls of Stuyvesant High School, and her contributions, though not clear to her at the time, have allowed Stuyvesant to remain open to both men and women to this day. When she and the other 12 women enrolled at Stuyvesant first stepped foot on the campus in the fall of 1969, nothing would ever be the same.

Stuyvesant’s reputation for promoting ambition and strong academics was true even 50 years ago. “The competition was fierce,” Sheck recalled. “Some of the young men were so geared toward success. I remember there was one young man who was brought to tears because I think he got a 98 or a 97.”

But unlike her peers and successors, Sheck simply wanted to enjoy her educational experience. “I didn’t have that fire in the belly that I needed to be number one, two, three,” Sheck said. “I was happy to do well.” However, this particular mindset may have allowed her to thoroughly enjoy her Stuyvesant experience and look back on it fondly to this day.

Sheck did not view her attendance at Stuyvesant as very significant, despite that she and the other 12 women were changing the status quo for the high school. “Back then, we kind of just thought [of] ourselves as one of the students,” Sheck said. “I don’t think it was anything super special unless we had a teacher who wanted to make it so.”

“We were a determined bunch,” she added. “We were just a group of young women put together by circumstances if you will. We were there as an educational opportunity rather than any kind of, ‘Hey, we’re doing something fabulous or breaking ground.’” Despite these women’s significance today, their time at Stuyvesant was focused solely around academics. According to Sheck, “the most gratifying moment was getting my diploma,” she said.

Sheck holds a genuine love for Stuyvesant: she still goes to Stuyvesant reunions, like the 50 years ceremony, to meet with familiar faces again. “I just remember it as a wonderful experience,” she said. “For me, it was a fabulous experience academically. I had some wonderful teachers [and] met some wonderful people who I’m in touch with to this day.”

Laren Lynn

By Sunan Tajwar

Laren Lynn (’73) grew up with a talent and passion for dancing and attended the American Ballet Academy from a young age and throughout high school. The geographical convenience of the academy to Stuyvesant pushed her to attend. Upon enrollment and through her first year of classes as a sophomore, Lynn says she “never really thought twice about having so few women in [her] class, having two older brothers at the school.”

In addition to dance, Lynn found a passion in math and science. She continues to do summer research in the fields of biology and zoology, her college major. Her favorite teacher at Stuyvesant High School was author Frank McCourt, her senior English and homeroom teacher. In a way, McCourt made his students “feel like people,” Lynn said.

During her time at Stuyvesant, Lynn recalls that she was called out for not representing her gender well by wearing pants, and how it was at times hard to be the only girl in some of her classes with a shy personality. “It was intimidating at first, but it prepared me for the future and pushed me to levels of strength I never thought I could achieve,” she said. She admits that she had had her fair share of long nights of homework and studying like students do today.

Among the wide variety of opportunities Stuyvesant presented her with, such as drafting and woodworking, Lynn’s most gratifying moment at Stuyvesant was graduation. “By my senior year, realizing that I had gotten through it was gratifying,” Lynn said. “Mr. McCourt’s class was especially helpful in realizing that gratification and acted as a window to realizing a level of maturity to understand what we had achieved.” Lynn also appreciated the fact that going to Stuyvesant allowed her and others to feel like they were a part of history. “It was a pretty tumultuous time with the women’s movement and the Vietnam War. Women’s roles were changing. There was a challenge to authority and the status quo to what you grew up expecting,” she explained.

Fifty years later, Lynn still believes that her time at Stuyvesant has constantly affected her work and craft. “Stuyvesant certainly showed me how to work and solve problems. It made me stronger in terms of being able to persevere. It also informed me about the ways I teach dance [at the University of Maine],” she elaborated. “I try to tune into the person like some of the teachers [who] I had [did]. [...] If I am able to touch certain students, I am grateful for being able to open their world up, as Stuy did for me. It distinctly affected how I work, approach deadlines, and get things done.”

Ruth Haber

By Jacqueline Thom

“Oh look, there’s one,” male students sometimes said when they saw one of only a handful of female students at Stuyvesant in 1969. Ruth Haber (’72) was part of that 13-person handful. She enthusiastically accepted the Department of Education’s invitation to join the then all-male student body at Stuyvesant as a rising sophomore and, 50 years later, reflects fondly on her pioneering experience there.

Surprisingly enough, Haber did not come across any boys who found issue with her or the other girls’ enrollment. Instead, it was the older male faculty who often looked down on them. “The principal was absolutely mortified,” Haber recalled with a chuckle. While supporters of gender integration in the specialized high schools argued that it would enhance education as a whole, critics claimed that the co-ed system would “bring down the quality of the school.”

Despite such claims, the courses offered in Stuyvesant at the time didn’t change to accommodate the girls when they entered. The girls did not have physical education for a year (no one really wanted it, anyway) and Haber was the only girl in her Spanish and biology classes for a semester, and what was expected of her as a student was the same as that expected of her male classmates. The biggest issue? The only girls’ bathroom available, which was hastily converted from a boys’ restroom, was on the top floor.

Many of the original 13 have moved on to become enormously successful. Haber had not considered law as a career option during her time in high school and was not interested in pursuing STEM. It was only during college that Haber decided to seek a law degree at Hofstra University School of Law, graduating only seven years after her time at Stuyvesant.

Coincidentally, the same year that Haber entered Stuyvesant (1969), numerous groundbreaking events took place. Besides the Alice de Rivera case that launched Stuyvesant’s gender integration, Apollo 13 was launched, the infamous Woodstock Festival took place in upstate New York, and the Stonewall Inn riots devastated Greenwich Village.

The latter events did not directly impact Haber, but having grown up in a time of drastic social change, it is no wonder that Haber is as passionate about female empowerment as she is. Prior to the late 1960s and 1970s there were very few movements that sought to highlight the plight of women. Many were still very much invested in being “the perfect housewife.” But this expectation only further pushed Haber to embrace the opportunity to advocate for her gender.

Law, like many other fields, is extremely competitive and harsh. Haber, a successful lawyer with a tremendous amount of experience behind her, credits the ambitious nature of Stuyvesant for teaching her to adapt to challenging situations. This was especially applicable to the beginning of her career as a lawyer, a time when female attorneys did not have as much of a voice as they do now.

Drawing inspiration from her progressive law school, where nearly half the students were female, and contrastingly, the gender divide Haber saw in the activities of those around her, Haber has been using her experience as both a lawyer in the court system and a lawyer in private practice to push for growth in gender equality, especially in the workplace.

As for her thoughts on how far society has come in addressing gender inequalities since her time at Stuyvesant, Haber unhesitatingly responded, “Society has progressed, but unfortunately, not enough. Hopefully we’ll be given even more opportunities to have women’s voices heard and to empower them.”

Kathy Parks

By Clara Shapiro

It was 1969, the year of Woodstock and Apollo 13, when Kathy Parks (’72) first came to Stuyvesant along with 12 other New York City girls.

“We knew we were smart girls and deserved to go there,” Parks recounted. But in a school then saturated with sexism, many found the idea of a girl deserving to go to a school like Stuyvesant laughable. “Many teachers, especially the older men, made it clear they didn’t think that girls belonged at Stuyvesant. For instance, one of my biology teachers said, referring to the groin area, ‘Your body is sensitive to hot and cold. If you put hot water on your body and then cold water, you can see the difference. Except for women. You, Ms. Parks, won’t be able to do that experiment,’” Parks recalled. “I was the only girl in that class. That was one of my most humiliating moments.”

This teacher was not the only person resentful that Stuyvesant’s all-male glory days had come to a close. Parks recounts packs of boys crowding at windows to hoot and ogle at a nearby female. “I would see boys hoisting themselves up to look through these little rectangular windows in the staircases and hallways. They’d look through and they’d say, ‘Oh look, there goes one of them,’” Parks said.

Growing up a “tomboy” in Stuy Town, Parks had been conditioned from a young age to ignore these gender-based slights. “It never bothered me to be the only girl among boys, or only woman among men,” she said. “The first time I experienced that was when I was seven years old. I used to play baseball in a park, at the diamond right nearby. My older brother went to Little League. I was a pretty good baseball player, too, so I thought I would go to play Little League with my brother. But when I got there, they said, ‘Little girls don’t play Little League.’ I said, ‘I don’t understand why not. I’m a better ball player than my brother!’ In the end, I got to go and watch, but I couldn’t hide my resentment. Still, I made sure I was always there.”

Parks’s rebellion against the gender stereotypes of the athletic world continued during her years at Stuyvesant. “The football coach—he made it clear he didn’t think girls belonged at Stuyvesant. So I used to go to football games just to watch him squirm,” Parks recalled, chuckling.

But not every teacher at Stuyvesant was a staunch defender of sexism. Fifty years later, Parks can still rattle off a list of her most beloved teachers: “I adored Mr. Kane, my biology teacher, and my English teacher, Mr. Frank McCourt. His brother, Malachy, used to come into the class quite a bit. He was a radio talk show personality. Then there was Mr. [Sterling] Jensen—he was the drama teacher. And Mrs. Mertz, our homeroom teacher,” she said.

These teachers supported Parks and her friends up to the day Parks remembers feeling the proudest: graduation day. “I felt like we had exerted our rights as women to show that we were every bit as capable as the men,” she said. “We had to be better and smarter than all the boys, because it’s still a man’s world. It’s true for women back in 1969, and it’s true for women in 2019.”

But Parks stands as a testament to women’s ability to thrive in an environment set against them. “Be so good that you figuratively kick their butts at everything,” she said. “Do the best you can and don’t let anyone intimidate you.”

Lisa Beckley

By Darius Jankauskas

Like many of the first 13 females who entered Stuyvesant in 1969, Lisa Beckley (’72) did not attend in order to challenge gender norms, but rather because the commute to Stuyvesant was shorter than that for other specialized schools. “I had no idea how many girls would be there. I had no role model teachers. I actually was trying to keep a low profile,” Beckley recalled.

The overall environment in 1969 was one that remains familiar today. Classes were quiet and students focused on academics. Beckley’s passion was mathematics; her most gratifying moment at Stuyvesant was receiving math grades higher than those of most of her friends. However, her passion for math did not extend to the sciences, which were then core to the Stuyvesant curriculum. Beckley did poorly in these classes, causing her to realize that she “was going to graduate at the bottom of the class,” she said. Ultimately, she transferred to her local high school at the end of her sophomore year.

While Beckley might not have graduated from Stuyvesant, her experiences during those first two years in a male-dominated environment, along with the teachings of her mother, taught her to be more assertive. “I was always taught to stand up for myself, which I did,” she said. “If a boy bothered me with unwanted attention, I told him flatly to leave me alone.” This attitude proved helpful not only in Stuyvesant, but also in her first few jobs, where her confident attitude helped her fend off unwanted attention from male coworkers. Beckley carried on this attitude during her adult life, when she became a teacher at an all-male prison for 17 years; there, she helped prisoners earn their General Education Development (GED) certification.

Beckley also taught at a women’s prison for five years, where she taught girls under 21 to become more assertive. “One girl told me her boyfriend said to her, ‘If you love me, you will do this,’” Beckley recalled. “I asked her why she didn't respond, ‘If you loved me, you wouldn't ask me to [do] this.’” Beckley hopes that her students have internalized those types of responses to difficult situations. She has since retired, but still holds strong opinions: regarding the #MeToo movement, she states that it does not encourage women to stand up for themselves in the moment. “You don't tolerate disrespect or unwanted advances,” she explained. “Say something NOW, not 20 or 30 or 40 years later.” Not everyone can reasonably meet this standard. But her closing piece of advice is universal: “Try your best, achieve your goals honestly, don't step on other people, and never give up,” she said.