Columbia in a Larger Context

Continuing "’The Woman Question’ at Columbia:

From John W. Burgess to Judith Shapiro"

Rosalind Rosenberg
Barnard College

Paper delivered at the Columbia University Seminar on the History of the University
February 17, 1999

Columbia in a Larger Context

Nearly everyone I have talked to has emphasized the chilliness of the situation at Columbia for women in the 1960s and the sense that the women’s movement here came suddenly, as though out of the blue. They also report that the changes that subsequently took place here could never have occurred without a national movement. It is certainly true that Columbia women were far from alone in protesting their marginal status. By 1970 commissions on the status of women, modeled on the state commissions that came out of the 1961-1963 Kennedy Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, were forming in universities across the country and in all the professional organizations. But I believe that the organizers at Columbia were among the first, and they were certainly among the most vocal. Why? I think that the answer has much to do with what was going on in the universities. The 1960 Bermuda Shorts Affair and the 1968 Linda LeClair Affair were the more visible signs of more systemic change. Let’s begin with some numbers.

Table 1: Ph.D.'s Awarded to Women at Columbia and in the U.S., 1910-1970

	1910	1920	1930	1940	1950	1960	1970
All CU PhD's	45	69	184	228	266	358	511
Female CU PhD's	7	18	52	58	38	40	124
% Female at CU	16%	26%	28%	25%	14%	11%	24%
% Female in US	10%	12%	15%	15%	12%	11%	14%

Compiled from Annual Reports, Columbia University; Century of Doctorates; National Research Council, Office of Scientific and Engineering Personnel, Affirmative Action, Table 3, "PhD’s awarded to US Citizens and Permanent Residents."

Table 2: Ph.D.’s Awarded at Four Largest Degree-Granting Institutions,
1920-59, 1960-69, 1970-74

School	1920-59			1960-69			1970-74
	M	F	%F	M	F	%F	M	F	%F
Wisconsin	6356	687	11%	4821	581	12%	3790	690	18%
Columbia	6758	1651	20%	3528	952	21%	1903	803	30%
Harvard	6845	745	11%	4052	645	16%	2537	621	24%
Berkeley	4973	583	12%	5042	600	12%	3162	677	21%

From A Century of Doctorates, Appendix E, as compiled from National Research Council, Commission on Human Resources.

Between 1910 and 1950 Columbia dramatically outpaced other universities in the production of female Ph.D.’s, both in raw numbers and in the percentage of degrees awarded. Then, between 1950 and 1960, Columbia seems to have mirrored the pattern of the country at large. As GIs flooded the universities and as cultural norms reduced the age of marriage, women lost out to men in graduate education. But then look what happens in the period 1960-1970. Columbia surged ahead. If ever there was evidence that revolutions occur as a result of rising expectations, here it is. Columbia Women’s Liberation came out of a school that was dramatically outpacing its rivals in the production of female Ph.D.’s in the 1960s.

But what of women on the faculty? How do the Columbia numbers look compared to those at comparable institutions, when one factors out the faculty at Barnard College and at Teachers College? Let’s go back to 1960 and look at science faculty alone – the group where one might expect Columbia to have had the lowest numbers of women.

Table 3: Women Science Faculty (Assistant Professor and Above) at 20 Leading Universities:
Columbia Ties for 1^st with 18 in 1960
(if positions in Home Economics are excluded)

Psych	Math	Econ	Anatom	Chem	Botony	Biochm	Bacter	Physics	Pol Sci	Astron	Path
1	1	2	2	3	1	2	1	2	1	1	1

Source: Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 1940-1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995) 132-33. Schools with same or fewer women faculty: Penn State (18), Illinois (18), NYU (17), Ohio (15) Chicago (13), Stanford (11), Michigan (11), Harvard (8), Minnesota (7), Michigan (6), Northwestern (4). Johns Hopkins (3), City College (3)

These numbers are nothing to celebrate. But what surprised me when I found them is that of all the other schools in the 20 leading universities that Rossiter surveyed, no school had more women scientists than Columbia in 1960, and only Penn State and the University of Illinois had as many women scientists on their faculties.

When one looks at the faculty more broadly at Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, and Berkeley around 1970, one sees that Columbia hired significantly more women than did the schools with which it liked to compare itself.

Table 4: Women as Percentage of Faculty at Four Universities, 1969-71

Columbia,1971			Harvard, 1970-71			Chicago, 1969			Berkeley, 1969-70
Total	Women	%	Total	Women	%	Total	Women	%	Total	Women	%
1526	278	18%	890	49	6%	1189	87	7%	1859	213	11%

These numbers require much more analysis. Columbia’s numbers include it’s nursing school ( T:44, W:44, 100%) and Harlem Hospital (T:57, W:22, 39%) and the School of Social Work (T:60, W:31, 52%). But when I subtract those divisions, I still get 15% women on the faculty – well ahead of the second place finisher: Berkeley (which includes nursing, and may include social work) at 11%, third place finisher Chicago at 7%, and fourth place finisher Harvard at 6%.

These numbers suggest that Columbia women may have been part of what sociologists long ago came to refer to as a revolution of rising expectations. If this is so, one is left with a further question. What explains these numbers? How did Columbia come to harbor relatively larger numbers of women graduate students and women faculty than did the rest of the country. Since I have just begun to investigate this matter, I am not sure of any answers. But I suggest the following factors:

New York City: As a huge city, with a large middle class, and an economic sector that hired huge numbers of educated women, New York City has long provided both a source of students and a source of jobs for graduates.

The Jewish Question: The large number of Jews in New York, combined with their high educational attainment in the 20^th century, together with the tendency, to which Burgess pointed long-ago, of seeking to keep daughters close to home, meant that those who sought graduate training would likely do so at one of the city’s schools of higher education.

Other Outsiders: In addition to the Jewish factor was the broader category of outsider. New York attracted an unusually larger number of women from other parts of the world, as well as women from other parts of the country who for one reason or another did not fit in, either by reason of sexual orientation, politics, or personal style. The Reverend Dix had had reason to fear women of "The Boston Type."

The Daughter of the Working Mother: To the extent that Columbia drew its women graduate students disproportionately from New York City, it drew women who were more likely than average to be the daughters of working mothers. A combination of New York City’s high cost of living and its female-friendly job market, created a significant number of professionals who were also mothers by the 1920s. Those numbers grew in succeeding decades, continuing to outpace a similar but less dramatic rise in the rest of the country.

Barnard College: Here is where we see the consequences of Burgess’s mistake most clearly. If one looks at the baccalaureate origins of female Ph.D.’s one finds the following:

Table 5: Largest Baccalaureate Origins of Women Ph.D.’s,
Ranked by Number, 1920-1974

School	Women Ph.D.’s	%
1. CUNY – Hunter College	1206	75%
2. UC – Berkeley	1071	13%
3. Columbia – Barnard College	945	100%
4. University of Michigan	938	16%
5. Wellesley	885	100%
6. Chicago	821	18%
7. Minnesota	789	14%
8. CUNY – Brooklyn	774	19%
9. Radcliffe/Harvard	751	100%
10. Cornell	745	15%

Source: Century of Doctorates

Note that, if one controls for enrollment, Barnard College is easily the largest producer of female PhD’s in the country from 1920-1974. Why?

Liberal Arts College: No doubt this had something to do with the fact that Barnard was a small liberal arts college. Liberal arts colleges are the biggest producers of doctorates. Studies suggest that women’s colleges appear to be better than other liberal arts colleges in producing female Ph.D.’s.²⁸

Early Specialization: Whereas students at Columbia spent their first two years in general education courses, Barnard students began work in their major from the beginning.

Availability of Columbia Resources: The availability of Columbia’s resources across the street, meant that women students had access to graduate instruction while still undergraduates.

Female Faculty at Barnard: Barnard had one of the highest female to total faculty in the country. This concentration of women scholars may have given women students the confidence to think that they too might pursue academic careers.

Table 6: Barnard College Faculty, By Gender, 1900-1974²⁹

Year	#Faculty	#Men	%Men	#Women	%Women
1900	47	37	79%	10	21%
1910	60	40	67%	20	33%
1920	77	36	47%	41	53%
1930	101	49	49%	52	51%
1940	111	43	39%	68	61%
1950	121	43	36%	78	64%
1960	138	47	34%	91	66%
1970	164	70	43%	94	57%
1974	152	54	36%	98	64%

Marriage Policy: Almost from the beginning, and certainly after the arrival of Virginia Gildersleeve, the administration and trustees accepted that their female faculty could be married, and even that they could be mothers. In 1931 the Trustees, with the encouragement of Gildersleeve and Trustees Helen Rogers Reed and Alice Duer Miller, went so far as to enact a maternity policy that provided one term off at full pay or a year off at half pay for all new faculty mothers. In the first year three women took advantage of this new policy. This policy was reduced in 1953 under the leadership of Millicent McIntosh to leave at half pay, with the time off to be determined in consultation with the dean of the faculty. And by the 1970s, faculty women have told me, the pattern was 10 days leave with one course reduction. But even so, Barnard acknowledged that it had faculty who might be mothers and who had special needs.³⁰

gil25m.jpg (19415 bytes)
Helen Rogers Reed, Virginia Gildersleeve, and Nicholas Murray Butler

Barnard not only accepted the marriage of its female faculty, it also accepted married students. From its beginning Barnard was open to students who commuted; indeed Barnard has only recently been able to house all of its students. Barnard also admitted a large group of transfers after the sophomore year. By the 1950s a large number of those transfers were women from other women’s colleges who had married, moved to New York to be with husbands who had found jobs here, and entered Barnard to complete their education. Once at Barnard they looked in large numbers to Columbia to continue their education. Barnard served as a pipeline for future female graduate students.

What is the connection between Columbia’s large number of PhD’s and its relatively large number of women faculty, as compared with comparable institutions? I’m not sure that there is any connection, although, in general, studies suggest that where there are larger numbers of women students there are larger numbers of women faculty. Perhaps the more significant factor is Columbia’s situation in New York, which provides a better job market for spouses than any other city in the country. As female academics married at ever higher rates over the course of the 20thc, the employment chances for husbands became an ever more pressing issue. By the late 1960s, Columbia had a critical mass of women ready to protest unfair treatment.

The "Woman Question" Post 1970

Their protest, together with federal pressure, led the university to adopt an affirmative action plan in the early 1970s. But two factors slowed its implementation. The first was that the faculty, much of it hired in the 1950s, was moving in generational lockstep toward retirement and was not particularly open to new ideas. Despite clear directives to do so, many departments never made any pretense of following affirmative action procedures when they hired new faculty.³¹ To make matters worse for women, at the very moment that a new generation stood poised to conquer in the early 1970s, academic expansion in the country came crashing to a halt. The crisis was especially severe in private institutions; retrenchment hit the state universities a decade later. Columbia was not only private it was heavily dependent on New York real estate. In the early 1970s the New York city real estate collapse put acute pressure on Columbia finances, giving it less flexibility with which to act on affirmative action goals.

Table 7: Women as % of Full-time Faculty at Columbia, 1971, 1985, 1990, 1996
Women as % of Full-Time Faculty in U.S. Higher Education, 1992

GSAS Faculty	CU 1971: % women	CU 1985 % women	CU 1990 % women	US 1992 % women	CU 1996 % women
Philosophy	20%	32%	34%	35%	36%
Political Science	4%	14%	22%	22%	22%
Pure Science	5%	8%	8%	17%	14%
TOTAL	12%	25%	24%	28%	25%

CU figures, Columbiana; The Almanac of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, 1995, pp. 58-9.

Table 8: Percentage of Women Faculty at Columbia [all schools],
1971, 1985, 1990, 1996 & US, 1992

Rank	CU 1971	CU 1985	CU 1990	US 1992	CU 1996
Professor	4%	6%	12%	14%	16%
Associate Professor	14%	26%	29%	25%	32%
Assistant Professor	25%	30%	36%	36%	40%
Other	41%	47%	44%	40%	40%
TOTAL	18%	23%	28%	28%	30%

CU figures; Almanac of Higher Education, 1995

Over the past generation Columbia has gone from being a leader in the hiring of female faculty to just keeping even with other institutions. Just as Columbia benefited from its position within New York City for the first seven decades of the 20^th century, it suffered from that position in the 1970s and 1980s.

The difficulty Columbia faced in making progress can be seen by looking at a break down of its faculty, where it grew, and where it shrank.

Table 9: Changes in Size of Columbia Faculty, 1971 to 1990

School or Division	1971 Total Women		1990 Total Women
GSAS Humanities Social Sciences Natural Science	266 156 139	54 6 7	241 176 139	81 39 11
Subtotal	561	67 (13%)	556	131 (24%)
Professional Schools Architecture Arts Business Engineering Journalism Law Library Service Social Work	21 17 90 103 15 42 13 66	0 2 1 1 0 1 4 36	22 21 103 108 23 52 12 40	5 4 15 5 8 10 8 21
Subtotal	367	45 (12%)	381	76 (20%)
Physical Education	25	0 (0%)	42	7 (17%)
Health Sciences Basic Health Science Clinical Dental Nursing Public Health [Harlem Hosp.]*	81 298 36 48 43 [57]	13 62 7 47 16 [21]	157 958 61 33 72	45 283 18 31 31
Subtotal	506	145 (29%)	1281	408 (32%)
GRAND TOTALS	1459	257 (18%)	2218	622 (28%)
All Faculty in US (full-time & part-time)	450,000**	104,000 (23%)**	842,220	246,922 (29%)

* Harlem Hospital not included in 1990 figures, so not counted in totals.
** Figures from 1970.
Sources: CU figures, The Digest of Educational Statistics, 1996/Table 168
NOTE: While CU faculty increases by 150% (with no growth in GSAS), the U.S. faculty increases by 187%

Numbers are important to understanding how "The Woman Question" has played out at Columbia, but they can only tell us so much. Most important are the people and institutions within Columbia that have continued to press for change. To name just a few from the Morningside Heights Campus. Ruth Bader Ginsburg pressed for change while at the Law School in the 1970s. Joan Ferrante and more recently Jean Howard in English Department, together with Marcia Wright in the History Department kept vigilant watch from the Senate’s Commission on the Status of Women; Gillian Lindt in Religion, Caroline Bynum in History and Emily Lloyd worked on women’s behalf within the administration. Martha Howell in history developed Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. And across the street were Barnard Presidents Ellen Futter and, since 1994 Judith Shapiro, who defined as one of their principal responsibilities the need to remind Columbia on a friendly day-to-day basis that it was/is not yet a fully coeducational institution.

I find a lovely symmetry in the figures who open and close this talk. On the one hand we have John W. Burgess – fearful that Columbia would become a female seminary, filled with the Jewish daughters of New York. On the other hand we have Judith Shapiro, a Jewish daughter of New York, and the head of a woman’s college with a significant Jewish population.

jshapiro.jpg (9682 bytes)
Judith Shapiro

Judith Shapiro did not attend Barnard. She went to Brandies, where, she recalls an atmosphere "boys-and-girls-together equality" but no more than one female – a biologist – on the faculty. The boys went to medical school, or, if they could not stand the sight of blood, to law school. The girls, many of them the daughters of school teachers and librarians, did their mothers one better and went to graduate school. Shapiro detoured to Berkeley on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study medieval history, but soon realized that being a serious intellectual did not necessarily suit one to endless hours poring over medieval texts. And so it was back to New York, the standard stint as a female assistant in publishing, followed quickly by a job with a psychological research firm teaching salesmen how to sell new drugs to doctors, and then on to graduate school in anthropology at Columbia in 1964. She won an NIMH fellowship, went off to Brazil, had some trouble with the language so spent her time observing the behavior patterns of males and females and without fully realizing it at the time became one of the young Turks in anthropology who were founding modern gender studies. She began her academic career at Chicago, moved to Bryn Mawr where she rose through the ranks to full professor and chair of anthropology and eventually provost. Then she came to Barnard.³²

In her inaugural address she confronted the question on everyone’s mind since Columbia had decided to admit women to the college a decade earlier. Was there still a place at Columbia University for a woman’s college? Shapiro’s answer, not surprisingly, was yes, there still was. So long as women remained disadvantaged members of the larger society, Barnard would have a place. As President Shapiro said in part, "At a time in the life cycle when pressures of gender socialization are building, girls’ schools and women’s colleges function as a kind of liberated zone. If too many coeducational classrooms are places where boys will be boys and girls will be girls, all-female classrooms are places where girls stand a better chance of getting to be people." ³³

But the persistence of a woman’s college in a coeducational university is not just about students, she continued. It is about the whole institution. Coeducation does not yet exist, she said, in an institution where men and women are not yet equally likely to study all fields. Nor is an institution coeducational if women and men are not found in similar numbers in all ranks of the faculty and administration. The remarkable thing about Barnard College, President Shapiro concluded, is that it has been a coeducational institution in the fullest sense for longer than any other part of the university, and as such continues to have a place in a university on its way to full coeducational status.³⁴

In conclusion, I can not help but look back at John W. Burgess and note that his passionate opposition to the admission of women to Columbia turns out to have been one of the most ill-advised gestures of his career. If he had gone along with President Frederick Barnard, Columbia could have been a Chicago or a Harvard, a place where the numbers of women students and faculty could be kept at a reasonably low level for at least a century. This low level would have denied women the critical mass to make much noise. Instead, his opposition opened the way for Barnard, and no end of trouble where the "Woman Question" was concerned.

^{28 "A
Profile of Recent College Graduates," Women’s College Coalition, 1985; Elizabeth
Tidball, "The Baccalaureate Origins of Recent Natural Science Doctorates," Journal
of Higher Education, 57, no, 6 (1986): 606-20; "Baccalaureate Origins of
Doctorate Recipients," 8^th Edition, Franklin and Marshall College, 1998.
^{29 Table
prepared by Robert A. McCaughey.
^{30 Virginia
Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
New York: MacMillan, 1954), 106-107. Barnard Board of Trustee Minutes, December 3, 1931,
and December 9, 1953. "Policy on Leaves of Absence for Reasons of Pregnancy,
Childbirth and Infant Care for Officers of Instruction," May 29, 1985, Barnard
College Provosts Office. Interviews with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Renee Geen, Paula Rubel, and
Helene Foley.
^{31 Interview
with Joan Ferrante, January 29, 1999.
^{32 Interview
with Judith Shapiro, January 28, 1999.
^{33 Judith
Shapiro, "Barnard College Inaugural Address," October 27, 1994, Riverside
Church, New York City.}}}}}}

34 Ibid.