"’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
Opening Columbia to
Women
No issue has generated more heat
at Columbia over the years than "The Woman Question." Other controversies –
like the student take-over of Low Library – have flamed momentarily brighter. But
none has smoldered as long. Following the Civil War, and continuing down to our own time,
the vexing question of what a male institution should do about females who seek its
privilieges has persisted now for well over a century. The reason for this persistence has
much to do with Columbia’s situation in New York City, the country’s most
ethnically diverse city, its economic heart, its media capital, and its principal haven
for ambitious, rebellious, heterodox women. In the nineteenth century, men struck out for
the frontier, but young women headed for town. No town attracted more than New York. Added
to New York City’s special characteristics is the particular history of Columbia
itself. To understand the history of "The Woman Question" at Columbia one must
pay particular attention to Columbia’s leaders and the decisions they made. Chief
among them in the late nineteenth century was John W. Burgess, Dean of the Faculty of
Political Science, whose opposition to admitting women to Columbia contributed more than
any other factor to insuring that "The Woman Question" would be raising
temperatures for generations to come.
An economic boom transformed New
York into a great metropolis in the years after the Civil War. In the process it generated
a growing population of well-to-do young women with the leisure and inclination to improve
their minds. State universities had begun admitting women during the Civil War, Vassar
College opened its doors in 1865, and Wellesley and Smith followed in the 1870s. Inspired
by their example, New York reformers quickly took up the cause of women’s education.
In 1876 the city’s foremost women’s club, Sorosis, petitioned the Columbia Board
of Trustees to admit women students, and sympathetic local newspapers added their support.1
F.A.P. Barnard
|
If Columbia’s response had
been left to Columbia President Frederick A. P. Barnard, Columbia would have been fully
coeducational by 1877. A Yale trained mathematician, who had taught at the Universities of
Alabama and Mississippi before assuming the presidency of Columbia in 1864, Barnard
regarded women as a civilizing influence and believed that any great university would,
sooner or later, want to include them.2
But the decision was not Barnard’s alone to make. Powerful men on the Board of
Trustees objected strenuously to admitting women students. One trustee, the Reverend
Morgan Dix, complained in his diary that the unpleasant pressure was all due to a
"persistent set of agitators" of "the Boston type." Not until a
century later would outside agitators be so reviled as they were at Columbia University in
the 1870s and 80s. These were not just outsiders, they were of the "Boston
type."A Boston-type agitator was often a woman who rejected conventional marriage for
a so-called "Boston Marriage," in which two women lived as life-long partners.3 One did not speak of lesbianism
in those days, but in the eyes of Reverend Morgan women who lived with other women were
not natural. Moreover, women of this "Boston type" led the suffrage movement, a
campaign that in taking women out of the home seriously threatened the future of the
American family and the stability of American society. |
John W. Burgess
|
No less passionate in his
opposition to the admission of women students was Professor of Political Science John W.
Burgess. Born in Tennessee, Burgess had fought on the Union side in the Civil War while
just a teenager. In 1865 he ventured North to Massachusetts, attended Amherst, studied law
in nearby Springfield, taught briefly at Knox College in Indiana, and pursued graduate
work in Germany, before accepting Barnard’s offer in 1876 to help build Columbia into
a great university. Greatness, in Burgess’s mind, required the singleness of purpose
possible only at such all-male schools as Amherst, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the
German universities. |
Near the end of his life,
Burgess gave his reasons for opposing the admission of women to Columbia. First, admitting
women would "distract the attention of the male students from their proper
work." Second, he believed, women would depress the intellectual level at Columbia
and ultimately debase the school’s reputation. On account of their "physical
infirmities," women, Burgess contended, could match neither men’s "evenness
of scholarship" nor their "constancy of attendance." On this point Burgess
relied for scientific support on the work of Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Edward
Clarke who, following Herbert Spencer’s theory that the body is a closed energy
system, maintained that women’s reproductive organs drained energy that might
otherwise be available for mental development.4
Women would never be scholars without putting their future as mothers at risk. If Dix
worried about agitators of the "Boston type," Burgess fretted about the danger
of ignoring wisdom from Cambridge. How could Columbia maintain its status as a great
school if it ignored advice from Harvard? Finally, Burgess laid out a demographic –
and, to his mind, clinching – concern. Since New York City fathers usually sent their
sons to colleges outside the city, while preferring to keep their daughters close to home,
a decision to admit women to Columbia, he feared, would "make the college a female
seminary." Not a female college, but a lesser school, a seminary.5
That was not all. As early as
the 1870s an accelerating immigration into New City was beginning to drive out the
White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant population that had long governed the metropolis. This change
meant that the daughter who came to a coeducational Columbia could not be guaranteed to be
Episcopalian, or even Presbyterian. If immigration continued its present course,
Columbia’s fate might be worse than that of becoming a female seminary. It could well
become, in Burgess’s words, a "Hebrew female seminary."6
That did it. Feminization was
one thing; Hebrew feminization was something else altogether. Visionary, idealistic,
egalitarian President Barnard could address the Board of Trustees eloquently in 1879
calling on them to recognize the justice of women’s claim on Columbia’s
resources. He could elaborate his plea again in 1880, and again in 1881, but the Board
would not acquiesce.7 Not until
a petition signed by 1400 New Yorkers urging Columbia to make higher education available
to women, did the Board form a Select Committee to investigate the matter.8
In 1883 the Trustees struck a
compromise. The faculty would draw up a detailed syllabus of instruction for any woman
student who wished to pursue collegiate study. The young woman would be barred from
Columbia classes, but if she were able to pass the requisite exams, the trustees would
award her an appropriate degree.9
In 1887 the first of the young women to complete the collegiate course, Mary Hankey,
presented herself for a bachelors degree and was awarded a Bachelor of Letters. She then
died the following year of pneumonia.10
Dr. Clarke seemed to have been vindicated. College study was really too much for the
female constitution.
Annie Nathan Meyer
|
But the movement to open Columbia to women would not die. One of
the young women who had undertaken the Collegiate Course was Annie Nathan Meyer.
Though she married after only one year of study – further confirming Burgess’s
point that women lacked the scholarly dedication of male students -- Annie Nathan Meyer
undertook a crusade to open Columbia to women. Meyer was just the sort of threat Burgess
most feared – female, determined, and Jewish. In 1889 she achieved a compromise,
Columbia would agree to an affiliation with a separate women’s college. President
Barnard, who had fought so hard to open Columbia to women, died before the new college
opened. The college’s founders honored his memory by giving the fledgling institution
his name. |
Until the middle of the
twentieth century Barnard College assumed exclusive responsibility for women’s
undergraduate education at Columbia. Then in 1955, soon after Harvard College opened its
classes to Radcliffe students, the two institutions agreed to a system of
cross-registration, based on each student’s seeking permission of the instructor. In
1973 even these permissions were waved, and in 1982 Columbia, facing a shrinking applicant
pool of college-age men, decided to do what it had resisted doing in the boom times of the
1880s – admit women students. John W. Burgess’s passionate battle to bar women
from Columbia had backfired. Far from keeping women at bay, he had unwittingly set in
motion a process that led to Columbia’s eventually having not just a large majority
of female undergraduates, but also a significant number of Jewish, female undergraduates.
But the ultimate character of the student population at Columbia proved to be only one of
the consequences of Burgess’s early oposition to coeducation.
Admitting Women to
Graduate Study
| The
founding of Barnard College in 1889 settled the question of undergraduate education, at
least for the time being. But what of graduate training? In 1880 Cornell had awarded the
first American Ph.D. to a woman. Surely, women would soon be knocking at Columbia’s
door demanding advanced training. Indeed, in 1884 Winifred Edgerton, newly graduated from
Wellesley, sought advanced training at Columbia in applied astronomy and pure mathematics.
Initially rebuffed, she visited trustees individually to plead her case and eventually won
the favor of even the conservative Reverend Morgan Dix. Her needs were unique, her talent
and seriousness of purpose immediately apparent. She needed a telescope; only Columbia had
one. And besides, the Professor of Astronomy needed an assistant. Believing that no
precedent would thereby be set. The trustees voted to allow Miss Edgerton to pursue her
studies individually. Two years later, in 1866, she became the first woman ever to earn a
Columbia Ph.D., and she earned it cum laude.11 |
Winifred Egerton
|
Columbia University Telescope, 1883
|
Dr.
Edgerton came close to accepting a professorship at Smith College the following year, but,
at the last minute decided to marry John Hamilton Merrill, a graduate of Columbia’s
School of Mines. Marriage accomplished what no previous obstacle had – her effective
erasure from scholarly life. |
| Though she joined the campaign to found Barnard College, she
withdrew when her husband objected to the impropriety of committee meetings being held in
men’s offices downtown. She bore a number of children, founded and taught at a school
for girls, and ended her days as a librarian at the Barbizon Hotel in New York.12 |
| Winifred
Edgerton was the first young woman to seek graduate training, but many others followed,
and the founding of Barnard College insured an intensifying pressure on the Columbia
administration to open graduate classes to women. Seth Low, who succeeded Frederick
Barnard to the presidency of Columbia, shared his predecessor’s enthusiasm for
coeducation. Blocked at the undergraduate level, he assumed that the faculty and trustees
would find admitting women at the graduate level far easier. Graduate students were older,
more mature, more certain of their vocational paths, less easily distracted. And in a city
expanding as quickly as New York, the demand for highly trained minds seemed
inexhaustible. Many faculty, including future Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler,
agreed and quietly began admitting women to their classes. President Low, citing the
examples of Yale, Harvard, and a growing number of European universities that had recently
opened graduate classes to women, urged the Columbia University Council to do so also. As
Low explained to the faculty, "Unless Columbia throws open to [women] her doors in
the graduate courses, the City of New York must depend altogether for the influence of
highly educated women, upon women who receive their training outside of the city."13 Low’s recommendation
brought forth a howl of outrage from Burgess, who insisted that such a grave step required
extended debate. Bitter discussions followed, and then a compromise. The Faculty of
Philosophy voted to admit women, with the permission of the instructor, in 1895. The
Faculty of Pure Science did so in 1897. But Burgess’s Faculty of Political Science
held out. |
Winifred Edgerton
|
Burgess relented only after Low
played a trick on him. Taking advantage of Burgess’s ambition to build the most
powerful faculty of political science in the country, Low indicated that he had learned
that a potential donor would be willing to give Columbia money for three professorships
– one in history, one in economics, and one in mathematics – if each of these
departments would offer a corresponding number of hours of instruction to Barnard seniors
and graduates. With the prospect of chairs in economics and history, Burgess eagerly
agreed, and in 1898 he finally permitted the Faculty of Political Science to open classes
to Barnard seniors and graduates with the permission of the instructor. Only later did Low
let it be known that he had donated the money himself. Despite Burgess’s concession
on the question of opening classes in Political Science with the permission of the
instructor, it should be noted that he never gave the necessary permission for women to
enter any of his classes in constitutional history. Even after the Barnard-Columbia
inter-corporate agreement was changed in 1900 to confirm the Columbia faculty’s
agreement to allow Barnard students to take graduate courses at Columbia in their senior
year, Burgess continued to bar his classroom door to women until the day he retired in
1911.14
Women in the
Professional Schools
Burgess had never been alone in
blocking women’s entrance to Columbia – though he held out longer than anyone
else on the graduate faculty. Others kept the battle going in the professional schools. No
one did more to breach the professional school barriers to women than the young woman who
took over the helm of Barnard College the year of Burgess’s retirement: Virginia
Cucheron Gildersleeve – a protégé of Nicholas Murray Butler who assumed the
presidency of Columbia at about the same time. During Gildersleeve’s deanship, and in
large part due to her efforts, women gradually gained entrance to all of Columbia’s
professional schools.
| The Schools of Journalism and Library Science admitted women
when they opened in 1912 and the School of Business did the same when it opened in 1916.
Winning access to the medical school required a more concerted campaign, but Gildersleeve
succeeded in 1917 with the promise that she would hand-pick the first female students and
guarantee their success. And she did. In 1924 Gildersleeve lay the cornerstone for a
graduate women’s dormitory at Columbia and pointed out in an address to the
university that women by then had come to outnumber men at Columbia by a substantial
margin. In 1928 Gildersleeve won women the right of admission to the Columbia Law School,
and once again the first females admitted were Barnard graduates, hand-picked by
Gildersleeve.15 In 1942, the
last hold-out, the School of Engineering School, succumbed to the Gildersleeve treatment
in the midst of World War II and admitted women. Five years later, Gildersleeve retired.16 |
Virginia Cocheron Gildersleeve
|
Faculty Women
| Winning women access to undergraduate, graduate, and
professional training at Columbia required dedicated, sustained effort by many women and
men over many decades. But at least women students offered the benefit of tuition dollars.
Taking the next step – winning women a place on the Columbia faculty – seemed
virtually impossible by comparison. As potential faculty members, women represented
competition for scarce jobs, a threat to the status of the university, and the unseeingly
prospect of occupying positions of authority over male students. Nonetheless, in the
expansive years of the early twentieth century, when Seth Low and then Nicholas Murray
Butler were building Columbia into one of a small handful of leading universities in the
world, opportunity beckoned even to women. In 1896, Columbia hired its first female
faculty member – Flora Harpham (Carleton AB, AM) to the staff of the Department of
Astronomy in 1896. Astronomy in those days was a labor intensive enterprise, and women
were valued members of the lower faculty ranks for this reason, even at Harvard, where a
bevy of female assistants were known as Pickering’s Harem."17
Then in 1900, Columbia fulfilled its part of the Low gift of professorships to Columbia by
hiring seven women instructors (including Virginia Gildersleeve) who, though listed as
Columbia faculty, would have as their primary responsibility the teaching of Barnard
students – thereby freeing the new chaired professors for Columbia teaching. Once the
terms of Low’s special gift of three professorships were fulfilled, however, women
found it difficult to make further progress into the Columbia faculty ranks. Famed
anthropologist Ruth Benedict achieved, with the support of her mentor Franz Boas, an
associate professorship. And she held the position of Acting Chair of Anthropology after
Boas retired. Benedict’s protégé Margaret Mead, who achieved even greater fame as
an anthropologist, taught only extension and general studies courses. Not until 1940, on
the eve of World War II, did Columbia hire its first female full-professor, Marjorie Hope
Nicolson, in English.18 One might attribute Columbia’s reluctance
to hire women, at a time when more than a quarter of its Ph.D.’s went to women, to
the tough economic climate of the 1930s. But how does one explain the lack of opportunity
for women that followed World War II? The years from 1945 to 1970 were flush times for
Columbia, as measured by its dramatic expansion. In 1946-47 university employed 351
professors in the college and graduate faculties. By 1971, that number had reached 490.19 But a combination of the GI
Bill, a celebration of domesticity, and persistent sexism made these flush times for men,
not for women. At times it was hard to remember that Virginia Gildersleeve had ever been
around. In these same post-war years, however, two forces were working in the direction of
change for women: an expanding white collar sector with a seemingly insatiable need for
highly educated workers and the greater sexual freedom that came from a growing consumer
economy. The pressures working against women collided with those working in their favor as
the 1950s gave way to the 1960s. |
Ruth Benedict
|
Margaret Mead
|
Marjorie Hope Nicolson
|
Columbia Women's
Liberation
In the fall of 1959 Barnard
President Millicent McIntosh offered a glimmer of this coming collision as it would be
played out on Morningside Heights in her Convocation Address. In a classic example of what
would come to be known as "mixed signals" and "incomplete feminism,"
she urged Barnard students to prepare themselves for a career, whose demands they should
never "discard" at "their own convenience."
Millicent McIntosh
|
And
in the next breath she counseled her students to "adjust" themselves without
"resentment" to the most rewarding of all jobs, their families. She did not
explain how her listeners were supposed to do this, and many later looked back on this
advice from the vantage point of their thirtieth reunion in 1990 with more than a little
irritation.20 Keeping the mixed
signal loud, if not clear, President McIntosh helped set off the Bermuda Shorts Affair in
the spring of 1960. The affair followed the complaint by Columbia President Greyson Kirk
that Barnard students were parading across the Columbia campus in dress unbefitting a
serious female scholar. They were wearing slacks and, worse, shorts. He called for a dress
code; President McIntosh agreed, and the Barnard Student Council reluctantly did as they
were told. According to the code, Barnard students could wear shorts on the Barnard
campus, so long as the they revealed no more than two inches of leg above the knee, but
whenever Barnard students crossed Broadway they would have to cover themselves with a long
coat.21 |
| But there is more. In March of
1968, shortly before the take over of Low Library, the Linda LeClair incident erupted.
Caught living off campus with her boyfriend and having lied about it, Linda was sanctioned
by Barnard’s judicial council. Barnard’s new president, Martha Peterson, would
no doubt have loved to expel Linda, as half the country (judging from Peterson’s
letter file in the Barnard Archives) wanted her to do. But Barnard students seemed to have
been solidly on Linda’s side, and Peterson delayed. Wisely, as it turned out, for the
events of the following weeks quickly drowned out Linda LeClair’s troubles. The
Bermuda Shorts and Linda LeClair affairs may seem trivial in retrospect, but they were
part of something larger. Young women were growing increasingly resentful of being treated
like children a university that celebrated individual achievement. The personal, women
were learning to say, was political, and the time had come to take political action
against a whole host of personal and professional indignities.
Women intended to live where
they pleased, with whom they pleased, and to claim the same rights to professional
advancement as their brothers. If the first century of "The Woman Question" at
Columbia focused on gaining women access to undergraduate, graduate, and professional
training, then the next would be aimed at winning them full acceptance as adults.
Acceptance as adults meant gaining equal access to positions in the faculty and in the
administration. |
Linda LeClair
Martha Peterson
|
| In the spring of 1969 a small
group of feminists formed Columbia Women’s Liberation. The group included Kate
Millet, a Columbia graduate student in English and an instructor at Barnard; Catharine
Stimpson, an Assistant Professor at Barnard; Ann Sutherland Harris, an Assistant Professor
at Columbia in Art History; Barbara Buonchristiano, an administrative assistant at the
Business School; and a number of other graduate students, and lower level women faculty.
Some were among the founders of the modern women’s movement, belonged to NOW, and had
ties to NOW’s 1968 spin-off -- the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). In the
winter of 1968-1969 WEAL brought pressure on the U.S. Department of Health Education and
Welfare to put medical schools all across the country (including the Columbia Medical
School) on notice for suspected discrimination against women and minorities. The women of
Columbia Women’s Liberation followed up this action with an investigation of
women’s status at Columbia University generally. |
Kate Millet
|
Kate Stimpson
|
Taking advantage of
the large number of women who staffed Columbia’s administrative offices and their
friendships with other women on campus, the members of Columbia Women’s Liberation
put together a damning report and kept up the pressure at HEW to do something about
discrimination against women at all levels from admission to graduate instruction, to the
awarding of fellowships, to hiring, to promotion, and to salaries. They presented this
report to Secretary of Labor George Schultz in the spring of 1970, published it the
Barnard Alumnae Magazine at the same time, and one of their members, Ann Sutherland
Harris, presented their findings in testimony to Congress.22
Throughout this time, Columbia adminstrators ignored both HEW and the mounting feminist
storm. Then, on November 7, 1971 HEW ran out of patience. In a letter, hand delivered to
Columbia’s new president, William McGill, the Office of Civil Rights of HEW
threatened to take action to withhold all government funding until the university
responded to the charges of discrimination.23 |
Among the findings of Columbia
Women’s Liberation were that departments were discriminating against women graduate
students in funding. Women were told that the likelihood that they would marry made them
bad investments. All but one of the women I talked to, successful academics today without
exception, either brought money to Columbia from outside (e.g. Woodrow Wilson Fellowships,
Danforth Fellowships) or worked as secretaries in the university, thereby delaying their
progress. 24
Most of the women hired on
Morningside Heights were hired at Barnard. Those at Columbia were typicaly hired in
General Studies rather than in the Columbia College or GSAS faculty. Both Carolyn Heilbrun
and Joan Ferrante in English were in General Studies. One professor in the history
department had said in the early 1960s that as long as he was on the faculty no woman
would be hired, and his comment was accepted without comment. By the late 1960s the
department had only one assistant professor in African History and one half-time
professorial appointment in Middle Eastern History. And these were the departments
producing the largest numbers of female Ph.D.s. 25
| Women who succeeded
in being hired often faced discrimination in promotion. The percentage of female full
professors was under 5%, in a country in which women had earned more than 10% of the
doctorates for over twenty years. Anthropology, which the public assumed to be welcoming
to women, had had no tenured female faculty since the retirement of Ruth Benedict. On the
Administrative staff, women complained of having repeatedly to train men with fewer
qualifications than they had for jobs into which the women would like to have been
promoted.26 Women who won promotion encountered
discrimination in salaries. Investigations by an Ad Hoc Salary Committee, appointed by
President William McGill in the early 1970s to look into the charges made by Columbia
Women’s Liberation and the federal government, found, among other things that one of
the worlds leading physicists, Professor Chieng Shiung Wu, who was appointed at Columbia
in 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project, and had been a full professor since 1958, earned
$10,000 less than similarly situated male faculty. This was a time when the average salary
of a full-professor was roughly $30,000.27 |
Chieng Shiung Wu
|
continue
* I wish to thank the following for their generous help in
preparing this paper: Robert McCaughey, Judith Shapiro, Jane Lowenthal, Rhea Pliakas,
David Hill, Betty Jemmott, Linda Kerber, Lucille Nieporent, Carol Berkin, Paula Rubel,
Diane Pierce, Michael Feierman, Flora Davidson, Judith Shapiro, Joan Ferrante, Patrica
Graham, Barbara Buonchristiano, Catharine Stimpson, Helene Foley, Jim Caraley, Marcia
Wright, Rebecca Hirade, Laura Atkinson, Nina Garsoian, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Chris Royer,
Barbara Schmitter, Betsy Esch, Tom Mathewson, Colin Purdy, Rachel Furst, Parry
Creedon, and Emily Hawkins.
1 Annie
Nathan Meyer, Barnard Beginnings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 4.
2
John Fulton,
ed., Memoirs of Frederick A. P. Barnard (New York: MacMillan, 1896), 22-44, 339,
407-23.
3
Morgan Dix
Diary, January 30, 1883.
4
Edward Clarke, Sex
in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: Osgood and Cp., 1873), 12-13.
5
John W.
Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York: Columbia University Press,
1934), 241-2.
6
Burgess, Reminiscences,
242.
7
The Higher
Education of Women, passages extracted from the Annual Reports of the President of
Columbia College, presented to the Trustees in June 1879, June 1880, and June 1881(New
York, 1882).
8
Meyer, Barnard
Beginnings, 8.
9
Minutes of the
Trustees of Columbia University, June 4, 1883.
10
Alice H.
Bonnell, "Women at Columbia: The Long March to Equal Opportunity," Columbia
Reports (May 1972), 5.
11
Minutes of
the Board of Trustees, June 7, 1886; Joan Sari Faier, Columbia’s First Woman
Graduate," Columbia Today (Winter, 1977), 27-9.
12
Morgan Dix
Diary, March 11, 1887; Faier, "Columbia’s First Woman Graduate," 28.
13
President
Seth Low to the University Council, October 16, 1984, Columbiana.
14
R. Gordon
Hoxie, et. al., A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 66-7.
15
Rosalind
Rosenberg, "The Legacy of Dean Gildersleeve," Barnard (Summer 1995),
17-21.
16
"Girls
to Train As Engineers at Columbia," New York Herald Tribune, December 23,
1942, clipping in "Women at Columbia" Box, Columbiana.
17
Margaret
Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), 53-4.
18
S. J. Woolf,
"Woman Leader of ‘Key’ Men: Dean Nicolson of Smith, chosen by Phi Beta
Kappa, Views the Academic World," The New York Times Magazine, 17 March 1940,
9, 19; Andrea Walton, "Women at Columbia: A Study of Power and Empowerment in the
Lives of Six Scholars" (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, ),
368-453.
19
"Tabular
Statements/ Teaching Staff," Report of the Acting President of Columbia University
for 1947 and 1948; Commission on the Status of Women, Columbia University, "Part
One: Officers of Instruction," Columbia University Senate, March 1975, Table 5.
20
Millicent C.
McIntosh, "New Patterns for Education Women," Barnard Convocation Address,
September 1959 and Rosellen Brown Hoffman, "Our Lives at Fifty," paper given at
the 30th reunion of the Class of 1960, Barnard College. I am grateful to Linda
Kerber for bringing these documents to my attention and to Lucille Nieporent for sending
them to me.
21
"Ban on
Shorts Threatens Classic Barnard Couture," New York Times, April 28, 1960, p.
1; "Administrative Regulations: Campus Etiquette," Barnard College Blue Book,
87-88.
22
"Columbia Women’s Liberation, Report from the Committee on Discrimination
Against Women Faculty," Barnard Alumnae (Spring 1970), 12-18; Ann Sutherland
Harris, "Testimony Before the Special House Subcommittee on Education with Respect to
Section 805 of H. R. 16098, June 16, 1970; Bernice Sandler, Chairman, Acting Committee for
Federal Contract Compliance (WEAL) to George Schultz, Secretary of Labor, May 11, 1970.
23
Commission on
the Status of Women/ Columbia University, Part I, Officers of Instruction," The
Columbia University Senate, March 1975, Columbia University Senate Office, 1.
24
Interviews
with Linda Kerber, Carol Berkin, Catherine Stimpson, and Joan Ferrante. Anthropology was
an exception to this rule, I learned from Paula Rubel and Judith Shapiro.
25
Patricia
Albjerg Graham, "Women in Academe," Science (September 1970): 1284-90.
26
Interview
with Paula Rubel.
27
Interviews with Joan Ferrante and Pat Graham; "Chien-Shiung Wu, 84 Dies; Top
Experimental Physicist," The New York Times, February 18, 1997.
Further developments following report of Columbia Women’s Liberation of
HEW charges:
1971 -- Senate establishes Commission on the Status of Women,
which begins meeting in 1971 and continues meeting to this day.
1975 – Senate publishes report sharply critical of Columbia
1975 -
Senate recommends Ad Hoc Committee on Salaries, committee meets from 1976-1980, makes
adjustments
1980 -- TIAA-CREF drops Sex-Based Pension Tables – in part due to
initiative of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first tenured member of the Law School, who arrived
in 1972.
1993 – Columbia Adopts Sexual Harassment Policy
1993 – Columbia adopts Parental Workload Relief Policy [Barnard
policy liberalized in 1985 to provide term off with half pay or up to a year off at full
pay, with 1/3 teaching reduction. Policy includes one year off the tenure clock at
discretion of faculty member.]