Find Right Husband If You Work, Lemann Panelists Warn 'Cliffies

"Everything really depends on the man you marry," Mrs. Miriam H. Berlin told a Radcliffe audience last night. Her sentiments seemed shared by at least the three other panelists with whom she discussed the difficulties of combining marriage with a career.

The exchange of views was the second presentation in the series of Lemann Lectures on the marriage of the educated woman. "Taking off from where Bettelhem ended," the panelists spoke largely out of personal experience. They assumed at the outset that most of the 'Cliffies listening would like to work sometime after they were married.

Mrs. Berlin, a Soviet historian who teaches at Wellesley, declared: "If you don't have your husband's support--both morally and in the dishwashing way--you can't cope with the problems you have to face." She urged students to look carefully at their "unexamined intentions," such as wanting to go directly into graduate school.

Mrs. Beatrice B. Whiting, an anthropologist, cited the results of a study she had made of 24 mothers in six cultures, which showed that women who were home only a moderate amount of time rated highest in "warmth" and "consistency." She said that mothers wishing to work should find paying jobs conducted outside their homes in contact with other adults.

Mrs. Alice K. Smith, a Radcliffe Institute scholar writing a history of the development of the atomic bomb, claimed that if a working mother could not have the best of both worlds, "she can have the best of one and as much as possible of the other." She protested against "the tyranny of housework," but noted that she was "not suggesting you live your life in Bohemian squalor."

Gerald A. Berlin, a Boston lawyer, warned that divorces or separations "never come out of the blue." He said that "the fault lines of marriage are pretty generally observable in the early days of marriage and even before." He denied that conflict caused by a working wife did more than trigger a divorce.