A research center of one's own

During a vacation to her rural Wisconsin home in the fall of 1974, Frances Hill watched television interviewers talk with farm women about the dispute then raging between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Farmer's Organization. The women on TV were all middle-level farm organizers, Hill said recently, who in the past had worked beside their husbands, providing crucial economic services. But they had been expected to remain ladylike at the same time, and had never been permitted to participate in decision-making or public affairs.

"Here they were, women who had just jumped off their tractors to be interviewed," Hill said, "and it intrigued me greatly, for there had been a publicly visible change in the socio-cultural attitudes toward women." Hill has rejected the easy explanation for this change--that it is a derivative of women's liberation--explaining that Gloria Steinem's influence was felt most strongly among urban women, and almost not at all by their rural counterparts. And for Hill the question remains as important today as it was two years ago.

Hill is one of the 36 current fellows at the Radcliffe Institute, each of whom will spend one year pursuing an independent project in her own field, funded either by the Institute or, as in Hill's case, a foundation grant. The program is designed, Patricia A. Graham, dean of the Institute, said last week, "to support women who are likely to make a major contribution to their field and to improve professional mobility." And she emphasizes that the program is not designed to encourage women to pursue women's studies alone, explaining that "it is not a good idea to ghettoize women's scholarship and to push women into research on women."

Women today are not reaching the highest professional echelons, Graham says, and the Institute is providing them with an opportunity by giving them "time to do good work. We put them in the midst of a bustling artistic community such as Boston, help them to make contacts, and to deal with some socialization factors. They have been low in status, heavily expected to go into the nurturing business, and not scholarly work. We are trying to reverse that, with high scholarly expectations," she says.

Hill seems to have come to the Institute for just these reasons--to meet and work with women who are scholarly and diverse. "I knew it would be serious but not just scholasticism--people may interact or just work as they see fit. It's intellectually comfortable here, almost like being freed up of all administrative work and being a third-year graduate student again," Hill says. And the absence of telephones in the offices of the fellows indicates clearly the atmosphere of hard and individual work the Institute hopes to provide.

The fellowship program has not always had the same emphasis--many people look back to the days when it served as a place for women to get started in their field, rather than to pursue their interests after they had proven themselves scholastically. When then-Radcliffe president Mary I. Bunting initiated the program in 1960, and for years afterward, money was given away in small stipends of about $3000--it was called "baby-sitting money"--to women who wanted to continue serious education and return to the work force.

When Graham took over the deanship three years ago, though, the emphasis changed radically, with the program becoming a more competitive one, carrying fewer and higher stipends and greater academic distinction. Graham said last week that in the "old days, the sixties, it was avant garde" to enable women to return to the work force, adding that the fellowship's former role is now carried out by other programs within the Institute itself.

One of these newer attempts is the Radcliffe Seminars Program, a collection of courses designed to provide a "second chance," Nancy Downey, administrative director of the program, says. Created for students who have never completed their undergraduate education, have received their bachelor's degree but have found a new direction they want to pursue, or have married but are seeking a career, the program was established in 1950 after the privileges of older women in the Radcliffe community were curtailed by the merger of the Harvard and Radcliffe classes after World War II.

The seminar office has recently moved across the Radcliffe Yard from the Institute-Schlesinger Library Building to Fay House because, Downey says, the Institute building was "bursting at the seams" with its numerous projects. From the original eight offerings, such as "Japanese Culture Expressed by its Art" and "Ancient Greek with Readings," the number of courses has grown to 84, and the number of students has almost tripled in the three years Downey has headed the program. And since the first seminar was offered for extension school credit in 1963, the number of accredited courses has risen quickly; about one-third of the students each year now receive that type of credit.

The seminars also provide an academic community where instructors, most of whom hold teaching appointments at colleges in the Boston area, may try out new or innovative courses. The instructors are asked to teach the "most exciting, non-traditional course they've ever taught," Downey said, and a brief glance at the catalogue of courses indicates that the program has somehow avoided selling out innovation to trendiness. As the program has grown, so has the number of male instructors and students increased. Some of these are men who hold bachelor's degrees and, in trying to determine what they want to do with their lives, are participating in offerings like the Landscape and Environmental Design Program. Others, Downey says, are professionals like physicists and chemists, who love poetry and take advantage of the writing workshops the program offers.

The seminars are self-supporting, charging $160 for each course, and paying instructors $1300 for their services. But the program cannot attempt to attract the working women of the area--the women who were at the heart of the early fellowship program--without financial aid for those who cannot meet the costs. "There is not too much scholarship money," says Downey, who was herself a seminar participant in the '60s. "There's a little, with some $50 and $75 scholarships and then an installment plan for payment of the remainder. We've written thousands of letters asking for funds for scholarship aid, but there is no money," she whimpers. She is now tentatively planning a series of fund-raising lectures to be given by instructors this fall, to start a scholarship fund.

Even without that resource, the seminar has created two new time shifts for seminar offerings, "in order to help out working women who can get some release time," Downey says. But despite changes like that, and new services like a counseling program, Downey stresses that the program has not lost its original purpose as it has expanded--the courses are taught now, as they were 25 years ago, at the level of college seniors or first year graduate students, and it has even retained the initial structure of two-hour courses with limited enrollment.

And for the women caught in between, the non-tenured faculty women in the Boston area, the Institute is sponsoring a fellowship program, funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. "Most women in academic life are not tenured, and power of course, is tenure," Dean Graham says. "You have to get tenure to make a difference, and that is difficult with the shrinking job market. If you are going to make a contribution to the community, you ought to lead with your strongest suit, and we think that is a program with access to libraries and facilities," she adds. The Institute has asked institutions to nominate faculty for the program, in addition to accepting direct applications; and this request has succeeded in bringing both bright faculty women to the notice of the school and, also bringing the notion of fellowships to the notice of many untenured men and women.

The Institute has raised almost $1 million in the last 12 months, a sum Graham said she would never have believed possible several years ago. Nationally, outside groups are bankrolling the Institute, among them the Lilly Endowment, which this summer announced its backing of a new $386,000 program for research on women in American society. Unlike the other two fellowships supporting women in their own studies, this is a program designed for individuals--both men and women--to work on a specialized project dealing specifically with women. Graham said last week that books published recently have pointed out the lack of monographic materials on women, and that "we have to do the basic work to help others to larger things."

Another project oriented toward this goal is Notable American Women, a three-volume biographical dictionary first published in 1951 and providing scholarly data on women who have in some way played an important role in American history. The work now underway is sponsored by Radcliffe College itself, and will update the earlier work to include women who have died between 1951 and 1975. The original volumes had 1300 articles on women who had lived between 1607 and 1959, and the update will add another 400 articles, with such candidates for inclusion as Eleanor Roosevelt, Marilyn Sanger, Marilyn Monroe and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. And although the administrators of the program are located in the Radcliffe Institute, the biography is purely a Radcliffe project--the College's contribution to national women's studies.

A copy of each of the papers prepared by participants in College and Institute programs will be kept in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, hidden on the first floor of the old Radcliffe College Library building that now also houses the Institute. When a gift of the Women's Rights Collection provided the nucleus for a Women's Archives in 1943, the aim of its founders was to collect source materials for easier writing of what was then a neglected history.

Until about three or four years ago, the 18,000-volume library retained much the same function by collecting, preserving and making available materials for people studying American women's history. The collection now includes such diverse materials as a complete set of the Ladies Home Journal, from its first issue, numerous books on etiquette and cooking, and the "Maimie Papers," a series of descriptive letters written by a reformed prostitute about her past.

But until the late '60s and early '70s there were so few researchers interested in the library's resources that the historian Anne Firor Scott could write in her journal as late as 1960, "Women's Archives very welcoming...glad to have somebody using their stuff." But things have changed--the greatest external influence on the library has no doubt been the national women's movement, which has increased curiosity about the history of women and legitimized the study of it. And with the naming of the Schlesinger Library as the official repository of the records of the National Organization of Women and Women's Equity Action League, the Library's administration has committed itself to the continuing documentation of the feminist movement in the present and the future.

The Library has also moved in the past few years from its position as a collector to a sponsor of research. The decision on what kind of project to sponsor, Patricia M. King, director of the Library, says is based on what "researchers seem to be most interested in." There is now, for example, a tremendous interest in working class women, she says. Hence, a project is being supported based on the papers of the Women's Trade Union League.

The Library is at the same time sponsoring oral history projects, backed by foundation grants, to supplement written records on file. While one of these is just winding up--a study on population requiring interviews with people active in the birth control movement, in child and health care, and sex education--a more recent one will concentrate on the history of black women in America. "The rationale for this one is different," King says. "While most of the women will have played a public role, they are not so likely to have written records, or to have reached the same level of prominence. It will serve as a substitute for written records."

The recently-announced program which King said has already received more than 100 letters suggesting candidates for interviews, will be limited to 40 or 50 extensive oral autobiographies, including family background and sources of motivation, with special attention given to histories of elderly women. Besides community leaders and professional women, the Library has also received suggestions to include ordinary people like hairdressers in the oral history.

As interest in women's studies has grown, so has the presence of men in the Library. King says 10 to 15 per cent of the library's users are now men, utilizing the resources either for women's history in particular or to supplement a more general history. The most requested papers recently have been those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a nineteenth century feminist theoretician who believed economic independence to be the foremost need of all women. But perhaps more important, in a study King did recently of the Schlesinger Library's manuscript users, she found four subjects--education and educated women, employment and working class women, feminism and suffrage, and the woman and her body--overwhelmingly sought after at the Institute. She says the figures indicate the Library's current resources as well as the drift of public interest, and that some of the lesser studied subjects, like religion, abolition and immigrant women, may be more popular elsewhere.

In defining the focus of the Library, King does not mention women's history, as one might expect, but instead social history with an emphasis on women. With that broad a focus, and with the already-proven adaptability of the Library, King seems justified in not worrying about the future role of the Library within the community. Even in the unlikely case of a merger of Radcliffe with Harvard, King says she thinks the Library is already well-established enough that it could easily function as part of the Harvard College Library.

The Institute and the Library are today speaking to new needs within the Radcliffe community, Dean Graham says. While in the past the College was intended to provide access to undergraduate education, she says, the needs of women beyond the undergraduate years are now being addressed. While until recently the Institute administered its own budget--it was moved to the jurisdiction of Radcliffe College recently at the request of Harvard--it has always been inextricably tied to Radcliffe, with Graham serving both as dean of the Institute and vice-president of Radcliffe College. But as the influence of Radcliffe as an undergraduate institution has begun to wane, the national prestige and respect accorded the Institute and Library has waxed, perhaps pointing to a continued role for Radcliffe in higher education with or without merger.