One Woman, Two Lives
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In the heyday of U.S. feminism, an indomitable suffragette gave a discouraged follower some militant advice: "Call on God, my dear! She will help you!" But the Deity ignores wrongly addressed prayers, and He has kept to the old system, under which women bear babies and men pretty much run everything. No woman has yet been elected President, and, as Critic Diana Trilling once remarked, it is hard even to imagine "a play called Death of a Saleswoman." Women are still at sea, and their rule is men and children first.
American men do not really want the world to be half female and half free. The passion, patience and intuition of loving women are obviously good for more than dishes and diapers. And since about 1833, when Oberlin College first gave "the misjudged and neglected sex all the instructive privileges which have hitherto unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs," it has been taken for granted that most little girls are smarter than most little boys. Yet what has it got them?
Moderate and Outraged. It turns out that women are mainly free in sex and speech. They have scarcely begun to use their brains. Of the top-rank high school seniors who skip college, two-thirds are girls. The proportion of girls in college has slipped from 47% in 1920 (a vintage feminist year) to 37% now. Only a little more than half of all college girls get a bachelor's degree. For every 300 women capable of earning a doctorate degree, only one does. In utilizing women's brains, Russia outdoes the U.S.: 30% of Soviet engineers and 75% of doctors are women. In the U.S., only 6% of the doctors and 1% of engineers are women.
One woman who has thought about all this and taken a reasonable, constructive, moderate and just slightly outraged stand is Mary I. Bunting, 51, mother, microbiologist, and the new president of Radcliffe College. U.S. girls, she thinks, grow up in "a climate of unexpectation," willing to be educated but convinced by "hidden dissuaders" that they will not really use their education. Mrs. Bunting, who describes herself as "a geneticist with nestbuilding experience," finds unexpectation hidden everywhere. As she puts it:
"Adults ask little boys what they want to do when they grow up. They ask little girls where they got that pretty dress. We don't care what women do with their education. Why, we don't even care if they learn to be good mothers."
"Who Needs Me?" The fuel of a free society is people freely pursuing some consuming interest, be it physics, poetry or plumbing. Nothing is more joyfully consuming than motherhood, but the proportion of any woman's life spent in motherhood is dropping fast. In 1890 the average woman lived 14 years after her last child turned 21; in 1961, between earlier marriage and longer life, the same period spans 30 years.
What woman wants to spend three decades wondering "Who needs me?" Surely not the U.S. college girl of 1961, says Mary Bunting: "She won't model herself on anyone who has rejected good family life or who has rejected an intellectual life to be a housewife in suburbia. What she needs to see is the person who has managed both." The girl must find marriage, but she must also find what Mary Bunting calls "the thing that's most important--having something awfully interesting that you want to work on awfully hard."
"Fur-Lined Domesticity." The marriage part of this twin-goal life seems to be no trick at all. Largely as a consequence of better nutrition, girls mature earlier than ever; the average age of puberty has dropped by 1 1/2 years since 1940. The average American woman marries at 20. Once the married college girl was a bit of a freak, perhaps the wife of a war veteran back to finish his education, or perhaps even trying to keep her marriage a secret. Now the campus marriage is increasingly common; last year at the University of California, for example, 36% of the day students were married. At the end of this school year, 147,000 girls will graduate from U.S. colleges, and most will marry soon; some colleges report that 90% of their girl graduates marry within three years.
But early marriage is perhaps largely the effect of unexpectation. Schoolgirls soon accept the idea that to be married is to be satisfied with life. Schools steer girls away from science and math because "you won't need it." Girls more than ever go to college "not to pursue learning but to learn pursuing." They slip, in the phrase of Anthropologist Margaret Mead, into "a kind of fur-lined domesticity.''
Ambition for a career recedes. That "interesting little job in New York for a few years before marriage" seems less and less attractive: the girl whose eager mind plumbed Milton pictures herself glumly making coffee for the boss. Business, she finds, snaps up young men for their potential, but hires women only for what they can do--temporarily. Don't all working girls soon quit to get married?
The effect on girls is what sociologists call "a self-fulfilling prophecy." Marriage looks like salvation. Vague fears about the Bomb make it more so. What a girl expects from her education drops back from high goals of professional, intellectual or artistic attainment to a desire for "finish" and for the graces of motherhood.
Something Meaningful. "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection." said St. Paul. From those who agree with him to those who love their wives as they are, men are likely to give Mary Bunting a hot argument. So what's wrong with motherhood? Nothing, says Mary Bunting; nor does she insist on "careers." She simply believes that countless women are dying to do something more meaningful. "They are busy." she says. "They are exhausted. But they are not happy." They are not doing something important enough, hard enough, engrossing enough to make life worthwhile.
By example and precept, Mary Bunting has already gone far to counter the pressures against thinking women. No sooner had she seemingly stepped out of nowhere two years ago to become Radcliffe's third woman president than she began having startling new ideas. She has excited women all over the country with Radcliffe's new Institute for Independent Study, which this month launched a unique program of paying gifted women for part-time scholarship in the Harvard Yard. Perhaps most important, she has plumped for the old but recently unfashionable truism that an intellectually active woman makes a better mother, "even if she sometimes has to leave the little darlings on their own."
Pied Piper. Her old friends are not surprised. Mary Bunting has always been one of those rare people who make other people feel that they really can spend their lives doing what most interests them. She grew up that way in Brooklyn. In the close-knit family of her father. Lawyer Henry Ingraham, she recalls, "there was never this climate of unexpectation for girls." No one envisioned any particular career for Polly, as she was called to distinguish her from her mother Mary. She was simply expected to want to do something interesting with her life, paid or unpaid.
In those days, when trees really did grow in Brooklyn, the comfortable brick house on Adelphi Street was filled with children (two girls, two boys), books on every imaginable subject, and two remarkable parents who loved both. Mother Mary Shotwell Ingraham was, and still is at 74, a prodigious activist in civic causes, sometimes working 18 hours a day in such jobs as heading the Y.W.C.A.. helping to found the U.S.O. in World War II and launching the City University of New York (TIME. April 28) last year. Father Ingraham was "a kind of Pied Piper" who walked his children two miles to school every morning, telling serial stories and attracting a long train of fascinated kids as he marched along.
E-Minus. All the Ingrahams were passionately fond of being outdoors. Sunday mornings they spent "walking and admiring." Father was a fly-fisherman; mother golfed and swam; everyone bird-watched. The family spent weekends and summers at two homes on Long Island's
North Shore, one on the water, the other an inland farm.
Horses and books were Polly's world.
In the evenings Henry Ingraham read aloud to his wife--typically, the novels of The Forsyte Saga--while she sewed, and the children could listen or leave as they pleased. "They weren't doing it for us," recalls Mary Bunting. "They were doing it for themselves." Polly herself was the kind of omnivorously inquiring reader who could plunge into the encyclopedia and follow her nose for hours. School at Packer Collegiate was another matter: "I was glad to get rid of it in the afternoon and get back to something interesting.'' As for homework, Polly had a technique: "Prepare for your first class at home, do your work for the second class under the desk during your first class, and so on all day." Polly was such a poor formal student that her English teacher once returned a paper marked "E-minus. See me."
One autumn day, luxuriating in a 5-c- trolley ride home, Polly opened her chemistry book for the first time. She was fascinated, and from then on, chemistry made school bearable.
"She may have wasted her time in relation to marks." says her mother, "but never in relation to learning." In that mood. Polly followed her mother to Vassar ('31). When the dean asked her why she wanted to go there, Polly honestly answered: "I think it's the line of least resistance." But she went on learning in her own fashion.
The Need to Know. One year she skipped note taking entirely to see if she could learn better; she read piles of books, grew rapidly fonder of science, spent nights in a sleeping bag atop her dormitory to try to understand the theory of the expanding universe. She was also Vassar's hop, skip and jump champion, but dating never interested her. "I think I would have liked to go out more," she recalls. "But I just hadn't met anyone I thought was worth giving an evening to. I was pretty absorbed."
Her big crush was bacteriology. Her desire to learn about it drove Polly's marks up to Phi Beta Kappa level, and it was pure interest, not career ambition. "I just had to find out about those little bacteria," she says. Polly went from Vassar to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where the workings of bacteria were being intensively studied.
Best of all, "the students basically educated each other. Everyone cared tremendously about finding out what was really true. It was by defending everything and fighting it out in the lab that you learned." And in the idyllic lake country around Madison, work merged with play. They were all ardent hikers, picnickers and skate sailors; Polly used to skate with a sail made of an old agricultural exhibit sign reading IT PAYS TO FEED THE CALF WHOLE MILK.
In three years at Wisconsin. Polly picked up an M.A. and a Ph.D. She also found her future husband, a tall, lean, kindly medical student ("with a sort of quiet power") named Henry Bunting, the son of a pathology professor in whose class they met. After two years of hiking and bird watching, "we just knew we were going to be married."
Can Spiders Smell? Back in Brooklyn while Henry went off to Johns Hopkins (which had a rule preventing interns from marrying), Polly got a frantic call from Vermont's Bennington College. Could she start teaching genetics next Monday? Genetics was Greek to Polly, but she marched into class with the premise that "dogs have dogs, cats have cats, and you built it up from there."
As it turned out, "Bennington was so arty that they didn't care how7 you taught science, even if you were a twerp." She also discovered that she "learned faster than those students, and they had higher IQs." She had learned the art of learning: finding the key questions that unlock big answers. Ever since, she has been known for giving students odd research problems (Can spiders smell?) that lead to revealing answers (yes, with their legs).
When she became Mary Bunting in 1937, her husband was earning $6 a month as a resident at Baltimore City Hospital. She supported him by teaching physiology at Goucher College. Then he got a $1,200 fellowship at Yale Medical School and became the breadwinner. She worked in a lab for $600 a year, "feeling darned lucky because at that price they had so little string on me." In two years she used her freedom for pioneer work on microbial genetics, and found her research specialty --a bright red bacterium called serratia marcescens, whose color makes it easy to trace.
Growing on Goat's Milk. Cash was scarce. "I don't think I bought a steak for ten years," she recalls. But life was rich. While Henry taught pathology at Yale, they lived in a series of rented houses in Bethany, Conn. The Buntings skied, hiked, played tennis, spent long nights banding chimney swifts in a New Haven heating plant. For $200 they managed to buy 50 acres on a Vermont mountaintop. built a tar-paper shack retreat for $26. In 1940 the first of their four children (a daughter, three sons) was born.
Invariably dressed in blue jeans, Mary Bunting raised all her own vegetables, kept chickens and four goats. "We practically grew up on goat's milk," recalls Son Charles. She raised her children to love independence, poetry and the outdoors. "We all hate the city," says Daughter Mary. Weekends the Buntings wheezed off in their Model A Ford pickup truck to camp out on the mountaintop.
Life in a Cellar. To Bethany, there was always something special about the Buntings. A neighbor recalls that "you could never do anything for them." They did things for others. It was Mary who ran the 4-H club, got the swimming hole dug, rounded up boys to fight a forest fire, served on the school board. She sparked the building of a regional high school. Henry Bunting played the fiddle at square dances, and at night made long rounds as the town's volunteer doctor.
When there was time again for genetics, Mary Bunting slipped back to the Yale lab. "When I was home all day, I got tired," she says. "When I was working part-time, I could enjoy the ironing." She needed spirit. The Buntings were building their own house. While digging the cellar, they all lived in a null goat house --after fumigating it.
When they finished the cellar, the family roofed it over and lived there until the house was built a year later. "A lot of people might think 'How awful,' " says Mary, "but we had all the essentials--and real fun." The fun, the house, the family, the research were all perhaps too good to be true. There was a little warning. Henry Bunting began to tire; he stopped teaching one semester; he grew ill. He died of brain cancer on Good Friday 1954.
Mary Bunting does not speak of it. She went on running the new farm, raising four lively children, studying her "bug." When Yale proposed that she take a full-time job researching and lecturing on bacteriology, she grabbed it. "I never once heard Polly talk about herself--ever," says an old friend.
Away from Heaven. In 1955 Mary Bunting was offered the deanship of Douglass College, the women's branch of New Jersey's state-run Rutgers University, and her decision was characteristic. She felt she had to show her children that people move on, even from "heaven." As it turned out, Douglass fascinated her. It was full of girls who were the first of their families to go to college--yet they really had no idea why they were there. Dean Bunting set out to promote "greater self-confidence. I didn't think these girls realized how able they were, and how much they had to contribute."
At Douglass. Mary Bunting first tried out her ideas for more confidence by letting the girls run their own multilingual course in world poetry ("It was a dandy"). She started part-time studies for married women, and made it a great success--while she herself did radiation research on serratia for the Atomic Energy Commission. When Radcliffe asked her to succeed retiring President Wilbur K. Jordan in 1959, she had doubts. Radcliffe seemed to be "cooking along," and her own campus needed help. But she saw a bigger problem: the low motivation of U.S. college girls in general. Radcliffe, "kind of a prestige spot," seemed the best platform in the country from which to set an example.
In Dirty White Sneakers. If Mary Bunting is concerned about motivation, she is nevertheless not discouraged. As she knows from experience and frequent trips all over the U.S., the college girl of the classes of '62, '63, '64 and '65 is a creature of high emotions, originality, beauty, freedom and wisdom. Notably missing are the "apathetes" of the '50s--the "silent generation." President Edward D. Eddy Jr. of Pittsburgh's Chatham College, a noted expert on U.S. student attitudes, credits the change to the nation's recent peace and prosperity--a nice switch on the notion that only a war or a depression can make students serious. "Today's college girl is more serious about everything, including marriage," says Eddy.
In attitudes, customs, dress and manners, college girls, being natural conformists, tend to imitate one another on any one campus, but they vary from campus to campus. At some schools, girls never read the newspapers. At others, they walk around carrying the Manchester Guardian. At Oberlin, fully half the girls hope to serve overseas in some socially useful manner, from relief work to the Peace Corps. "Idealism is rampant here," says the dean of women.
Dress varies from the chaste pastel uniforms at Indiana's Saint Mary's College (oldest U.S. Catholic women's campus) to the skin-tight skirts, bouffant hairdos and rainbow eye shadow at the University of Miami. When the sun shines at the University of Texas, every female foot seems to be in black loafers. When it rains, out come clean white sneakers. At Northwestern, the uniform is dirty white sneakers and full skirts above the knee; at Reed, some girls go barefoot. Skirts are so short at U.C.L.A. that a nervous professor recently announced: "Move back or leave class until I blacken the lower half of my glasses."
Neither God nor politicians are wildly popular. College girls are moved by causes --sit-ins are big--but not by presidential campaigns. They intellectualize religion, but cannot quite feel it; "I believe in God, but it doesn't affect my life," says one Radcliffe senior. Except among Roman Catholics, churchgoing is erratic, especially after Saturday night dates.
Security in Dates. Few girls start college with reasons any better focused than Mary Bunting's line of least resistance. A consequence of this is the why-am-I-here "sophomore slump," which is likely to make girls oversleep, overeat and sometimes go overboard. Before, during and after sophomore slump, girls struggle with the problem of men. They desperately want men; colleges tend to get rated by their nearness to the supply. Says a Saint Mary's girl: "Notre Dame is ten minutes by bike, 15 minutes at a dead run, and 22 if you just walk." University of Texas coeds are described as "bluntly aggressive with men." A sociology professor reports that "15 or 20 years ago a college girl would invariably reply, 'Career,' if you asked her what she saw in her immediate future. Today she would reply, 'Marriage and children.' "
Girls meet men more easily than they used to; Antioch, for example, lets men visit girls in their dormitory rooms, provided that they yell "Man on!" as they enter the corridor. "Playing the field," Betty Coed style, is as outdated as the raccoon coat; boys nowadays want "dating security," and since girls want boys, the universal solution is "going with," "going along with," or, in a squarer phrase, "going steady." A boy often signals this understanding by giving a girl his fraternity pin, following up with roses delivered to her sorority house during a candlelight ceremony. Dating security leads at least to the doorstep necking or the kiss before class that sometimes is known as P.D.A.--public demonstration of affection. The authorities frown on P.D.A. "We don't want to discourage kissing," says the University of Miami's Assistant Dean Louise Mills. "But we do try to tell the girls they shouldn't do it in public."
Going steady also leads a statistically indeterminable number of girls to bed, generally with fears and trepidations rationalized by "he insists and I love him." Most girls' mothers suspect this situation and stay calm. "It is fathers," says Psychiatrist Carl Binger, "who need to be protected against the facts of life." If the upshot is a marriage while a girl is still in school, she often counts her education a success. "I NEVER, NEVER expected to leave without being married," writes a still unmarried Wellesley girl. Girls who get to be seniors without a man sometimes panic and hastily turn themselves into teachers, but the great majority keep cool and go on to marriage after graduation.
New Shock. Whatever men mean to college girls, the girls certainly have less time for them. Almost everywhere, girls are working much harder. At least in the grade sense, they have to be better students. Admission standards are tougher all over. For example, boys usually outdo girls on math ability tests (a reflection of unexpectation). But at Stanford this year, the freshmen girls entered with math scores equal to those of the freshmen boys in 1957. At better colleges, the competition is often a shock to blase freshmen who got all the honors in high school. In many a girls' dormitory, lights burn all night. "When I get home," says a weary Oberlin senior, "my mother says, 'Welcome, Cadaver.' "
What goes for ordinary college girls does not, of course, necessarily go for the top i% of high school girls who get into prestigious Radcliffe College,-female annex of Harvard. For Radcliffe's 1,155 undergraduates are unusually mature as well as fearfully bright: 66% of last June's graduates left with honors, against 53% at Harvard, and 37% of the " 'dimes" went on to graduate school.
Radcliffe got started when a Miss Abby Leach of Brockton, Mass., brashly persuaded three eminent Harvard scholars to give her private lessons in Greek, Latin and English (she later became a Vassar professor). From that start grew a college with such alumnae as Gertrude Stein ('97), Actress Josephine (Arsenic and Old Lace) Hull ('99), Helen Keller ('04), Philanthropist Mary Lasker ('23), Novelist Helen Howe ('27), new Barnard President Rosemary Park ('28), Poet Adrienne Cecile Rich ('51). To all these eminences, Harvard long pretended indifference, choosing to type all Radcliffe women as flat-chested neuters in flat-heeled shoes. One explanation for this was that since Radcliffe had few dormitories and did not attract many girls from afar, its students tended to be "just Boston types." A whole literature of slanderous jokes flourished: "Was that a Radcliffe girl, or did a horse step on her face?"
Beauties with Brains. Starting during World War II, all that began to change. The wastefulness of running similar classes at Harvard and Radcliffe, only a ten-minute class-break apart, led to joining the schools "in everything except theory." Today the girls even take their exams with the boys, and some share the same tutorial sessions. Under a complex concordat between the two schools, Radcliffe gives 90% of its tuition ($1,520) income to Harvard.
To old Harvardmen, the results are astonishing. "Gross generalizations, such as that 'Cliffies are all dogs, no longer apply," says a gallant Harvardman. Radcliffe attracts beauties with brains from all over the world. The reason is simple: all those Harvardmen (5 to 1)--and Harvard itself, of course. The class of 1949, for example, reports that 42% of its husbands are Harvardmen, and going steady is now endemic in the Yard.
What Radcliffe's individualistic girls have in common are English bicycles, guitars and extremely hard work, made harder by their compulsion to do even more than asked. "They go to the library and underline and underline," observes a Radcliffe senior. They are too busy for newspapers and politics: "So there's a Harvardman in the White House, big deal." In their overcrowded dormitories, they get on one another's nerves, and there is "no place to cry."
"Dinner-Table Education." Mary Bunting plans to change all that. To bring students and faculty together, she wants to remake Radcliffe with a house plan similar to Harvard's. Remembering her own yeasty days at Wisconsin, she would like to raise the level of "dinner-table education" at Radcliffe. Moreover, the house system will include families with children--carefully selected people who live two lives well. Some day one Radcliffe girl will be able to discuss man's fate with her tutor as another girl feeds the tutor's baby.
The forerunners have already arrived: 21 women artists and scholars, working part-time under Mary Bunting's new Institute for Independent Study, which aim to give talented women all the facilities they need to work for a year on some consuming project that marriage interrupted. All women with a doctorate or "equivalent in achievement," the new Associate and Affiliate Scholars get up to $3,000 and all of Harvard-Radcliffe to work in. Their fields range from archaeology, law and philosophy to painting, poetry and psychiatry. When she announced the idea last fall, Mary Bunting was startled at the response. Letters flowed in from all over the world, along with 2,400 applications. "To use a Quaker phrase," she says, "we must have spoken to their condition."
From the day she arrived at Radcliffe, President Bunting has served as quite a model herself. "She's not much of a dresser," sniffed one trustee on first seeing her, but soon people were speaking of "infectious charm." To keep in touch with freshmen, she started teaching a seminar in genetics. When the porch light is on at 76 Brattle Street, said she, drop in. The girls do in droves. "A marvelous woman," was the verdict. "She's the kind every Radcliffe girl would like to be."
After the 19th Amendment. By now, if such doughty igth century feminists as Susan B. Anthony had had their way, the U.S. might be full of women running banks, corporations and research laboratories while their husbands stayed home and tended the children. Instead, militant feminism in the U.S. crested with the passage of the igth Amendment ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex") and rippled away. American women, says Mary Bunting, became "somewhat like a dog I knew who, long after the front fence had been removed, ran down the road to the place where the gate used to be."
The main reason that feminism failed was its belated discovery of the fact that women need men and motherhood. Mary Bunting, who would shudder at comparison with Susan B. Anthony, stands first of all for the family. She proposes no all-front feminine attack on the business and professional fields of men. But in a society of early marriage, lightened housework and lengthened lives, she does deplore women who abdicate their obligation to put their brains and education to creative use. Marriage, motherhood, the fledging of children and possibly widowhood subject a woman's life to stressful changes, and she must be "ready to come out alive."
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