Alumnae Group Hears Trio Discuss Factors Affecting Women's Careers

More than 400 Radcliffe alumnae gathered in the Loeb Theatre yesterday to hear three prominent women--a newspaper editor, a labor expert, and a psychologist--disagree in the question, "Women's Careers: Chance or Choice?"

"To me it seems that the choice is up to the woman whether she wants to foreswear the traditions inherent in her id and go forth to do battle in the male jungle or whether she wants to accept her sex and the duties that go with it," Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, editor and publisher of Newsday, declared.

She cautioned women against entering a career unless they "are willing to sacrifice everything for it . . . . If a woman can't make up her mind whether she wants a career more or less than marriage, she can't expect equal consideration with a man."

Given the chance, she said, women make just as good executives as men. Noting that "a woman in Russia leads a more constructive life than a woman in America" because she has greater professional opportunities, Mrs. Guggenheim deplored "the mommie fetish so deeply branded into the American psyche."

According to Anne Roe Simpson, lecturer on Education, "the problem for women is the integration of all their activities into a consistent, coherent, meaningful pattern."

In trying to find out why women choose to pursue a career, she discovered that "the most important variable was the girl's perception of the attitude of men toward women who work. As they grow older, more and more women tend to feel that males do not approve and that they had better go along with this attitude if they want to capture a husband."

Actually, Mrs. Simpson said, the women may be wrong. The majority of a group of Harvard seniors interviewed last year said they had no objection to working wives. "Perhaps their response was due to self-interest," she noted. "Many boys go through graduate school on their wives' salaries."

"We are not exploiting the intelligence of women," Mrs. Simpson commented, citing a study which showed that while a woman's level of education was related to whether or not she entered an occupation, her level of intelligence was not.

"We like to feel that choice leads a woman into a career in a democratic society, but chance is actually a very great factor," Mrs. Esther Peterson, Assistant Secretary of Labor and Director of the Women's Bureau in Washington, reported.