The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  For the Buntings, homemaking was a shared process, one that required the efforts and patience of both parties. The same could be said of their careers: Bunting looked over Henry’s X-rays, and Henry performed a cat dissection for Bunting’s class. Their marriage was still traditional in many ways—Henry was the breadwinner, and Bunting was relieved that she could pursue science without the pressure of supporting the family—but it was far more equal than what most women experienced in the 1930s and 1940s.

  Presented with Bridgman’s data, Bunting saw her happy life differently, like a photograph drained of its color. Her rapid graduate training, her part-time job at Yale, her grants signed by male colleagues, her small salary: all of these were symptoms of a broader problem. She had been waved through lazily by authorities paying her little mind. The nation expected so little from its women, even its most brilliant ones. And she had been lucky: most of her peers had endured much worse. She recalled the neighbor in Connecticut who thought she should be grateful that her husband allowed her to drive the family car, and the women who, in her eyes, lacked all sense of purpose. “I didn’t have to worry about whether to get married or not,” she reflected years later. “I had to decide when and to whom. Actually I think my family always expected me to get married and have a family and do other things. I took that for granted.”

  Looking at the statistics about brilliant young women who never even got on the college track, Bunting realized how many factors conspired to keep American women away from intellectual pursuits. There were the parents who never encouraged their daughters to do “other things,” the guidance counselors who failed to recommend college, the student newspapers that highlighted engagements but not honor roll grades, and the many professional men—like her colleagues on the committee—who were entirely unbothered by the thought of thousands of women dropping out and fading away from sight. Everyone and everything told American women—both those in Bunting’s generation and those who followed her—that their “real lives” were in the home, away from the public sphere. The nation was going to lose the Cold War to a country that relied on both men and women for research and innovation. The women of the Soviet Union demonstrated their scientific acumen: they made up 30 percent of Soviet engineers and 75 percent of the nation’s doctors. Meanwhile, American women made up only 1 percent of the nation’s engineers and 6 percent of its doctors. The United States was wasting a precious resource, what Bunting would later call “educated womanpower.”

  Bunting wasn’t alone in thinking about this problem. Many administrators and education scholars agreed that something was wrong with the way the nation educated women, but they couldn’t agree on what the problem was or on how it should be solved. Between 1948 and 1963, the number of women enrolled in college dramatically increased, from 700,000 students to almost 1.7 million. Still, female undergraduates looked like “incidental students” to university administrators, according to the historian Linda Eisenmann. Women didn’t really belong at research institutions (which were rising in prominence thanks to an influx of federal dollars), and they didn’t merit professional training, because it was assumed that they would leave the workforce at the first signs of pregnancy. Some education reformers thought that women needed more classes in marriage counseling or the domestic arts, to better prepare them for their lives as housewives. Others reinforced the value of a liberal arts education, even for the stay-at-home mother. An educated woman could recite sonnets while changing diapers, they suggested, thus keeping herself entertained.

  Bunting disagreed with both camps. She thought women needed to be educated so they could contribute to research and innovation. Furthermore, she believed that most women, if they found willing husbands and stuck to strict schedules, could have both family and career. At Douglass, she was dismayed by how many parents, teachers, administrators, and alumni believed that women either couldn’t pursue intellectual goals or could do so only at the expense of their personal lives.

  American women lived in what Bunting started to call a “climate of unexpectation.” She set out to change the climate.

  Bunting returned to Douglass energized. She persuaded the school’s board to green-light an educational initiative for a small group of older, part-time students, women who were married with children and who could only come to campus for an hour or two a day. Part-time study was generally derided at the time—some thought part-time students were dilettantes—but Bunting was convinced that these part-time students would succeed. A group of ten women were admitted, and succeed they did: the group was overrepresented on the honor roll. One faculty member called them the “GIs of Douglass.”

  The program helped validate Bunting’s emerging understanding of the trajectory of a woman’s education: it was full of starts and stops, and it took place over the course of a lifetime. Women were living longer compared with the women of previous generations, and the majority of them were done with the most demanding stages of motherhood by their early thirties. They had decades of empty time to fill. As Bunting described it, these women entered and exited the workforce much like drivers merging onto, and then exiting, the interstate highway system. Education needed to operate more like the nation’s highway system, Bunting decided; it needed to provide women with on-ramps and off-ramps that they could use at will.

  Despite all her activism on behalf of women, Bunting didn’t identify as a feminist. For her, as for many women in the 1950s, feminism seemed radical, even sinister; it smacked of communism, bohemianism, and radicalism. What’s more, women like Bunting had a different idea of social change from self-identified feminists. Whereas feminists wanted to change the rules that governed the social world, Bunting and reformers like her wanted to help individual women learn the rules more quickly and be more at ease within them. As Esther Raushenbush, the former president of the women’s college Sarah Lawrence, recalled, “The research of those years was directed toward helping women make adjustments; little concern was ever expressed about the responsibility of society to change those social patterns.” The idea that society itself must change was a revolutionary idea—an idea whose time had not yet come.

  Nothing made these differences clearer than a chance encounter between a reformer and a revolutionary. Just as she was reforming Douglass College, making it into an on-ramp for married women, Bunting met another woman who was thinking about similar problems. Betty Friedan was a freelance journalist and a fellow alumna of a Seven Sisters school (she had graduated from Smith) and, as Bunting remembered later, a woman who was “boiling very fiercely.”

  At the time they met, Friedan was researching the “return of mature women to the labor force” and was preoccupied with the predominant myth of the “happy housewife”—the woman who needed nothing more than sturdy oven mitts and a good vacuum to be content. She wanted to write something about it—something longer than a magazine article, a book, perhaps. Friedan asked Bunting to collaborate on the book project: Bunting would offer her ideas about education, and Friedan would write forcefully about the “ways in which women were prevented from living their own lives.”

  Four or five times, Friedan boarded the commuter train from Rockland County, New York, and traveled to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she and Bunting discussed plans for what Bunting called their “small book” (she was never grandiose about her projects). They met in Bunting’s office, where they would spend an hour or two reading over drafts of possible chapters. As they got to know each other better, as women and as thinkers, Bunting grew wary. Friedan was outspoken. She was angry. She saw women’s problems as a result of male interference in women’s lives; to Bunting, it seemed that Friedan was thinking “in terms of men against women, and was feeling very bitter about men and what men did to women.” Bunting—a humanist, a happy wife, and the descendant of a Quaker—found Friedan’s polemical style and vitriolic tone unappealing. (It was not atypical for a WASP to find a Jewish woman overly emotional.)

&n
bsp; “I was thinking much more in terms of the climate of unexpectation,” Bunting later explained, “in which men and women were both trapped. The book was going to have a lot in it that was quite dramatic that I couldn’t really support.” Her social vision didn’t include villains and victims; she refused to blame men for women’s problems, or even to think about how they might benefit from women’s suffering. She thus encouraged Friedan to take a different approach, to admit that there was more than one way of looking at some of these problems, but Friedan refused. They eventually parted ways. Bunting returned to the work of running an institution, while Friedan raced to finish The Feminine Mystique.

  In March 1960, Bunting finally got her chance to test some of her more innovative ideas about how to generate educated womanpower. She had just been appointed president of Radcliffe College, though her term as president hadn’t officially started (she had been offered the job after a Radcliffe trustee heard her give a talk at Smith). She proposed, to a skeptical board of trustees, the creation of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. Bunting explained how funding a small community of female scholars would help not just the women appointed to the Institute but also the Radcliffe undergrads, who, like the students at Douglass, would be inspired by the older women’s example. If the experiment was successful, colleges around the country might imitate its approach.

  When Bunting proposed this plan, there was nothing like the Institute in the country. The closest thing might have been her own “female GI” program at Douglass. (A couple years later, the University of Minnesota would start a similar continuing education program.) But Bunting didn’t need a model; since her days in the bacteriology lab at Vassar, she had always loved researching questions to which no one knew the answer. The idea for the Institute had been taking shape in the back of her mind since her days at Douglass—truly, since her happy days in Bethany, Connecticut, when she farmed on some days and researched on others.

  For several years, she had nurtured what she thought of as a hypothesis (she had many hypotheses, scribbled down in her notebooks, alongside her hour-by-hour daily schedules): educated women could restart their intellectual careers if they were given time, money, and university resources. She pictured a woman much like her younger self: mother of four, PhD in hand, energized equally by her young children and recent research in her chosen field. This woman needed the equivalent of the Yale laboratory: a place within commuting distance where she could explore her research at her leisure, without the burden of breadwinning. She recalled her neighbors in Bethany. “Every one of these neat little brick houses has at least one woman who doesn’t seem to have enough to do,” she had written to her mother when she was living there. “If they did all of their own wash etc. they could keep busy, but they dont [sic]. Most of the time they spend visiting with each other or yelling at their kids, just out of boredom…They all talk, I hear them out the back window, about how hard they have to work, but in reality they wander aimlessly about looking for amusement.” Though a bit unfair to those women who lacked her unflagging energy, Bunting nonetheless identified one of the key problems with the suburban American ideal: keeping house simply didn’t keep most educated women fully occupied.

  What would happen if a brilliant, bored woman were given all of the advantages that she, Polly Bunting, had enjoyed as a young wife? What if women around the country saw that they, too, could continue with their educations and leaped, en masse, into the workforce? What upsurge in female intelligence—in national brainpower—might result? Radcliffe, she argued on that day in early March, was in just the position to run this “messy experiment.”

  This was a bold suggestion for a woman who hadn’t even been officially inaugurated as Radcliffe’s president. But Bunting was a bold woman: an anonymous Harvard professor once said of her, “I wish Harvard had a president who was as much of a man as Mrs. Bunting.” The board listened with concern. If this was an experiment, then there was no guarantee of its success. Radcliffe could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on women with no connection to the institution—and for what? Was there any way to know that this project would influence the Radcliffe undergrads? Moreover, so many Radcliffe alumnae were seemingly happy homemakers; they might take offense at the idea that they had been displaced or that their lives had stalled. The board told Bunting that she would have to do the fund-raising for this project alone and that she wasn’t to approach the usual Radcliffe donors. Bunting welcomed the challenge.

  Constance Smith, left, and Polly Bunting, center, at Radcliffe College

  Bunting never let anything slow her down—not money problems, not travel fatigue, not even her husband’s death. She gathered a brain trust of women to help her develop a budget and make a plan. She secured a five-year, $150,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, then a five-year grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, totaling $250,000. She won the support of Harvard faculty, of public figures including Harvard government professor (and future national security adviser) McGeorge Bundy, and of prominent women writers, including Adrienne Rich, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, and the playwright Lillian Hellman, the last of whom joined the Institute’s advisory committee. She found a director, Constance Smith, known as Connie to her friends, an associate professor of political science at Douglass. Smith had dark hair, bright green eyes, and a broad smile. Eager to take the position, she was officially appointed on January 9, 1961, for a salary of $12,000.

  By all accounts, Smith was a natural at the director job. She was warm and attentive, someone who could intuit the needs of others, “a sweet kind of whirling dervish.” One Institute fellow remembered her as “terrific” and “the best person that they could have there.” She charmed Bunting’s assistant, Rene Bryant, and wrote to Bunting that she expected that all three would have a fine working relationship.

  Everything was falling into place. A press release went out in November 1960; it “deplore[d] the lack of incentive and opportunity in this country for the talented citizen” and lambasted the nation’s “anti-intellectual climate,” which was “particularly limiting to those women whose major responsibilities during at least a decade are in the home.” A glossy brochure, also published in November, went further, showing how female intellectual frustration put families—and thus nations—at risk. “This sense of stagnation can become a malignant factor in even the best of marriages,” the brochure warned, “when the gifted woman must spend her time inventing ways to employ herself mentally and failing, or only half-succeeding, may turn against the marriage itself in sheer frustration.” Educated women need not be unruly activists. While the pioneers of women’s education had been “crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate, but also, at times, loud,” today’s women didn’t have to conform to this stereotype. After all, the brochure announced, “the bitter battles for women’s rights are history.” The Institute, like so many other women’s education reforms of the era, was framed as a gentle corrective to a life course that was already moving in the right direction.

  It was in large part because the Institute was supposed to be norm reinforcing and nonthreatening that it failed to address the particular concerns of working-class women and women of color, whose lives took a very different course. To start with, a program that pitched itself as part-time employment would do nothing for women wage earners who needed a full-time salary. The problem for these women was not that they didn’t have an opportunity to work but that they didn’t get paid enough for the work they did. In an era when it was still legal to advertise jobs according to sex, women usually accepted lower-paid positions. (Though sex discrimination in job hiring is now illegal, this trend persists today.) In 1960, the median full-time female worker earned $24,590 a year, compared with $40,586 for men (these earnings have been adjusted for inflation according to the year 2019).

  Educated black women, meanwhile, were dramatically different from their white counterparts. According to th
e historian Paula Giddings, in the 1950s, when white women were dropping out of college, the rate of black women graduates was actually rising. By the academic year 1952–1953, black women earned 62.4 percent of all degrees from historically black colleges; their college graduation rates rivaled male graduation rates from all colleges across the nation. As a result, the number of black professional women rose as well; they soon outpaced black men, percentage-wise, in professional and semiprofessional positions. This didn’t free them from domestic responsibilities, however: in fact, in the 1950s, upwardly mobile black women, many of whom continued to work outside the home, largely felt confused about how to perform middle-class domesticity, because their own mothers often had not had the means to do so. Middle-class black women faced many of the same pressures and expectations that their white peers faced, but their conflicts manifested themselves in different ways, and they required different kinds of solutions. In short, exhortations to avoid “stagnation” and to take “initiative” would have sounded strange and uncompelling to many black women who had been striving to improve their economic positions all their lives.

  But the American media, with its default white perspective, lauded the formation of the Institute. The announcement of the Institute made headlines from Toronto to Tulsa. “Radcliffe Launching Plan to Get Brainy Women out of Kitchen,” broadcast Newsday, out of Garden City, New York. The World-Herald, in Omaha, reported, “Female Brain Outlet Sought.” Bunting was fluent in Cold War rhetoric, and she wrote a long piece for The New York Times Magazine about the “waste of highly talented, educated womanpower” that connected her experiment to the nation’s foreign policy goals. In “A Huge Waste: Educated Womanpower,” she argued that “educational institutions must provide for, encourage and assist the able, part-time student—the married woman—by creating more flexible schedules.” She reassured her readers that “studying, in appropriate doses, mixes wonderfully well with homemaking” and acknowledged that there may be “innate differences” between men and women, though this could not be determined with any certainty without standardizing their conditions of growth. (Bunting was ever the scientist.)