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

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 living 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. ey were very careful about opening the doors for us,” Ms. Govi said, humorously recounting how the boys would wait for her to choose a seat in 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 “unkind girl culture,” according to Ms. Creagh. Bramwell echoed this sentiment, describing 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 explained how “the toxic girl behavior is prevalent as underclassmen, but as [she] progresses through Deerfield, particularly in [her] 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 said that she would describe the culture as “supportive, [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 has evolved. No two girls will have the same experience at Deerfield, but every Deerfield girl in the past decades will have le" a mark on the 36 years of co-educational history. Describing the girls of the class of 1993, Ms. Govi said, “We were so much more than [just] the first girls. You were going to pave the way, whatever the way was going to be.”