Von Stade Letter: A Reply

As WOMEN at Radcliffe, we must respond to F. Skiddy von Stade's "realistic appraisal of woman's part in making our world sensible, or at least viable."

Von Stade states that the present role of women as wives and child-rearers prevents most women from making other kinds of contributions to society. We agree. But we challenge his assumption that our present role is an immutable fact, that our past necessarily sets the limits of our future. The present status of women is not fixed by nature itself, but is rather the product of our socialization, of our relationships to institutions, and of the family structure of society.

All these factors; at present, unite to channel us into secondary status; all of them can be changed, and must be changed if women are going to be free to choose for ourselves what we are to be and how we are to make our social contribution. By ignoring the social causes of our present condition, Von Stade in fact would perpetuate our subordination. His "realistic appraisal" is, after all, an argument for the limitation of women's access to higher education.

Von Stade states that as the function of the University is to prepare individuals to contribute to the welfare of our society, and as women's present societal role excludes or limits such social contribution, women are less worth educating than men. In this description of the function of the University, it seems to have a neutral position toward the society in which it exists.

But this appearance is a deceptive one. To admit students on the basis of their supposed future contribution to society, in a society in which women are excluded from such social contribution and social participation, means to discriminate against women. It creates an institutional bias which, although unstated, nonetheless maintains and perpetuates our secondary status.

In von Stade's letter, he formulates the question of admissions and merger as a conflict between the right of men to a Harvard education and the right of women to receive this education. The struggle of women for equal recognition involves this basic right. But von Stade speaks of the "balance of males versus females" at Harvard, and of including women "at the expense of males." He seems to see education as inherently the property and privilege of males, a sanctuary that can be invaded by women only at men's peril. Just as Harvard's supposed institutional neutrality breaks down under close examination, so does the supposed neutrality of knowledge it self.

VON STADE'S final point is even more revealing. Hoping he is "not being anti-feminist," he concludes that "the relative transference of responsibility" for social welfare to women seems to him "utterly unrealistic." But it is not responsibility that von Stade means, it is power. This is sexual politics. Harvard's responsibility to society (or to the nation, as Pusey puts it) is expressed by denying equally qualified women admission to the University. "Responsibility" means the perpetuation of power, the perpetuation of a closed system denying freedom, or even equality, to women.

As a member of the power structure at Harvard, von Stade has destroyed the illusions of women in Harvard-Radcliffe. We are encouraged to believe that we are among the select few who will be allowed to become active participants in our society only to meet with institutional discrimination in undergraduate and graduate admission, in faculty hiring and promotion. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as having the power to define our own lives-only to meet with Harvard's definition of us as excluded by our sex from fulfillment of our individual and social potential. Von Stade makes very clear that Harvard defines us as women in exactly the same ways women are defined in the society as a whole.

The contradiction at Radcliffe between our intellectual competence and our reality as women is not in our heads, but in the structure of Harvard and of the society of which it is a part. Women in the University are made schizophrenic by the conflicting demands placed upon us. We are supposed to be intellectuals, in search of productive lives, and to be women, in search of our identity through a man and his children. But von Stade offers us a false analysis of the causes of this phenomenon. We do not all become "bright, well-educated, relatively dull housewives" out of biological necessity, but because of a society-and a University-that forces us to conform to the traditional female role.