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To the Editor:

Ruth R. Wisse writes powerfully and passionately about the campaign against Harvard President Lawrence Summers; it has been, as she suggests, a shameless stampede [“‘Dear Ellen’; or, Sexual Correctness at Harvard,” April].

But her defense of Summers repeats the old canard about the incompatibility of motherhood and intellectual work. Summers asserted that employers want workers who will essentially be married to their jobs, and that “this is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men [than married women] have historically been prepared to make.” In other words, men are more likely than women to neglect family for the sake of work.

Until very recently, such assumptions were almost universally accepted. Academic committees openly rejected the applications of young married women, believing that motherhood would keep them from pulling their professional weight. I learned this in a very personal way while in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. As the dean of arts and sciences said of me to my department chairman in the early 1970’s, “She’s a married female with two children; you can’t give her a fellowship. Students in that demographic are not reliable.” It was only because I received a special fellowship for women that I was able to continue toward my Ph.D. and a career in the academy.

Statements like Summers’s have dramatically affected the reproductive decisions of talented and ambitious women who have not been as fortunate as I—or as Ruth Wisse. Facing environments that incorporate a mistrust of motherhood, many postpone childbearing because they do not want to be suspected of lacking commitment to their work. Sad to say, some of my sister feminists have also reinforced anti-motherhood messages by heaping scorn on those who say that fertility is not an even playing field stretching from the onset of menstruation until menopause. Many women, when they are finally established firmly enough at work to risk having a baby, encounter biological difficulties.

Ruth Wisse urges young women to understand that motherhood is on the whole a far more satisfying and important endeavor than any paid job. If employers discriminate against women because mothers are more devoted than fathers, so be it. But as women juggle demanding careers and family needs, they often discover a positive corollary: their husbands become more engaged, effective fathers. At afternoon faculty meetings, young male professors often plead for promptness so they can drive in carpools. Male colleagues bring sick children to the office to while away the hours on an unused computer. Many women—and apparently many men—are capable of the juggling act.

According to Ruth Wisse, fellowships awarded exclusively to women, or other special considerations in hiring, are unfair because they discriminate against men. But discrimination against women, while perhaps more subtle than in the past, remains pervasive in academic life. Many women candidates would not get to the “short list” if diversity officers did not insist on it. Women—especially mothers—need policies that will continue to open doors for them that others are anxious to close. They need people like Ruth Wisse to be an advocate is on their behalf.

Sylvia Barack Fishman

Brandeis University

Waltham, Massachusetts

 

To the Editor:

I should like to add a somewhat different perspective to Ruth R. Wisse’s wise and thoughtful discussion of the debate about women and tenure at Harvard. When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970’s, there were no more than four or five tenured women in the entire faculty of arts and sciences.

One, whom I knew personally, was for many years only a “lecturer.” She was finally granted tenure on the basis of a publication record that put many senior faculty to shame. This arrangement, in which she taught a full-time load for half-time pay, had advantages for her at a time when she was raising three young children. As she once put it to me, she felt that she could honorably cut back her full-time schedule if a family emergency ever required it (so far as I know, it never did). I suspect that her public expressions of contentment with this arrangement were not entirely sincere. In any case, the arrangement was most unusual, and would not have been feasible had her husband’s income been less generous.

A second vignette: as a high-school student in Seattle in the 60’s, I recall seeing, with a friend, a picture of the graduating class of the University of Washington medical school. It was a sea of men—around 250—among whom were sprinkled four women. You can imagine its effect upon my companion—a brilliant girl and until then an aspiring doctor. She decided on the spot that the odds were better in nursing.

A final story: I arrived in Buffalo, New York in the fall of 1974, where my husband, who was a year ahead of me in graduate school, had been hired as an assistant professor. When I sought employment, I encountered “anti-nepotism” rules that kept academically qualified wives (often with Ph.D’s from first-rate programs) from teaching at the university. I avoided the rule in question by agreeing to “teach for free” and off the books. I also encountered, I regret to say, many unhappy wives and failing marriages.

I mention these episodes not to arouse indignation but to try to re-create the context out of which the current “feminist” movement emerged, and to suggest the intransigence of certain related trade-offs. It is important to keep in mind that the “prejudice” against women in the academy was not altogether unfounded. Why, after all, lavish an expensive graduate or professional education on a student who is likely to drop out (or only work part-time) in order to raise a family? Ruth Wisse would like to keep “legal equality” while at the same time urging a return to more traditional, family-centered roles for women. But, should young women heed such advice en masse, would it still be reasonable or fair to expect universities and employers to admit and hire them on an “equal” basis? In sum: what is needed is less anger and more serious thought about how we might more happily reconcile equality of opportunity with the having and rearing of children.

Susan Shell  

Boston College

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 

 

To the Editor:

The controversies swirling around Lawrence Summers are nothing new for Harvard presidents. But the particular controversy over women, which Ruth R. Wisse addresses in her brilliant article—well, that’s a different story. As she so eloquently notes, it was not that Summers was wrong in requesting a broad-based inquiry into women’s progress in scientific careers but that he did not go far enough. This inquiry should be expanded to other fields, including my own, business.

Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909, was as quintessentially politically incorrect in his day as Summers is now. Eliot championed women’s education, elective courses, and clinical and case-based pedagogy, among many other radical reforms. None came easily: his move to rescind required attendance at chapel was adopted only after a decade of bitter debate.

Like Summers, Eliot believed in an equality based on merit, not on birth. Not surprisingly, he also championed tough grading. As a young professor of mathematics and chemistry, Eliot administered Harvard’s first written examinations. Small wonder his languid peers denied him tenure.

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