Spinach with Vinegar

The trouble with women, President Lynn Townsend White Jr. of California's little (625 girls) Mills College (at Oakland) once wrote, is that they cling to the "biologically fantastic notion that to be different from men is to be inferior to men." And the trouble with women's colleges, he added, is that, in imitating the men's, they treat higher education as" "something like spinach, which can profitably be absorbed without reference to the gender of the absorbent." Since 1943, when he left his job as professor of history at Stanford to take over Mills College, chubby Lynn White, 50, has been trying his best to change all that.

He introduced all sorts of courses that on the surface would make the conventional scholar wince. He set up a major in Family Studies to teach "the vision of the family and the rewards it offers to those who devote themselves to it," added B.S. degrees in merchandising, personnel, business, interior design. He started a course in Community Leadership so that his graduates would be able to serve symphonies and hospitals, added another tagged "What to Do Until the Lawyer Comes," to teach them how to handle their business problems. Women colleagues on other campuses did not always appreciate White's efforts. "They think I'm trying to hem women in," he once complained. "I'm trying to liberate them. I won't be satisfied until I hear a woman say with pride, 'I'm a housewife.' "

Actually, White wanted to turn out a special sort of housewife. The "home arts," he insisted, should be a part of the liberal arts, and not just a viewing of the universe as an "infinite series of identical and isolated fruit salads." He gave his students a thorough grounding in literature, art and history, brought to his campus such teachers as Composer Darius Milhaud, Author (The Friendly Persuasion) Jessamyn West and Music Critic Alfred Frankenstein. Since the career of the average woman, White argued, is to raise a family, why not prepare her for it while at the same time giving her the intellectual background to play her role creatively?

This week White announced that he would leave Mills to teach medieval history at the University of California at Los Angeles. "I've been here 15 years," he explained, "and I've begun to find myself quoting myself." If White is quoting himself, other people have been quoting him too. Women's higher education may in general still be the same mess of spinach he found it, but it will miss Gourmet White's special brand of vinegar.

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