By Emily Jeffres
Following World War II, when Colgate was still all male, wives of veterans were temporarily allowed to register for classes. Helen Craven Mues was the first.
World War II
Mues in classroom with male counterparts, 1946
When Colgate began accepting returning WWII veterans in 1946, administrators anticipated that some of the accompanying veterans’ wives might like to continue their educations along with their husbands. Although the university continued to be an all-male institution, the Board of Trustees voted to allow these particular women to register for classes. That said, the women were not allowed to graduate from Colgate and were told that they would need to transfer to another institution if they desired a degree. (Interestingly, university officials had taken the same position nearly 80 years earlier, with Mabel Dart in 1878.)
Helen Craven Mues was the first woman to take advantage of the WWII program. Mues was a former Woman Accepted for Voluntary Emergency, or WAVE (the women’s branch of the U.S. Navy Reserves), who spent two years in the Navy and had been stationed at Cornell when she met her husband, Robert Mues, at one of the ever-popular formal dances of the time. Robert had attended Colgate as a V-12 student, and the two returned to campus at the close of the war. Helen selected a major in history and took a full course load, including classes in German, mathematics, psychology, and English. Five other women joined Helen in the first semester of the program, which continued into the early 1950s.1
