Co-education at Deerfield Academy: Voices from 1989 to 2025

Deerfield Academy admitted both boys and girls when it was founded in 1797 up until 1948 during Headmaster Frank Boyden’s time. It was a single-sex institution until 1989, when the Board of Trustees voted to return to co-education by admitting an equal number of boys and girls. Over the thirty-six years that Deerfield has been co-educational, but as alumni and current students describe, what it means to be a “Deerfield girl” thirty years ago is not the same as it is today.

Leila Govi ’93, a member of the first co-educational class at Deerfield, described the school as having 125 girls spread across five years, with a ratio of 1:5 girls to boys. “By the time I was a senior, it kind of evened out,” she said. 

As the first female students in an all-boys school, Ms. Govi explained that “to make the decision to come to Deerfield [as a girl], you had to be a bit of a daredevil.” However, both Ms. Govi and Amy Snow ’92 recounted a relatively smooth transition. “I don’t remember feeling any pushback or negativity. The boys in my class had entered Deerfield expecting girls to come in,” Ms. Snow said. 

Ms. Govi said,“I feel like they also rolled out the red carpet for us in terms of anything we need, any advisor support,” adding, "they were very attentive to making sure that girls were going to have a good experience.” Associate Head of School for Student Life Amie Creagh  exclaimed that she could remember the flowers in the [Deerfield] locker rooms when Phillips Academy Andover played a game against Deerfield in 1990. 

The “red carpet” for girls in the early years of co-education also extended to dorms. Ms. Govi reminiscenced on her sophomore move-in day when they opened the Rosenwald-Shumway dormitory, saying, “When I moved into that dorm sophomore year, one of my brothers said ‘this is outrageous’ and that it was like a Four Seasons hotel.” 

However, Ms. Creagh talked about how “there were some spaces on campus that were kind of ‘boy space’ either implicitly or explicitly” when she arrived in 1999, including the old rink where students would stand to watch hockey games. 

In the fitness center then, Ms. Creagh said, there were rarely girls. “Now if you go to the fitness center in the mornings there are a lot of girls in there lifting weights,” she said. 

Although the gender ratio in the gym has leveled out, Eva Bramwell ’26 described how even today, “girls’ [sports] don’t get the same crowd that guys do. Girls field hockey will never have the same crowd as football.” Even though the sports crowds may vary in size, Ms. Govi had the feeling as one of the first girls of Deerfield, “you could play anything, you could join anything.” 

The social dynamics between girls and boys at Deerfield have evolved over the decades. “The boys must've been given a talking to. They were very careful about opening the doors for us,” Ms. Govi said, humorously recounting, “The boys were waiting for me to pick the first seat. I was the only girl in that class.” On the other hand, Bramwell shared a different experience than that of the 1990s. She explained that “when a girl gets on stage to dance, to sing, or to get an award, the guys will immediately say the guy that she’s associated with.” She added, “I think that’s so disrespectful because she just won an award, and you’re just taking her achievement and putting it on the guy that she’s with.” 

In the classroom, Bramwell recounted how her history teacher tracked the gender distribution of discussion, and 76% of the conversation was controlled by male students, even in a class with more girls than boys. 

At the same time, though, Sophie Simonds ’26 explained, “If I compare my friends here to my friends at home, people here are just much more comfortable and much more themselves around people of the opposite sex.”

Deerfield’s female community has a reputation among other schools as an “an unkind girl culture,” according to Ms. Creagh. Bramwell echoed this sentiment, recounting how she once heard a senior boy say,“You should definitely send your son to Deerfield, but I don’t think that you should send your daughter.” Simonds explains how “the toxic girl behavior is prevalent as underclassmen, but as [she] progressed through Deerfield, particularly in my senior year, the girls have gotten nicer” As an upperclassmen, she began to feel a stronger culture of community. 

Ms. Snow affirmed the positive female culture, saying that in her time at Deerfield girls were supportive of each other. “Our class especially had a really good spirit and was very cohesive,” she said, adding, “Now when I go back for reunions it feels like you’d fall right back in the friendships you had when you were there.” 

Ms. Creagh elaborated that she would describe the culture as “supportive, mentoring [with] older girls mentoring younger girls either explicitly or implicitly … I would also describe girls on this campus as powerful and culture builders.”

Since its first co-educational class in 1989, what it means to be a girl at Deerfield evolved. No two girls will have the same experience at Deerfield, but every Deerfield girl in the past decades will have left a mark on the 36 years of co-educational history at Deerfield—describing the girls of the class of 1993, Ms. Govi said, “We were so much more than the first girls. You were going to pave the way, whatever the way was going to be.”