Study for "The Women's Table"

In 1989 Maya Lin was commissioned to design a memorial to honor the women who have studied at Yale, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of coeducation at Yale College. The Women’s Table, installed in front of Sterling Memorial Library, is inscribed with the number of female students registered each year from Yale’s founding in 1701 until 1993, when the work was completed. Zeroes mark the first 172 years of Yale’s history, until 1873—the first year, it was thought, that women registered as students. (Subsequent research has shown that women were registered at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it first opened in 1869). In this study, Lin carefully pasted the numbers on a path spiraling outward from the center of an ellipse representing the top of the table. She omitted decades worth of repeated zeroes that appear in the finished memorial, further dramatizing the absence of enrolled women in Yale’s early history.