INTRODUCTION

A\ though by all accounts the period 1940—72 was a golden age for science in
America, it has generally been considered a very dark age for women in the
professions.! How could this have been? Were women not an integral part of
American science by 1940? Why, then, in a period of record growth in almost
every aspect of American science that one could count—moncy spent, persons
trained, jobs created, articles published, even Nobel prizes won—were women
so invisible? What had happened? Was this not at first the period of World War
II, when women were told that they could do anything and were even recruited
for certain scientific and technical projects? Was this not followed by the Cold
War, when, because of the heightened manpower necds of a highly technolog!-
cal military-industrial complex, officials launched a campaign for “woman-
power,” urging bright women to seck training in nontraditional areas such as
science and engineering? Was this not a period when record numbers of wom-
en were carning doctorates in scientific and technical fields? What had hap-
pened to them? Were they congregated in arcas or fields that did not grow as
much as the men’s? Did the scientific job market work differently for them? Did
marriage as then constituted (or, more broadly, marital status in gencral) have a
differential impact on their scientific careers? Why were there these limits to the
women’s opportunities?
Unfortunately for the trained women of the 1940s through the 1960s, the
evidence indicates that the growth and affluence of the period that could have
made room for more and better-trained scientists of both sexes did not benefit
the two equally; in fact, it generally unleashed certain forces that hastened the
women’s exit and subsequent marginalization and underutilization, which
could then be cited to justify denying further training for their successors.
Evidence presented here indicates that most of the women’s traditional em-
ployers, such as women’s colleges, teachers colleges, and colleges of home
economics, were closing their doors to them, and they were not included on
the faculties of the growing and new coeducational institutions. Much of this
new exclusion was tied to marriage, as in the reinstatement of the antincpotism
rules on most campuses after World War II. But even single women were
ousted or just not hired in these pronatalist years, often for fear that they might
later get married. Prestigious universities had never had many women in visible
places, but in the affluent 1950s and 1960s less well regarded institutions began
to aspire to become prestigious themselves. Thus the pattern was deliberate
and grew widespread. Formerly ridiculed and poorly supported, these institu-

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 XV1 INTRODUCTION
tions began to seem ripe for upgrading and colonization; for the first time they
could afford to pension off the older women and employ more men.
Large numbers of often older women also seemed to spur, though this was
never stated publicly, a lot of ageism, sexism, and possibly homophobia. It was
portrayed as a sign of progress to get rid of the old girls, raise salaries, reduce
teaching loads, hire more Ph.D.’s, rename the school a state university, and
urge the new faculty to get on with their research, all of which would forcibly
upgrade the school’s level of prestige. Indeed, much of the discussion in these
decades of the need for higher salaries at the liberal arts colleges and elsewhere,
usually by foundation officials and academic administrators, was a kind of code
language for the masculinization of formerly female-dominated areas. After
the mid-19s0s this “chill” spread beyond employment to levels of recognition
that earlier women scientists had achieved, such as election to certain profes-
sional offices and selection for coveted prizes. Thus, at a time when young male
scientists faced enhanced opportunities at every turn, the young women were
supposed to be home with the children, whether they had them or not or
whether they wanted to be there or not.
For many years there was little consciousness that these attitudes and prac-
tices might constitute something as ugly as discrimination. It was just the way
it was. Even respectable people behaved this way, and they were often proud of
it. The prevailing assumption, considered so obvious that hardly anyone ex-
pressed it in the 1950s, was that though some women were present 1n science,
they were at best invisible and at worst an embarrassment. They could be, and
were, blithely omitted as either unimportant or anomalous from accounts and
thinking about the profession. Thus, at the same time that some governmental
officials were urging young women to greater efforts (see ch. 3), previously
trained women scientists were finding it hard to get hired or promoted or even
to be taken seriously. Whether single or married, they had been defined as
obstacles to overall progress, and their removal was a desired goal. There did
not seem to be any way to stop the juggernaut. Any protests or complaints
were unlikely to change anything, and they were likely to be dismissed as
special pleading not worthy of consideration.
The leaders of a few women’s organization were aware of the closing doors
and spoke out, though with limited success. Unfortunately, those women’s
organizations whose leaders saw what was happening and might have pro-
tested more successfully than they did on their behalf were themselves compro-
mised in various ways, starting in the late 1940s. Liberals complained that the
American Association of University Women (AAUW) had let some of its
chapters refuse to accept Negro members, while the right wing retaliated with
accusations that a few AAUW leaders and staff held Communist sympathies.
Intimidated by such public censure, leaders of both the AAUW and, to a lesser
extent, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs

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 INTRODUCTION XV1L
took a less outspoken stand on the rising tide of discrimination than they might
have otherwise. As a whole, organizations turned cautious and quiet, and the
women scientists, one by one, either persevered with difficulty or turned to
other things. (In fact, as will be discussed in chapter 5, statistical surveys of the
1950s and 1960s found “other” a rather frequent designation of women’s activ-
ities. )
A few women scientists noticed what was happening. Some saw instances
such as quotas but were reluctant to see a pattern. Most women and scientists
of the time lacked the vocabulary (e.g., “sexist” or “male chauvinist”) and the
civil-rights concepts to recognize systematic patterns, identify the responsible
parties, and plan how to correct the situation. A few individuals and even small
groups did see a pattern and reported it, but because they were either grateful
for their current status or desperate not to lose even that, they were reluctant to
criticize the powerful and successful, especially when so little seemed likely to
be gained from it. The few who did something to bring attention to the
situation or even to try to correct it were ineffectual for various reasons.
Mildred Mitchell published an article in 1951 that provoked such a strong
counterblast from a Harvard psychologist that the topic dropped out of sight
for at least a decade. Then, in the mid-19s0s, at the very time when so much
rhetoric claimed that trained women were needed more than ever, a committee
of Radcliffe trustees and Harvard faculty glimpsed and discussed the limits to
women’s opportunities in academia, its own final report, reflecting many com-
promises, was hopelessly muddled and even counterproductive. When one
committee of the AAUW did discuss discriminatory practices in the 1950s and
even took a few retaliatory steps, AAUW members voted it out of existence in
1963. Occasional individuals, such as Myra Sampson at Smith College, Frances
Clayton at Brown University, and Jessie Bernard at Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity, collected data that showed that the women’s colleges were no longer hiring
many women but evidently preferred men. Yet for various reasons none was
able to use this material effectively. In short, even those women who were most
inclined to take an interest in the professional status of scientific and academic
women were themselves too much a product of the thinking and politics of the
time to raise much “consciousness” or effect change.
Yet one suspects from the few actions that were taken that if the data had
been interpreted otherwise, they would not have been published, or if they had
been published, they would not have been taken seriously. It is more likely that
they would have been ignored, as Sampson’s data were, or dismissed as the
ideas of radical or crazy women. Certainly federal legislation regarding em-
ployment or the internal workings of universities would have seemed intrusive
and detrimental at a time of McCarthyism. From this it took even the most
politically astute women a minimum of about fifteen years to recover.
Although the prevailing mindset made it nearly impossible for the women

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 XVI INTRODUCTION
of the time, including several social scientists, to glimpse the larger reality,
suddenly in the early 1960s Betty Friedan and others began to put enough
pieces together into a radically new but recognizable pattern. Alice Rossi, a
well-trained sociologist of the 1950s, devoted several years in the early 1960s to
rereading, rethinking, and reformulating the prevailing wisdom. Perhaps her
new view was possible then because in the context of the civil-rights movement
she could begin to see a pattern of oppressive attitudes and practices, that is,
that the “victims” were a class that did not “deserve” their fate and should not
be blamed for it; that society could and should be changed; that laws would
have to be passed by a reluctant Congress and then, what would be even harder,
the executive branch would have to be pressured into enforcing them. As the
women’s numbers increased in the late 1960s (especially in the biological sci-
ences) and their “consciousness” began to rise, the continuing discriminatory
practices grew increasingly outrageous and intolerable. Hundreds of women
and other feminists, becoming aware for the first time of the enormity of their
marginalization and exploitation and the scale of the resources denied to them,
were energized to seek change immediately. “Sisterhood” was exhilarating, and
within a few months many of them began to fight back. Finally, about 1969 this
anger coalesced into a movement, which called for the innumerable “status of
women” reports of 1969—72. These in turn, as they documented and brought
into full view the totality of the women’s exclusion, angered even more per-
sons. By 1970 these reports had become prime evidence in federal hearings on
sex discrimination on campus and in the work force, which led to landmark
legislation—equal pay and affirmative action in academia—by 1972.
Thus, women scientists were there in record numbers 1n the 1950s and 1960s,
though one might have to look rather hard to find them. Trained to advanced
levels, they were, to use some military terms of the period, “camouflaged” as
housewives, mothers, and “other” and “stockpiled” in cities and college towns
across America (where many still remain), ready but uncalled for the big emer-
gency that never came.

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 WOMENSCIENTISTS
IN AMERICA

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 Blank page

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 I

World War II
Opportunity Lost?

World War IT is generally termed a “total war” because it affected the daily
lives of almost all Americans. Not only did it cause many thousands of casu-
alties on battlefields around the world but it wrought tremendous economic
and social changes at home; it restored high employment and long-awaited
prosperity, disrupted family life, and, since waging war is 2 governmental
function, greatly increased the responsibilities and size of the federal govern-
ment. In addition, government’s support and interest in science and engineer-
ing grew dramatically during wartime, and its manpower policies affected
many women scientists, who suddenly came to be considered a rare and pre-
cious national resource and were flooded with recruitment literature and spe- |
cial training programs. But even at the height of their demand, women scien-
tists found that, despite the rhetoric, they were not welcome in all types of
work or at high levels. Instead, they were considered temporary employees,
“keeping the seat warm” for men assigned to other, higher-priority wartime
duties, or else they were channeled into lower-level openings as aides and
assistants to men who had been promoted. Thus, although many women
scientists made important contributions to winning the war, they remained
temporary and subordinate supplements to an essentially all-male labor force.
They showed how valuable they could be in a crisis, but they also lost the best
opportunity yet to create the kind of leverage that might have carried their
wartime gains into the postwar economy.
Most textbooks report that the U.S. involvement in World War II began in
December 1941, with the unexpected attack by the Japanese on the American
fleet at Pearl Harbor, and ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but this wartime chronology is de-
ceptive. Since the war had started in Europe as early as September 1939, with
the German march on Poland, which was followed by the Nazi invasions of
Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, the fall of France, and the air attacks on Great
Britain, the American government had been aware for more than two years

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 16

The Path to Liberation

Consciousness Raised,
Legislation Enacted

A\fter a few sporadic efforts in the 1950s and some deliberately weak govern-
mental reforms in the mid-1960s, from 1968 to 1972 many women scientists,
especially social scientists and research associates, found first their individual
and collective voice of protest and then allied to press for political change.
Electrified by even the prospect of change, they feverishly signed petitions,
formed caucuses and “consciousness-raising” groups, joined marches, wrote
checks, collected data and prepared reports, or otherwise worked for institu-
tional reform in the workplace and in their scientific societies. Although often
individuals could not say why the old ways were suddenly so intolerable, or the
long-accepted rationalizations no longer satisfactory, formerly isolated people
rapidly came together to form a women’s movement in science and engineer-
ing. Energized by their new-found empowerment, the right women suddenly
appeared as if out of nowhere in the key places, ready to take the movement the
next step. A series of much-publicized gender encounters throughout the years
1970—72 allowed a series of indignant feminists to come forward, express their
outrage, and energize still more followers. Among these events were the federal
government’s first sluggish steps to enforce its much-amended executive orders
for federal contractors. In fact the universities’ delaying tactics backfired here,
for the press coverage of their repeated refusals to comply and endless stalling
in providing equal pay convinced many, including some in Congress, that
actual legislation was needed. Thus, momentum grew, and many women scien-
tists joined with other professional and working women to push Congress into
landmark legislation (including the Equal Rights Amendment) by 1972. Still
others, often the best-placed faculty women, could not understand what the
excitement was all about and wondered whether their professional society
really needed a “committee on the status of women” and why it had put them
on it. Yet by the time President Richard Nixon signed the Equal Employment

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 362 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA

Opportunity Act of 1972 and the Education Amendments Act that spring, the
“Ph.D. glut” had dawned, and for the first time in thirty years physicists and
then other scientists could not find jobs. Thus the legislation that promised to
transform women’s experience in one part of science significantly forever might
be threatened by a new depression. One era had clearly ended, and a new, more
embattled one was beginning.
The first step was to identify and articulate the structural problem that
women scientists were facing. Just how difficult it was for a moderately success-
ful and aware woman scientist around 1960 to have a clear, consistent viewpoint
on women’s status in her field 1s evident from Dorothy Weeks’s article “Women
in Physics Today,” which appeared in August 1960. She wanted to be optimistic
and loyal to her alma maters, but the limited and outdated data at her disposal
documented instead considerable evidence for pessimism. It was hard to know
what to applaud, what to accept, what to minimize, and what to criticize. For
example, even though the evidence indicated that women had not kept pace
with men in the postwar expansion of the field, was it not better, when one was
permitted a few pages in a widely read news journal like Physics Today, to be as
upbeat as possible, unlike the many authors that blamed women for their low
participation in science? Should one not try to encourage future women to
enter the field, even if this required putting a positive “spin” on the actual data?
Weeks tried to show how much better women were doing now than earlier,
even though most of her actual data indicated the opposite: The number of
women fellows in the American Physical Society was up since 1941 (from 21 to
30) even though their proportion of the greatly increased total (from gor to
1,624.) was down by 20 percent (from 2.32 percent to 1.85 percent). When her
educational data revealed that between 1949 and 1953 women earned 4.6 per-
cent of the bachelors’ degrees but just 1.7 percent of the doctorates in physics,
she tried to find optimism in the relatively high proportion of these under-
graduate women coming from women’s colleges (including especially her alma
mater, Wellesley College) and the recently rising proportion (since the dismal
1.4 percent of 1949—53) at MIT, her doctoral institution. Finally, she was proud
to report that MIT had recently received a $1.5 million contribution for an as
yet unbuilt women’s dormitory. !
By contrast, Sylvia Fleis Fava’s 1960 article prominently placed in the Amert-
can Soctological Renew, “The Status of Women in Professional Sociology,” was
clear and analytical, though not angry. Unlike other articles of the time (and a
prophetic example of what was to come), it contained considerable systematic
data and had a serious, consistent, even concerned, viewpoint. Using extensive
data for the years 194.9—58 (degrees awarded, including comparisons with other
fields; participation rates at meetings; books, articles, and reviews published in
two major journals; median salary and age by level of education and type of
employment), Fava demonstrated women’s decreased involvement in sociolo-

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 Path to Liberation 363
gy at each stage of a career: although women constituted about $5 percent of the
undergraduate degrees in sociology, they were only 15 percent of the doctorates
and 7 percent of the participants at annual meetings of the American Sociolog!-
cal Association, of which only one woman (Dorothy Swaine Thomas in 1952)
had ever served as president. One result was that women overall had lower
median salaries than the men despite higher median ages. Fava, who had
recently earned her doctorate from Northwestern University (1956) and was on
the faculty at Brooklyn College, attributed this progressive disengagement not
only to the “pull” of marriage and domestic life but also (and this was done less
often in the 1960s) to the “push” of discouragement in graduate school, men-
tors’ lack of interest, and limited job opportunities. But old patterns might be
about to change: an expansion in college faculties was expected, and more and
more married women were remaining in the labor force. Fava thought that
sensible sociologists should be discussing the issue and taking “appropriate
action,” because the phenomena were of sociological as well as ethical or
professional interest. For lack of space, she could not pursue the reasons for the
patterns she depicted, which were so familiar to people in the field but “less
obvious to students and newcomers.”2 Many women in the field, including
Alice Rossi, must have read her article as they tried to make sense of their own
experiences. While it may have been reassuring to realize that one was not alone
and to see an overall pattern to the “weeding out,” it may have been upsetting
and radicalizing to learn that it was quite so sex-specific. Within a few years
others would build on Fava’s pioneering study, for Betty Friedan was among
those who cited the article.
Similarly insightful, with a bit of anger as well, was a set of articles in 1962—
63 by anthropologist Ethel Alpenfels, a professor at the New York University
School of Education. Alpenfels, who had won many awards, including, even
though she was white, a woman-of-the-year award from the American Associa-
tion of Negro Women in 1955, had served as a consultant to an educational
subcommittee of the PCSW. Too radical for its reports, her articles, which
appeared first under the bland title “Women in the Professional World” in a
1962 anthology and more pointedly as “The ‘World of Idea’s—Do Women
Count?” in the Educational Record of 1963, described and deplored the declin-
ing opportunities for women in educational institutions in the previous ten to
fifteen years.4 Theodore Caplow and Reece McGee had accurately reflected
their times when in their 1958 book The Academic Marketplace they had deliber-
ately left women out, for women faculty had always been rare at prestigious
universities. What was even more alarming to Alpenfels was that they were less
common in the early sixties in those very positions where they had once been
numerous, such as on faculties at women’s colleges or schools of education
(back when they had been known as “normal schools”), as deans of women, or
even as school principals. In fact at a ttme when women’s college enrollments

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 364 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
were rising, sharply at New York University, many women could expect only
clerical jobs rather than professional ones upon graduation. This was just one
more sign of the whole pattern of recent years.

In a thousand subtle ways, a young college woman learns that women are less
capable, less intelligent, less serious, more emotional, and less important than
men. It propels her toward “soft” courses, pushes her into “women’s” occupa-
tions and away from science, and finally, closes the door on many kinds of work
for which she may well be suited. Whether recognized or unrecognized, this
powerful and pervasive ghost sits at every conference table, in every committee
meeting; it hovers in lecture halls and in counseling offices and is part of the
college woman’s experience, day in and day out.®

Everyone’s experience, Alpenfels concluded, was diminished by these preju-

dices, for students needed to work and study with instructors of both sexes.
They needed to learn that whether persons were emotionally stable, intellec-
tually curious, and capable of handling ideas had nothing to do with their sex.
Yet she herself; one of the very few of her time to see the constricting of
opportunity and to write about it, seems to have done little more than identify
the problem. Certainly the conclusion to her second article underestimated the
enormity of the task she was suggesting, for it merely called on administrators
to reform themselves: “College leaders, if they are really serious, can no longer
escape their responsibility. A little housecleaning is in order.”®
Starting about 1963, the level of anger in writings about women in science
and women in general began to increase, coalescing before long into a modern
women’s movement of increasing political clout. One easily identifiable start-
ing point of this new era was, of course, Betty Friedan’s best-selling critique of
the back-to-the-home movement of the previous fifteen years, The Feminine
Mystique, published in 1963 but started several years earlier. Friedan, who had
graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in psychology in 1942 and
had been a graduate student at Berkeley for a year thereafter, had since given up
a career in psychology for domesticity in the suburbs. In addition to raising her
three children, she had kept up a sideline as a freelance writer and volunteered
to write for her college’s fifteenth reunion in 1957 a report on what the bright
women of 1942 had done since graduation. Horrified by their collective loss of
identity (“the problem that has no name”), she published an article entitled “I
Say: Women are People Too!” in the September 1960 issue of Good Housekeeping
magazine. Overwhelmed by the response and pushed by a publisher, she com-
muted biweekly to the New York Public Library to make a full book out of it.
Within a few years she had produced a documented and angry critique that
externalized and blamed society for making so many of its women “just a
housewife,” as she found herself responding to the 1960 census taker. Ex-

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 Path to Liberation 365
cerpted in several women’s magazines, such as Mademozselle, Ladies Home Jour-
nal, and McCall, the book had both an immediate and a long-term impact.”
Women read about the empty lives of other educated women, identified with
the phenomenon, talked about it with others, and then one by one began to act
on it, as various career days and reentry programs began to spring up. Then
once in the labor force, where they faced the traditional, unreformed, sexist,
and discriminatory practices of the workplace, some of them began to take the
next step and organize for governmental reforms.®
A fourth, and here the most important, female social scientist to document
and decry in the early 1960s the situation that even well-trained women were
not getting the professional opportunities they deserved was sociologist Alice
S. (Kitt) Rossi. A 1947 graduate of Brooklyn College, she had escaped a stifling
first marriage, remarried in 1951, and while holding a series of temporary jobs
managed to complete her doctorate from the prestigious Columbia sociology
department in 1957. After giving birth to three children in 1955—59, she took on a
series of lecturer and research associate positions around the University of
Chicago, where her husband, also a sociologist, was on the faculty and directed
its NORC. This sub- or nonfaculty status did not bother her initially, as she
recounted later, because it was the norm there and then. But one fateful day in
the early 1960s she was quickly radicalized. Because according to the university
rules Rossi could not as a research associate submit a grant proposal to the NSF
in her own name, she had convinced a male faculty member in anthropology to
send it in for her. He had obliged but then betrayed her. When the grant was
funded, he decided to keep the money and try to do the work himself, and he
fired her! Angry, stunned, and hurt by this deliberate exploitation, Rossi began
a wide-ranging and intense rethinking of the current version of men’s and
women’s jobs and roles in society. Already interested in civil rights and some-
thing of a reformer/activist in the 1950s, when she conducted a survey on the
lack of open housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before long she had be-
come a confirmed feminist, convinced that the only way to prevent women’s
marginalization into childcare and underemployment was to change society
drastically.?
As a visible sociologist with an interest in sex roles, Rossi was invited to
various meetings in the early 1960s where the increasingly fashionable topic of
women’s “role conflicts” was being discussed. She deliberately made good use
of these opportunities to reach an audience outside the field of sociology to
embark on what turned into nearly a decade, if not a whole lifetime, of vigor-
ous activism. In particular, when she was invited in 1963 by the editor of
Daedalus, a prestigious journal of some impact in learned circles, to contribute
to a special issue on American women, Rossi spent about a year pulling togeth-
er and revising six times a lengthy and iconoclastic essay. (She later said that it
was a more difficult gestation than any of her pregnancies.) It grew out of her

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 366 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
wide reading in historical as well as sociological sources (including Betty
Friedan’s book), her considerable personal experience as a graduate student
and academic wife and mother, and her willingness and ability to reconceptual-
ize standard sociological views. Provocatively entitled “Equality between the
Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” her essay criticized the prevailing narrow
conservatism of most sociology (including that of Harvard guru Talcott Par-
sons) and envisioned a future America with androgynous sex roles. There not
only would many laws have been reformulated in line with feminist views, but
there would be at the very least a network of daycare centers, especially at urban
universities, where women would be readily trained in reentry programs;
sprawling suburbia would be replaced with apartment buildings closer to both
parents’ jobs; and reformed primary and secondary schooling would have
abolished the widespread sex-typing in personnel and subject matter. Since
such a transformation would require many changes in all aspects of daily life,
some would have to be brought about by governmental action.!© When this
essay caused a bit ofa stir, she revised and reprinted part of it as the deliberately
provocative “The Case against Full-time Motherhood” for Redbook, a woman’s
magazine, even though her fellow sociologists criticized her publishing so far
outside “the field.”!!
In October 1964 Rossi was one of several speakers at a national symposium
at MIT on the specific topic of women in science and technology. The occasion,
historic in 1ts own way, was to celebrate the opening a year earlier of MIT’s first
on-campus dormitory for women students, McCormick Hall. Although MIT
had been coeducational since 1870, when it admitted Ellen Richards, a chemist
who later founded the field of home economics, it had housed its women in an
apartment house across the river since 1945. Because so many of them were
unhappy there and in general and subsequently dropped out, MIT had nearly
terminated its coeducational status in the mid-fifties. But this was averted by
some preventative action by the alumnae, an important decision by top officials
at MIT about 1956, and a pledge in 1960 from feminist alumna Katherine
Dexter McCormick of first $1.5 million (later raised to $2 million) for a two-
hundred-bed dormitory for women. !2 Thus, the opening of McCormick Hall
(named for her late husband Stanley), situated on the central part of campus
along the Charles River, another case of “creative philanthropy” for women in
science and engineering, marked the culmination of one phase of women’s
history at MIT and the beginning of a new era both there and possibly for
women in science and engineering generally.
Perhaps in keeping with the occasion, the symposium was run by the wom-
en students of MIT. They chose a variety of speakers and panelists, including
Radcliffe College president Mary Bunting, physicist C. S. Wu, Jessie Bernard,
Mina Rees, Dorothy Simon, Lillian Gilbreth, Rita McCabe, and various oth-
ers. But the chief speakers were two male psychoanalysts, Bruno Bettleheim

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 Path to Liberation 367
and Erik Erikson, who were sandwiched around Alice Rossi. Among the
attendees were 260 women undergraduates from 137 colleges across the coun-
try, including 3 black women from Tennessee A&I University. The high point
for the audience, to judge by journalists’ accounts, came the first morning
when, after Bettleheim’s opening address on the commitment required of a
woman (first to her man and then only secondly to her work or science), he was
sarcastically squelched by panelist Vivianne T. Nachmias, M.D., a mother and
part-time research associate in anatomy, who thought her commitment to
science was equally as strong as the men’s in her field. She also questioned the
relevance to women in science of recent experiments (which she ridiculed at
one point) that showed that some girls liked playing with toys, which demon-
strated (to a psychoanalyst at least) their interest in “inner space,” while most
boys liked to play with toys that seemed to show a predilection for “outer
space.” Maybe, she asked, Madame Curie should have worked on the interior
of the atom and not the emission of radioactivity? And maybe male psycho-
therapists should not be concerned with love and harmony within the fami-
ly?13
Rossi’s lengthy address, buttressed with many data and charts, as well as
citations to the literature, seems by contrast to have gone over the heads of the
students but later pleased the editors of MIT Press, who considered it the only
part of the symposium worth publishing. With the help of an assistant and an
NIH career advancement grant, Rossi had dug into the growing literature on
the time on scientific careers, interest development, and marriage satisfaction
and tried to listen to what the respondents were actually saying as well to notice
what interpretation the researchers had been stereotypically imposing on
them. In particular she worked from a series of questionnaires sent by the
NORC in Chicago to a large number of men and women college graduates of
June 1961. From all this she determined that bright girls had a difficult time
envisioning or preparing for careers or creative lives, for everyone, from par-
ents to teachers, school counselors, and contemporaries, wanted them to be
well adjusted socially rather than the intense, driven, and perhaps lonely (but
still happy) people that top scientists tended to be. In 1965 Rossi published an
abbreviated version of this paper in Sczence. Under the more provocative title
“Women in Science: Why So Few?” she had, possibly influenced by Friedan’s
slant, reshaped her material into a leaner, more direct, and more powerful
political critique. Yes, there were fewer women in science at every successive
level, but society as a whole was to blame. Everyone expected them to drop out,
felt more comfortable when they did, and even planned for it. This was a
doubly wasteful loss: it was bad for the nation, which presumably needed all
the bright scientists 1t could get, and it was bad for the women themselves, who
were not using their talents to the fullest. If in the future these women were to
develop their potential to the utmost, many parts of society needed to be

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 368 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
changed. Continuing education and part-time work, the current panaceas,
were not enough. !#
But even this more pointed version of Rossi’s thinking produced little
immediate reaction. Science editor Philip Abelson, who occasionally discussed
women in science in his editorials, printed two letters to the editor three
months later, one from a recent graduate of MIT who said she had gone there
despite much advice from counselors trying to dissuade her, and the other,
from a woman who was apparently a mother, who said that Rossi had omitted
women’s important role in teaching their children how to use wisely their
leisure, of which there would be a great deal more in the future. Yet the MIT
symposium of 1964 may have had a certain delayed reaction, for it was still
being read about and discussed several years later. 15
By the mid-1960s a few other women scientists and social scientists were
finding their voices and willing to complain and ridicule “the experts” openly.
Perhaps it was Rossi’s dissatisfaction with the status quo that emboldened
Ruth Kundsin, a research associate in bacteriology at the Peter Bent Brigham
Hospital in Boston, to write the outspoken “Why Nobody Wants Women in
Science,” published first in the Harvard Medical School Alumni Bulletin and
then reprinted in Science Digest in October 1965. Kundsin claimed that women
in science were not acclaimed for their achievements but rather were singled
out for their oddities, were resented by other women, especially subordinates,
and were considered socially inadequate if they were unmarried. It would take
changes in behavior as well as laws for women to be fully accepted as scientists.
As it was, they had to have a “hardy spirit” to stand up to the many obstacles
they faced. After decades of articles that usually denied or minimized the
problems women faced in science, this was a forthright departure. !°
A certain defensive awareness was also rising among social scientists, includ-
ing anthropologists Peggy Golde and Ann Kindrick Fischer, who spent the
year 1965—66 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
Stanford, California, Golde as a fellow and Fischer, also a Ph.D. 1n the field, as
the spouse of a fellow. As Radcliffe Ph.D.’s of the 1950s who had experienced a
bit of the job market themselves and had read Betty Friedan’s book, they
disliked both her assumption that because Margaret Mead was so well known
the field of anthropology was particularly receptive to women and her blaming
the women of the postwar era for withdrawing from graduate school. Taking
advantage of the services of a statistician at the center to collect considerable
data on the numbers and proportions of doctorates going to men and women
in the field over several decades and to calculate various gender ratios, they
published a joint report two years later, in April 1968, among the “Brief Com-
munications” in the American Anthropologist, the major journal in the field. In it
they linked declines in the numbers or percentages of doctorates going to
women to discriminatory admissions at the many upwardly mobile graduate

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 Path to Liberation 369
departments of the time that did not want to be known for having too many
women around. They also collected a bit of information about employment,
including a list of those graduate departments with ten or more full-time
faculty that had no women. Because they thus spent a lot of time and space on
getting the doctoral numbers, on which there was a large literature, precisely
right and skimmed over the issues of employment and discrimination, on
which there was at the time scanty evidence, their report lacked the focus and
bite of the “status of women” reports composed 1n the angrier late 1960s. Yet
their report had some impact among women anthropologists.!7
Meanwhile, consciousness and even anger were emboldening other social
scientists, especially younger women new to the profession and to the job
market, as Fava had observed in 1960. In 1967 a pseudonymous article on the
role of women at sociology meetings appeared in the American Sociologist, a
newly created journal with articles about the profession. The short piece must
have been written from personal experience, for it spoofed the primarily sup-
portive emotional role women professionals were expected to play at such
meetings. It reported several women’s ambivalence (first elation but subse-
quent depression) when men in the field rushed over to greet them and then
talked very rapidly about their own recent professional triumphs—articles and
books accepted, grant proposals certain to be funded, and, in hushed tones,
recent job offers. But somehow there never was time or equal interest for the
men to reciprocate by listening to their account of their own productive year.
Evidently few women, especially younger ones, were profiting equally from
the mutual communication and informal interaction that presumably were the
chief purposes of attending the national meetings. Although some of the
women attending these sessions had expectations of full equality and were
experiencing, noticing, and now criticizing semipublicly those sex-linked con-
vention behaviors that put them at a disadvantage, “Geraldine R. Mintz” had
no direct way in 1967 to do more than write a satirical article, send it off to a
suitable publication, and hope that its thinly veiled criticisms would have some
impact. Perhaps they did, for in retrospect the article can be seen as still another
sign of a new outspokenness and simmering discontent among sociologists,
whose “consciousness” increased rapidly thereafter. !8
In October 1966 Rossi became a charter member of NOW and served on the
board of governors until 1970. NOW was created by Betty Friedan and others
as an “NAACP for women” to pressure the president to broaden Executive
Order 11246 to include sexual discrimination and the federal government’s new
and weak Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce
existing provisions about sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Before long several other women scientists and social scientists had joined
NOW—clinical biochemist Inka O’Hanrahan of San Francisco, who orga-
nized chapters in both northern and southern California, psychologist Jo-Ann

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 370 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
Gardner in Pittsburgh, and sociologists Cynthia Fuchs Epstein in New York
City and Sally Hacker, a Rossi student, in Houston (with husband Bart). Each
chapter focused on its own issues; for example, the one in northern California
worked on getting women admitted into the astronaut program, while one in
New York City sponsored a task force headed by humanist Kate Millett that
criticized the women’s colleges. A chapter in Ohio, headed by Dr. Elizabeth
Boyer, worked on economic and legal issues with educational institutions and
later split off to form WEAL, the Women’s Equity Action League.!9
By 1968 there was also some evidence that the number of women in science
and engineering, as counted by the NSF’s National Register, had risen sharply
since 1966, especially at educational institutions, in nonladder ranks, and in
certain fields (especially sociology and biology). The National Register de-
tected, for example, a 50 percent increase in the number of women employed
full-time at educational institutions between 1966 and 1968, jumping from
9,656 to 14,505. The increases were especially large and disproportionate in the
field of sociology (+510, or a dramatic 122.30 percent) and biological sciences
(+1,869, or 95.94 percent), and there were lesser spurts in chemistry (+916, or
$1.58 percent), mathematics (+627, or 50.98 percent), and psychology (+858, or
41.81 percent). These increases (making the women’s proportion more than 12
percent in some fields) may have been a result of improved data collection, or
they may been evidence of a “critical mass” behind the formation of women’s
caucuses in the late 1960s. Although none of the Register’s data on academic
ranks were broken down by gender, they showed substantial increases between
1966 and 1968 at the levels of research associate (from 219 to 780), research
assistant (from 3,902 to 5,909), “other” (from 622 to 1,330), and “no report”
(from 4,117 to 7,575), suggesting that many recent additions to the academic
workforce were being stockpiled into these soft-money or temporary posi-
tions. Many of these may have been women, especially in the fields listed
above.?°
Also by 1968 the student civil-rights movement that had started with sit-ins
in the South in the mid-1960s had begun to turn its interest northward, espe-
cially to antiwar issues, such as the draft (since deferments for male graduate
students were ending), and to universities involvement in ROTC and military
research and recruitment. Women, who did not have draft cards to burn or
draft boards to defy, felt marginalized by this new turn, and some began to
examine women’s role in the movement, at universities, and in their personal
lives. For many of them this was an exhilarating experience, a kind of “libera-
tion.” Among these young women was psychologist Naomi Weisstein, a par-
ticipant in several civil-rights protest groups, first as a graduate student at
Harvard in 1964 and then as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Chicago. But it was her discovering that she was nearly unemployable in the

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 Path to Liberation 371
Chicago area, despite all her work and credentials, because of her marriage to a
historian (Jesse Lemisch) then at the University of Chicago that caused her to
find her articulate and satirical voice. Although she accepted a teaching posi-
tion at nearby Loyola University, she then did what few women scientists
(besides Kundsin) had ever done, publicly at least, before. She began to speak
out against scientific attitudes in her field and prevailing employment practices
in academia, angrily ridiculing them in such acerbic and humorous pieces as
“How Can a Small Girl Like You Teach a Class Full of Big Men, and Other
Things the Chairman Said.” Her talks and writings began to made the rounds
of informal “consciousness-raising” groups, which were springing up every-
where, and were printed and reprinted in the exploding underground litera-
ture of the women’s movement. Her “Woman as Nigger, or How Psychology
Constructs the Female” was published in Psychology Today, itself a new kind of
popular scientific journal, in October 1969, and both it and her “Kinder,
Kiiche, Kirche, as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female” were
later reprinted in governmental hearings on discrimination against women in
academia. In addition, an article in the Washington Post in late 1969, “Women
Scholars Stymied by System,” which described her situation at length, may
have been noticed by another dissatisfied psychologist, Bernice Sandler, as well
as by governmental officials and congressional staff.?1
Very quickly women locally and nationally begin to comprehend the enor-
mity of their deprivation and to see the need for change and organization in
order to improve their second-class status. Graduate students, research associ-
ates, lecturers, and other underemployed and exploited women, already angry
about certain aspects of their jobs, began to notice how sex-linked their profes-
sional status was and to search for remedies. Consciousness was rising in
Chicago and elsewhere, but yust what steps to take to effect the change desired
were unclear; they needed to be invented and demonstrated. Pioneering in this
realm was again the sociologist Alice Rossi. Starting early in 1969, after follow-
ing her husband to Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins University gave her her ,
mth position as “research associate,” Rossi and others planned a multistage
campaign to build the women’s solidarity and force the issue of women’s
liberation on the attention of the main professional association in her field, the
American Sociological Association, at its next annual meeting, in San Fran-
cisco in late August. Perhaps if the issue was on the agenda of the governing
boards, certain resolutions could be passed, which might raise the profession’s
awareness of the issue and encourage members individually and through their
home departments to change prevailing behaviors. This had already worked to
a certain extent with blacks. (In fact, as she explained, part of her reason for
taking on the national association was the growing anxiety among female
graduate students and ysunior faculty in 1968—69 about their future in sociology.

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 372 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
Because most departments were by then seeking blacks as well as the traditional
white males for faculty positions, women sociologists, being neither, feared
that they would be left out.)
Rossi rather ingeniously planned a three-stage assault. First, foreseeing that
an undocumented demand might be met with the usual delaying response of
“let’s do a study and then decide,” she and others prepared a report on the
status of women in the field before the meeting; then she would present its
results to interested persons at a well-publicized open session (“caucus”) early
in the ASA meeting; and finally, with this momentum, she would present a list
of resolutions to the ASA Council toward the end. Accordingly, with the help
of others, she compiled the results of a questionnaire to 188 graduate depart-
ments of sociology and wrote one of the first “status of women” report of this
later period. Not only did she present, as Fava had done in 1960, the latest
impersonal aggregate numbers of the falloff of women—from 43 percent of
the college seniors planning graduate work in sociology to 30 percent of the
doctoral candidates in graduate school to 14 percent of the full-time assistant
professors (in the 78 percent of the departments that had responded) to 4
percent of the full-time full professors—but she went further and even pin-
pointed the five most prestigious departments that had no women full pro-
fessors at all.?2
When, as planned, Rossi presented her data to the recently organized
“woman’s caucus” in September 1969, the more than five hundred people
attending the session voted to endorse her ten resolutions calling for more
women on the society’s council, editorial boards, and committees, a women’s
newsletter, and periodic surveys, broken down by gender, of student progress
and faculty makeup. A few days later Rossi presented them to the ASA Coun-
cil, which passed them overwhelmingly, with just two dissenting votes. After
an excerpt from her report was published in Sczence in October 1969 (where she
deplored the fact that research associates, even those with doctorates and ten or
more years’ experience, were still not allowed to apply for grants in their own
name, whereas any new assistant professor could), other groups formed to
discuss the issues (e.g., in “consciousness-raising” groups) and write their own
reports.23
The value of her advance planning and her strategy of first presenting the
report and then calling for a vote becomes clearer if we look at the experience of
other groups. At the annual meeting of the AAAS in December 1969, for
example, a petition with eight demands for improved status of women was
circulated. Despite its “several hundred” signatures, it was not permitted on
the council agenda, however, because it had not been submitted thirty days in
advance, and it was never published in Science.24 When the newly formed
Association for Women in Psychology submitted fifty-two resolutions at an
open meeting of the board of directors of the APA in September 1970, includ-

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 Path to Liberation 373
ing a much-publicized demand for $1 million in reparations to women harmed
by the profession, only six were referred to a council meeting a month later.
The council then did what Rossi had feared the ASA would do: it voted to set
up a task force on women that took almost two years to produce a report with
more modest but attainable recommendations.25 This was just part of the
rampaging politicization of scientific societies in the years 1969—71.76
On many campuses there was also sudden interest in and pressure to docu-
ment conditions for women. Current aggregate statistics, such as that there
were no women full professors at Harvard (where even the Zemurray pro-
fessorship was temporarily vacant), were not enough; starting in the academic
year 1969—70 university faculties began to set up official committees, composed
of the few women on the faculty and some sympathetic men, to examine all
phases of women’s underrepresentation in campus life and power, to document
it in detail, and to suggest intentions of changing it in the foreseeable future. If
the original motive behind forming these committees had been to stall until
interest had faded or to minimize or whitewash the whole issue with a plethora
of statistics and complicating factors, these hopes were dashed, for this cascade
of reports revealed all too vividly the results of several decades of certain kinds
of employment and promotion policies. Some “reports on the status of wom-
en” were more extensive than others, but preliminary and final ones began to
appear in a flood in the spring of 1970, just in time to be reprinted in congres-
sional hearings on discrimination on campuses.?7
In the meantime, however, two landmark events occurred in early 1970. The
first was what came to be called the “Ph.D. glut.” The signs began to appear as
the Nixon administration, which had started cutting the rate of increase in
science budgets in 1968, continued to do so into the early 1970s and the Mans-
field Amendment stipulated that Defense Department monies could no longer
be spent for university research. In 1969—70 the number of scientists and
engineers on the federal payroll actually dropped (slightly) for the first time
since 1954, when NSF had started to keep count, and for the first time since the
1930s physicists could not find suitable jobs. A “crisis” mentality pervaded their
national meetings in April 1970, as special sessions were held to deplore the
emergency and hear revised estimates of future manpower needs. Major pre-
and postdoctoral fellows programs, designed in an earlier era to meet pressing
shortages, were suddenly dismantled, and many hitherto necessary projects,
including, ironically, publishing data on scientists, were terminated. (A later
critic would blame women for the unexpected oversupply of Ph.D.’s: too many
of them—that is, more than the pessimistic experts of the time had predicted—
had both gone to graduate school and completed their doctorates in the 1960s,
and thus more of them were competing with men for the fewer jobs available.
Earlier “experts” had, of course, blamed them for not going on or for dropping
out if they did.) Before long the cutbacks and pessimism had affected even

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 374 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
fields that were less dependent than physics on governmental appropriations.
Colleges and universities, whose faculties had expanded rapidly in the preced-
ing decade or more, were now declared by their academic leaders to be in a
“steady state” and would grow no more. By all predictions the “golden age”
was over, and by 1971 it was clear that science and higher education faced
difficult times, possibly a “new depression,” as one author aptly termed it.28
Just how long it would last remained to be seen, and what impact it would have
on those women entering or already in science was not at all clear. If there were
to be few jobs for anyone, then even their new-found political awareness might
not be worth much.
Yet despite all the resolutions passed and reports written, there was still no
legislation that prohibited sex discrimination at the nation’s academic institu-
tions. Over the years Congress had exempted colleges and universities from all
legislation on civil and women’s rights, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Congresswoman Edith Green (D.-Oregon), a former schoolteacher, had been
so upset with the watered-down Equal Pay Act of 1963, which had excluded all
“administrative, executive, and professional” positions, that she had vowed to
strengthen it someday. At first the only governmental rulings that might be
conceived as covering such powerful and sacrosanct institutions as universities
were then were the series of ever broader “executive orders” for federal contrac-
tors, issued by presidents since the 1940s, chiefly as a way to seem to be
strengthening civil-rights enforcement without having to go through a hostile
Congress, controlled by powerful white men from the South. The most recent
extension of this series was Executive Order 11375, signed by Lyndon Johnson
in October 1967, to ban sexual as well as racial discrimination by federal con-
tractors as well as federal employees. It went into effect a year later, in October
1968, without much fanfare.2?
Thus, in January 1970, just as the “Ph.D. glut” was making news, another
historic event also occurred. At that time another social scientist, clinical psy-
chologist Bernice Sandler of Maryland, took, to adapt a phrase of the time, “a
giant step for womankind.” Having raised two children and completed a reen-
try doctorate in clinical psychology, Sandler felt in the fall of 1969 that she was
ready to return to full-time work. But when she applied for seven positions at
the University of Maryland, she was turned down on the grounds that “she
came on too strong for a woman.”3° Upset, she talked with her husband, a
lawyer, who pointed out that the University of Maryland was a “federal con-
tractor” and thus subject to the executive orders that prevented racial discrimi-
nation and, since October 1968, sexual discrimination in hiring. Thus, though
academic officials, including chairmen of departments at the University of
Maryland, might think that they were part of a university that had historically
been above and outside most laws, this was no longer necessarily the case. After
a little research on employment patterns at the University of Maryland, Sandler

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 Path to Liberation 375
joined WEAL and filed suit against the University of Maryland in January 1970.
Since the pattern was the same “industrywide,” a few weeks later she broad-
ened the case to include as well the whole State University of New York system,
the City University of New York system, and the nine-campus University of
California system. Eventually her “class-action” lawsuit included 250 colleges
and universities.31
The potential power of such an instrument, hitherto untried, apparently
caught the universities unawares. For a short while it even seemed that sex
discrimination, so long the norm in higher education, especially at those pres-
tigious universities that were hungry for the millions of federal dollars, was
about to end. In April 1970 a tearm of federal investigators arrived at Harvard
University to scrutinize its personnel records but encountered so many delays
that it did not produce a letter of finding until eleven months later. Meanwhile,
a March 1970 complaint against the University of Pittsburgh filed by a faculty
group headed by behavioral scientist Ina Braden led to a visit by HEW investi-
gators, who eventually threatened to withhold $15 million in federal funds until
the university presented an acceptable “affirmative-action” plan.32 HEW’s pin-
pointing of the University of Michigan as its next test case attracted even more
attention, including several articles in Science. Under such scrutiny, investiga-
tors there moved quickly and within a few months had produced a report with
evidence of extensive sex discrimination. Faced with a threat to cut off any new
federal contracts for the university, Michigan officials quickly came up with an
_ affirmative-action plan, the first at a university. By March 1971 they offered
“salary equity” for men and women in the same jobs, as well as back pay to
women who had been underpaid. Yet the implementation of this plan, long
after the investigators had left, was slow and partial at best.
Thus, Executive Order 11375, the one relevant lever for sexual discrimination
in higher education, revealed itself over 1970—72 as quite ineffectual, for the
funds never were cut off even at the most notoriously discriminatory employ-
ers. Month after month, at campus after campus, even clear-cut findings were
not penalized but instead were traded for mere intentions for future partial
compliance. HEW, the federal agency responsible for investigating univer-
sities, was too understaffed to prolong the task, and its leaders, some of whom
came from these very kinds of universities and had spent decades building them
up, were not willing to penalize them very heavily.34 Yet the universities’ delay-
ing tactics backfired, for as one by one they stalled in complying with the
executive orders and denied equal-pay settlements sought by some employees,
the need and pressure for strong, effective legislation became clearer to many.
Meanwhile, increasingly rigorous, scientific evidence of widespread sexual
discrimination in hiring and unequal pay and advancement was piling up in
Science and other scientific and social science journals. Among these were
several simple but convincing “vita studies,” in which researchers sent sets of

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 376 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA

paired résumés with simular fictitious credentials under male and female names
to department chairmen and other employers, who were then asked to rank or
rate them. Statistically significant numbers of employers found the men’s cre-
dentials more impressive than the matched women’s and ranked the male
applicants higher than the similar or equal women. These seemed to indicate
convincingly that academic departments or at least many of their chairmen, like
many nonacademic employers, had definite biases in their employment prac-
tices.35 These studies helped to show that what was generally called “academic
freedom,” the opportunity to pursue ideas no matter how unpopular or radical
they might be, might be so broadly interpreted that under its rubric discrimi-
nation could flourish unchecked.
In March 1972 both houses of Congress passed, and President Nixon signed,
both the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the result of seven years
of effort by civil-rights groups and others to broaden and strengthen the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed to
Congress in 1923. Among the former’s several important and hard-won provi-
sions was one to drop that portion of Title VI that had formerly exempted all
educational institutions from equal-employment-opportunity laws. Led by
Republican Senator Jacob Javits of New York and Democratic Senator Har-
rison Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, substantial numbers of senators overrode
several attempts by Southern Democrats Sam Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina and
James Allen of Alabama to preserve the old blanket exemption. After four
attempts were voted down, the Senate agreed to narrow the exemption to cover
religious institutions only, thus expanding the law’s coverage of thousands of
other colleges and universities nationwide.36 A few weeks later the Senate
voted down nine attempts by Ervin and others to weaken or table the Equal
Rights Amendment, which had passed in the House in October. When it
passed in late March, the Ninety-second Congress left its mark, one of the most
radical of the century.37
Over the years, Edith Green had become one of the highest-ranking mem-
bers of the House’s Committee on Education and Labor, which in 1970 was
considering an omnibus educational reform bill. Seizing the moment to broad-
en women’s protection in academia beyond the executive orders, she intro-
duced a section “to prohibit discrimination against women in federally-assisted
programs and in employment in education; to extend the equal pay act so as to
prohibit discrimination in administrative, professional and executive employ-
ment; and to extend the jurisdiction of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
to include sex.”38 She then appointed the knowledgeable Sandler to her staff,
which was preparing for hearings on this bill in June and July 1970. Sandler
accordingly invited a full panoply of academic women who had been active in
the movement to testify and submitted for the printed record many of the
recent research and writings of such persons as psychologists Helen Astin and

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 Path to Liberation 377
Naomi Weisstein and political science graduate student Jo Freeman, as well as
some of the first status-of-women reports spewing forth from academia (Chi-
cago, Cornell, Berkeley, Harvard, and others) and the professional societies
(the American Political Science Association and the APA, as well as Rossi’s
work for the ASA). These supplemented other testimony and exhibits by the
NFBPWC, the AAUW, and groups of women physicians, lawyers, and federal
employees. Packed with information and, since they were governmental docu-
ments, modestly priced, these volumes quickly became standard textbooks in
the proliferating courses on women’s studies.
Also in 1970—72 a series of other episodes, each unique in itself but together
a kind of morality play of the new gender awareness, unfolded in the media,
serving to awaken the public to the full extent of the problem. In some cases
governmental agencies took the occasion to stage certain timid “firsts” for
womankind, as if to test the waters for other, more daring ventures later. In
other cases, as journalists felt emboldened to report behaviors and challenge
statements that would have passed unnoticed earlier, a series of cause célébres,
punctuated with occasional high-level resignations, got more publicity than
usual. Since this reportage was often sexist, feminists could then criticize it and
thus squeeze an extra round of publicity out of it.
Attitudes were changing, for example, in the realm of female fieldwork in
formerly forbidden places, such as Antarctica and the ocean floor. Although
some women had gone to Antarctica (usually with their husbands) 1n the first
half of the twentieth century and two American wives had even “wintered
over” during the privately sponsored Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of
1947, all women were officially banned in the 1950s, when the U.S. Navy took
over American responsibilities there. (Accordingly, the only woman scientist
to play even a minor role in events there that were part of the International
Geophysical Year of 1957—58 was the Russian marine geologist Marie Klenova,
who went as part of a preliminary Soviet expedition in 1955—56.) Officials of the
polar program of the NSF, which under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty of
1959 controlled and funded access by American scientists to research facilities in
Antarctica, had been routinely turning down qualified women applicants (e.g.,
Mary Belle Allen, Nancy M. Walls, and Mary Alice McWhinnie) because the
U.S. Navy claimed that first its ships and then its land facilities at Antarctica
were not suitable for women. However, the constant barrage of stories in
Washington newspapers in 1964 and 1965 about President Lyndon Johnson’s
new priorities and top-level female appointees caused consciousness to rise a
bit within the foundation. One such officer even clipped a story about the
appointment of Patricia Roberts Harris as ambassador to Luxembourg in
February 1965 and, attaching it to a memorandum to his boss, asked, “With this
stuff appearing almost daily in the press, how much longer are we going to stall
off on Antarctica?” Despite this thawing within one civilian agency, the Navy

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 378 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA

did not permit American women to go there until the fall of 1969, when, after a
decade of resistance and after a team of four Argentine women had successfully
spent the winter there, it finally allowed first a couple from Utah State Univer-
sity (Christine and Dietland Muller-Schwarze) to study the penguins near
McMurdo Station, the main base there, and then a team of four women, led by
geochemist Lois Jones of Ohio State University, to pursue their researches on
cold temperature for four weeks together in a remote valley fifty miles away.??
Needless to say, the newspaper coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere
portrayed this as women’s intrusion into men’s final sanctuary on earth.40
Then in July 1970, while Green’s hearings were under way in Washington,
D.C., the Department of the Interior submerged as part of its underwater
Tektite II project an all-woman group of five led by experienced aquanaut and
marine botanist Sylvia Earle Mead. The five women spent two weeks in a
capsule on the sea floor off the Virgin Islands. Although they discovered many
new species of plants and fish, most of their widespread publicity above ground
included little about their contributions to science and more about mermaids,
swimmer Esther Williams, a rumored hair drier on board, and their presumed
incompatibility. When pressed to name their greatest breakthrough, one par-
ticipant mentioned that it might have been “in the minds of the men running
the project,” which was co-sponsored by General Electric, NASA, the Navy,
the Smithsonian, and a few other federal agencies. Others speculated that this
event might be a kind of publicity stunt that would help nudge NASA toward
letting women become astronauts.*!
Hardly were the aquanauts above water when in late July 1970 Dr. Edgar
Berman, a former physician and currently adviser to former vice-president
Hubert Humphrey, leaked to the press his correspondence with Congresswo-
man Green’s colleague in the House, Democrat Patsy Mink of Hawaii, on
women’s physiological unfitness to hold high political office. At an April meet-
ing of the Democratic Party’s committee on priorities Mink had recommended
that the party should now put women’s issues at the top. To this Dr. Berman
had retorted that because of women’s “raging hormonal imbalances,” they
were not fit to hold high political office. Two months later Mink had asked for
his resignation from the committee, but he had merely written her a letter
restating his beliefs, which in July he passed on to reporters. As a result of the
furor, he resigned at the end of the month, whereupon the witty and outspo-
ken physiologist Estelle Ramey of Georgetown University Medical School
took up the cudgels, debating him in September at the Women’s National Press
Club in Washington and subsequently writing an article on the issue for Mc-
Calls. If leaders of the women’s movement, including the few congresswomen
of the time, had wanted an example of reactionary and even unscientific think-
ing at the highest levels of the federal government, they could hardly have
found a more suitable one.42

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 Path to Liberation 379
Another change started in February 1970, when the AAUP, responding to
pressures within its membership, reactivated its Committee W on the status of
women in the academic profession, which it had allowed to lapse in the late
1920s. With Alice Rossi as chair, one of the committee’s first projects was to
prepare an official policy statement (in conjunction with Committee A on
academic freedom and tenure) on antinepotism rules. This statement, “Faculty
Appointments and Family Relationship,” was then approved at the AAUP
general annual meeting in April 1971 and by the board of directors of the
Association of American Colleges in June 1971. Its language and logic followed
that marked out by Josephine Mitchell (Schoenfeld) and Lowell Schoenfeld
back in the r9sos: that the criteria for exclusion were based on a factor (marital
status) “wholly unrelated to academic qualifications” and thus “limit [faculty
members] unfairly” and were in addition “contrary to the best interests of the
institution” and even “the community, which is denied a sufficient utilization
of its resources.” Although some “reasonable restrictions” were proper espe-
cially on employment decisions affecting relatives, an overall ban on their
Opportunities was now seen as constituting “a continuing abuse to a significant
number of individual members of the profession.” Therefore both associations
urged “the rescinding of laws and institutional regulations which perpetrate” |
such policies and practices.44 These AAUP recommendations were not legally
binding, but an important corner had been turned in professional opinion and
preferred administrative procedures. A practice that had blighted untold aca-
demic careers might now become a thing of the past.
Likewise advocates of equal pay for professional women had a field day
when a discriminatory job advertisement explicitly offering substantially lower
salarics for women than for men by the Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) was published in the Septem-
ber 11, 1970, issue of Sczence. The resulting flurry of letters to the editor over the
next several months allowed a full exchange of views on this all-too-common
practice. Several women were outraged that the journal had accepted and
printed such an advertisement; several men then justified the lower salary on
the traditional grounds that women were “bad risks” who took time off to raise
families; and they in turn were denounced, ridiculed, and presented with
counterevidence. Finally Berkeley psychologist Susan Ervin-Tripp ended the
debate with a heavily footnoted letter citing Helen Astin’s recent book, which
had never been reviewed in Science, on the substantial employment histories of
the American women Ph.D.’s of 1957.44
Events such as these stirred even greater consciousness among professional
women, who were already busily forming a proliferating number of women’s
caucuses 1n 1970 and 1971. Among scientists the early ones included the wom-
en’s committee of the American Anthropological Association (February 1970)
and the American Physical Society (April 1971) and the separate Association for

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 380 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA

Women in Mathematics (January 1971) and the Association for Women in

Science (AWIS). This last, formed officially in April 1971, grew out of a series of
mostly female “champagne mixers” or social hours that had been held at the
annual Federation of Scientific and Experimental Biology meetings each year
in Atlantic City since 1966. Initially biologist Virginia Upton, then at the West
Haven (Conn.) VA Hospital, had sent to women registrants an invitation to a
reception sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. The women attending,
who had not realized how many other women there were at the meetings and
how much they had in common, were pleased to meet each other. Similar
meetings were held in 1967, 1968, and 1969 but remained primarily social. In
1970, however, in response to rising interest in the women’s movement, Judith
Pool of Stanford Medical School suggested that women’s issues in science be
discussed at the meeting. They were, with important results. Finding that they
had a lot to gain by working together and would enjoy doing so, the formed
AWIS the next year.*°
One of AWIS’s early projects was to develop and maintain a roster of
professionally trained women for use by potential employers and others. An-
other early area of activity, one that had more immediate results, was the assault
on the low proportion (<2 percent) of women on the “study sections” at NIH,
which ranked many of their research projects. Mathematical biologist Julia
Apter at Rush Medical School in Chicago seized this issue and led AWIS’s
protest of this discrimination (at first indirectly through her senator) to HEW
Secretary Elliott Richardson. When after a meeting Richardson stalled, AWIS
instituted a lawsuit (AWIS v. Richardson [1972]) charging that NIH had vio-
lated the executive order by not appointing women to its advisory committees.
Although that action dragged on inconclusively for years, NIH officials quickly
put a hold on the appointment of male panelists and appointed so many of the
women whose vitas Apter and AWIS had sought and submitted that within six
months the number of women scientists on these selection panels increased
dramatically, from 1.4 percent to 20 percent. This was still not high enough to
suit many, but here was a prime example, hitherto undemonstrated, of the
political impact of “scientific womanpower.”46
Meanwhile, a flurry of other voluntary changes were taking place. In the
spring of 1971, when the Chemists’ Club of New York may have had a financial
crisis, its members voted to admit their first women members. The very first to
join was cosmetic chemist turned financial analyst Hazel Bishop, and by 1973 it
had eleven women members.*” In November 1971 the R. R. Bowker Company
of New York announced that henceforth its AMS would be renamed the Amert-
can Men and Women of Science (AMWS),*® and at the December 1971 meeting of
the AAAS in Philadelphia, Yale research associate Mary Clutter and postdoc-
toral fellow Virginia Walbot got Margaret Mead and Hazel Fox, professor of
home economics at the University of Nebraska and as president of Sigma Delta

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 Path to Liberation 381
Epsilon that year the only other woman on the AAAS Council (of about five
hundred persons), to present a proposal to establish an Office for Women’s
Equality, later renamed the Office for Opportunities in Science.*?
But if consciousness was running high and the outpouring of outrage was
epidemic in some circles, such feelings were far from universal. Many eminent
scientists, women as well as men, did not necessarily agree that there was a
problem and wondered what all the fuss was about. Having adjusted to it all
years before and believing staunchly in individual virtues such as hard work,
they were either oblivious to the problem or, when it was brought to their
attention, adamant that it did not exist. They were so much a part of the
“system” that had treated them comparatively well that it was difficult for
them, as it had been earlier for Jessie Bernard, to see a pattern and think of
employers and colleagues, even sexist ones, as villains. Often foreign-born,
these faculty women clung to an individualistic view that all that mattered was
doing very good work and lots of it; one’s sex and marital status were irrelevant.
By dint of a lifetime of hard work, considerable self-sacrifice, and perhaps a
move to the United States, they had “made it,” and they did not wish to
criticize American institutions that had made their success possible. Their
successful work and high rank on the faculty had blinded them to other views;
instead they seemed proof that if, just if, a woman was good enough, she too
would be promoted to the highest levels. Their small numbers could be seen as
indicators that few women offered this successful combination rather than
evidence that stronger credentials might be required for women than for men.
For example, German immigrant and Nobel laureate Maria Goeppart Mayer of
the University of California at San Diego could not understand why the Amer-
ican Physical Society had created a committee on women in April 1971 or why it
had put her on it: she had no interest or expertise in the area.5° Similarly, Birgit
Vennesland, Norwegian-born and long a full professor of physiology and
biochemistry at the University of Chicago, ended her autobiographical state-
ment for her fellow physiologists in the early 1970s with some angry remarks
about the younger women who now expected to be put on university faculties
just because they felt as qualified as men; for women to press too hard in this
direction would, she felt sure, lower the quality of the faculty and thus in time
endanger the strength of the nation. Academia should hold onto its proven
ways and not give in to the merely political pressures of diversifying the facul-
ty.5! Likewise, when Louise Daniel, long the only woman on the agricultural
faculty at Cornell, was interviewed in 1976, she claimed that despite some
problems the men there had always treated her equally, even as a “gentleman,”
and that in the long run it would not help womankind to have women less
qualified than men on the faculty.°2
Some, however, did change their minds, with certain beneficial conse-
quences. Over time, as the issues dragged on and lawsuits multiplied, it became

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 382 WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA
more acceptable to speak out, sign petitions, and sue for equal pay. Sociologist
Jessie Bernard, whose 1964 book Academic Women had, despite its ambiva-
lence, reportedly inspired some women to think about the issues if not under-
take outright political action, continued to waver until she had a well-
publicized conversion experience after a small group meeting in 1968. The
support of such older, especially tenured women would mean a lot to the
younger ones, struggling for jobs and then tenure in the newly politicized
atmosphere of the mid-1970s.5% Biologist Ruth Hubbard, long a research
associate at Harvard but oblivious of her underclass status, since she was
allowed to sign her own grants, stayed away from the issues for many years
before becoming quite radicalized by the early 1970s. Then, after being pro-
moted to full professor, she started one of Harvard’s first courses on women.54
In 1976 Cornell psychologist Eleanor Jack Gibson insisted that she was still not
a “woman’s libber,” but she regretted that, after devoting so much of the 1960s
to reestablishing her own career there, she had had so little interest in or energy
for its new women’s studies program.>°>
Amidst all this turmoil the culmination of Green’s action in the House came
in March 1972 with the passage of what was finally termed the Educational
Amendments Act of 1972. It then went to the Senate, whose version did not
include any mention of sex discrimination. Perhaps because of Green’s sen-
iority, she was a part of the joint conference committee and was able to preserve
her section banning sex discrimination. In June President Nixon signed the
compromise bill, whose Title [X finally extended the Equal Pay Act of 1963 to
higher education and banned sex discrimination in any program of an institu-
tion receiving federal funding, including sports, textbooks, and the curricu-
lum. Just how broadly this would be interpreted (e.g., as extending to the
whole institution) remained to be determined in final regulations and guide-
lines.5¢
Thus, within just a few years, starting in 1968 and essentially complete by
1972, there was a legal revolution in women’s education and employment
rights. It promised, even seemed to guarantee, broad ramifications for wom-
en’s careers in science and engineering, but its full implementation would
require many battles in the years ahead. One era had ended and a new, more
equitable one was beginning.

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 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAAS American Association for the Advancement of Science

AAUP American Association of University Professors
AAUW American Association of University Women
AAUW] Journal of the AAUW
ACE American Council on Education
ACE-CEW American Council on Education, Commission on the Educa-
tion of Women
ACS American Chemical Society
AEC Atomic Energy Commission
AHEA American Home Economics Association
AMS American Men of Science (until 1972)
AMWS American Men and Women of Science (since 1972)
AP American Psychologist
APA American Psychological Association
APS American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia
BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics
CBY Current Biography Yearbook
COEN Chemical and Engineering News
CSC Civil Service Commission
CSM Christian Science Monitor
CSP Committee on Specialized Personnel
ESMWT Engineering, Science, and Management War Training
FAE Fund for the Advancement of Education
FDA Food and Drug Administration
GSA Geological Society of America
HEW Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
HUA Harvard University Archives
ICWP International Council of Women Psychologists
IW Independent Woman
JCE Journal of Chemical Education
JEE Journal of Engineering Education

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