Dome

Overall view looking northeast (entrance to the underground undergraduate library to the right); The most visible sign of the commemoration of women at Yale, the Women’s Table was designed by Maya Lin (Yale graduate, BA 1981, M.Arch 1986). Commissioned in 1989 by President Benno Schmidt for the 20th anniversary of the coeducation of Yale College, Lin chose to mark the presence and absence of registered female students since the inception of Yale in 1701. A spiral of numbers engraved on the top, starting from the water source, pairs zeros with the date of the first women students and women's enrollment numbers. When the initial research was done for the sculpture, 1873 was thought to mark the date of the first women students at the School of the Fine Arts. It is now known that the Silliman sisters registered for that school when it opened in 1869. The numbers end in 1993 when the sculpture was completed. Source: Yale University [website]; http://www.yale.edu/ (accessed 4/19/2013)