From our overstocked archives. This was a follow up to an essay about my time at Harvard in the 1950s.
Sam Smith - Re my piece on Harvard, a reader asked about women and blacks. Some notes:
The
Harvard student body was diverse by the standards of the 1950s, which
is to say mainly that there was a rough parity between white male public
and white male private school graduates. All the states were
represented; there were foreign students, athletes, seminal scientists
and so forth. There were Jews and even a handful of blacks. Harvard's
job was to turn them all into Harvard men.
Women
who were in every one of my classes were still non-persons of the
Harvard Class of '59 because they were students of Radcliffe rather than
of Harvard College. After all, one of the privileges of Harvard was to
note only that which it wished to see. The worst thing that could happen
to a Harvard student, in the eyes of Harvard, was that he be
"expunged." The university simply denied he was ever in attendance.
I
was reminded of this when I was on the Harvard sailing team and was
censured and lost my first place in a race after a formal hearing by the
New England Intercollegiate Sailing Assn. My sin: I had used a
Radcliffe student as my crew.
Thirty
years after she graduated in 1962, New York politician Elizabeth
Holtzman would say, "Nobody protested. We didn't know yet what was
unfair. I felt privileged to be getting a Harvard education." A New York
Times article the year of her graduation said that "Radcliffe girls,"
like those from other women's colleges, "don't do much of anything
beyond marrying and raising children." The article was written by a
Harvard man. And in another NY Times piece, Peggy Schmertzler of the
Radcliffe class of 1953 recalled, "I remember the deans' telling us an
educated person made the best mother. . . She could sing French songs to
her children."
And
the aforementioned Dean F Skiddy von Stade said once: "When I see the
bright, well-educated, but relatively dull housewives who attended the
Seven Sisters, I honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance
of males versus females at Harvard. Quite simply, I do not see highly
educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society
in the foreseeable future. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop
getting married and/or having children. They will fail in their present
role as women if they do."
On
the other hand, many of the Cliffies held their own. One of the stories
told was of the professor chiding a woman student for knitting in
class. "Knitting," he said, "is a repressed form of masturbation."
Replied the student, "When I knit, I knit. When I masturbate, I
masturbate."
As for the first woman professor to get tenure at Harvard, Cora Du Bois, see here
