Saturday, May 17, 2008
Women at elite universities may have broken the ivory ceiling, but they're still battling old-fashioned discrimination.
Oct 11, 1999 | When MIT posted its "Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science" on the Internet in March 1999, it made the front page of the New York Times under the headline, "M.I.T. Acknowledges Bias Against Female Professors." Since then, Nancy Hopkins, the professor of biology who chaired the report, has received an outpouring of e-mails, faxes and phone calls from female academics, confirming her contention that gender discrimination is still commonplace in top-flight universities at every level of institutional life. As a long-term veteran of elite higher education myself, I needed no persuading. I, too, have spent years, as Hopkins put it, "chronically recovering from the battle of yesterday or preparing for the one tomorrow."
Like Hopkins, I was part of the first generation of women to teach in the top-level universities. Inevitably, since I began my professional life just as affirmative action went into effect in the early 1970s, my career has been a series of firsts -- I was the first woman to be offered an assistant professorship in my department at Harvard, the first woman to teach in Princeton's English department, the first to get tenure in the college division of Columbia's English department. I saw the elite universities before they had perfected their civil rights manners, before they learned how to correct, or camouflage, their gender assumptions.
I am divorced and contentedly childless. Although my work has been the most important thing in my life, I always found it difficult to think of myself as ambitious or competitive. Calculations of money and success played no conscious part in my decision to become a writer and a teacher -- I was embracing a higher, even a sacred calling. I did not yet understand that by choosing career over family I had exchanged the traditional feminine domestic plot for the quest story, a search for personal and even societal salvation usually reserved for men.
When I applied to college in 1959, women were marrying younger and having more babies than at any other time in American history. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, men were going to school in record numbers, but the percentage of female college and graduate students had dropped since the 1930s. This shortage of female scholars was evident in "Who's Who," which had fewer entries for women in the 1950s than in the 1890s. Betty Friedan was uncovering the horrors of the "The Feminine Mystique" by studying 1950s college women as well as housewives, and my undergraduate years at Harvard could have served as a case in point.
In the early 1960s, Harvard was a Cold War university awash with federal funds, dubious corporate investments and misogynistic assumptions. Radcliffe students took Harvard classes and received Harvard degrees, but they were prohibited from entering Lamont, one of Harvard's two main libraries, though male students could use Radcliffe's library. Nor were women eligible for Harvard's prestigious honor societies, traveling fellowships or, presumably, most of its professorships. There were only 12 tenured women at Harvard when I entered, a number that had shrunk to 11 when I left a decade later, Ph.D. in hand. I never had a female teacher.
President John F. Kennedy drew many of his cabinet members from his alma mater, and James Reston jestingly predicted in the New York Times that soon Cambridge would have nothing left but Radcliffe. Radcliffe, apparently, couldn't supply the nation with its cabinet nor, unaided, give distinction to Cambridge. Despite my ambitions, however, I didn't question the prevailing assumption that even the smartest women were less viable career bets than men. Back home in the New Jersey country-club set, I'd been advised that "every girl must have two social sports," for me a dreary and impossible goal. At Harvard, devouring the major works of Jonathan Edwards, as I did during my first week of classes, was a sign of virtue. Male endorsement was reward enough -- I was content to be an unrecognized heir, even the exception that proved the rule.
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