Fighting Feminine Deference

THE DECISION of Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale to admit women to their hallowed halls early in the '70s put a great deal of pressure on the female branch of the Ivy League to follow suit and open their doors to men. Each of the Seven Sisters responded differently to that pressure: Vassar admitted men outright; Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley settled for sedate exchange programs with neighboring men's colleges; and Radcliffe and Barnard merged with their parent (male) universities. In I'm Radcliffe, Fly Me!, Livia Baker examines the success of each of the routes, and the direct effect the changes brought on the position of women in these colleges.

Baker points out that it is almost impossible to discuss where the Seven Sisters are going without prefacing remarks on their origins. The women's colleges were established late in the nineteenth century, and were pioneers in offering higher education for young women. There was a great deal of skepticism about the value of such education for women and, patterned after the widely respected, elitist colleges of the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters were particularly sensitive to public opinion. Baker shows the women's colleges' meticulous efforts to keep their academic standards equal to those of the Ivy League, to disprove the current theories suggesting that women were physically injured by too much thought, and to insure that their graduates were as ladylike as any young women of their age and social class. The Sisters had something to prove--that women could benefit from high quality education, and that they could benefit from it just as much as men. Their entire structures were geared toward proving tht point.

The Sisters' efforts to pattern themselves after the Ivy League--while protecting their graduates' social standing--forced the women's colleges into an ambiguous position. Their curriculums echoed those of Harvard and Yale exactly, offering no more opportunities to explore their experiences as women than the male schools did. Women in literature and history were as neglected at Mount Holyoke as they were at Harvard; the only addition to the classic curriculum were courses in music and deportment, "necessary" courses for genteel young ladies. "More to the point" than the inevitable triumph of male aggressiveness, Baker argues, "may be female passiveness, deference, if you will, which is a prominent feature not only of the women's-college academic life but also of the organized extra-curricular life--and by a simple effort of transference, of the larger society--a characteristic that the sisters institutionally, in their choices of what to support, what not to support, and how to do it, have done more to perpetuate than to alter." In effect, these women were trained to be the wives of the elite, highly educated volunteers for good causes, not, by any stretch of the imagination, fervent suffragettes or feminists.

ORIGINALLY, deference to traditional educational patterns was the colleges' response to a skeptical world, in which men like Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a Boston physician and a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers, were writing that education destroyed women's femininity physically as well as socially. Educated women, he wrote, "graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile." The founders of the women's colleges had to contend with the widespread belief that women were too weak for education. Ultimately, their only defense in the hostile climate seemed to be to make it clear that these promoters of women's education were not attacking the very foundations of their society. They were forced to insure that their graduates were no more aggressively feminist than other women. The problem today is whether or not the schools have responded adequately to changing notions of female roles: with painstaking research to back her up, Baker argues that the Seven Sisters' inferiority complex of a century ago continues to provide the basic dynamic for the schools' interaction with the world.

Of all the schools Baker describes, Radcliffe may well present the most severe case of deference to traditional norms. Set up in 1883 as the Harvard annex--over the opposition of men like Edward W. Hooper, then treasurer of Harvard, who said bluntly, "I have no prejudice in the matter of education of women, and I am quite willing to see Yale or Columbia take any risks they like, but I feel bound to protect Harvard College from what seems to me to be a risky experiment"--Radcliffe relied completely on Harvard faculty members to teach the young women. All the other members of the Seven Sisters Conference were self-reliant: Barnard had strong ties with Columbia, but at least its students could actually take courses at Columbia; until the Second World War, Radcliffe students heard Harvard faculty members repeat for their benefit the lectures they had given earlier the same day in the Yard.

Harvard, the bastion of the Eastern establishment, has always been slow to adopt innovations, and Radcliffe has consistently been treated as something of an afterthought. Radcliffe's founders accepted Harvard's control in return for its high academic quality; but Baker repeatedly quotes past and present Harvard administrators speaking out against higher education for women; she shows again and again that Harvard has been unwilling to change its traditional structure to help women find a place here. The merger-nonmerger position, Baker argues, allows Radcliffe a superficial independence. Radcliffe controls the Radcliffe Institute funds, but effectively washes away responsibilities for its undergraduates, relinquishing bargaining power over the courses its students can take or over the number of women in the administration or faculty.

I'm Radcliffe is likely to prove difficult reading for women who actually go here, if they get through Baker's rather academic style and the unwieldy plethora of facts about all the other colleges. She forces you to confront the fact that you came to Cambridge because of Harvard's great tradition of learning, but that, at the same time, that very traditional outlook has kept Harvard from responding to women's educational needs, with Radcliffe's administration just about powerless to fight for its students. Her statistics are not quite up to date--her research apparently ended in 1975, and there have been significant changes in some areas, notably student life, since then--but the overall patterns of discrimination by omission if not intention are changing very, very slowly.

But I'm Radcliffe does not concentrate on Radcliffe--in fact, most of Baker's arguments consider the other, more independent schools. Her concern is the future of women's education, the extent to which the Seven Sisters who remain separate from men's colleges can change to meet the needs of modern women, who can choose between coeducation and single-sex schools. So far, the independent schools do not seem to have found a resolution to the problem, largely, Baker argues, because they are still afraid of leaving the traditional educational mold in which they were cast. There are now more courses on women's experiences offered at the Seven Sisters than there once were, but the schools' students are still channelled into traditional female roles. Their graduates are still the wives of the elite, the volunteers for good causes; science departments at the Seven Sisters are still less developed than they are at coeducational schools.

BAKER OFFERS two explanations for the schools' reluctance to embrace contemporary feminism. First, she says, the women's colleges were founded to prove women the intellectual equals of men, and "having completed this mission, they abandoned ship in much the same manner women in the larger society abandoned feminism for a third of a century as soon as they got the vote." Second--and perhaps more telling, although Baker fails to develop this idea fully--the women of the Seven Sisters failed to support the feminist movement because, in the words of Bryn Mawr's Carey Thomas, herself an ardent feminist, it is "the symbol of a stupendous social revolution and we are frightened before it." The women who attend the Seven Sisters, like the men who have traditionally attended the Ivy Leagues, come from predominantly upperclass, Eastern establishment backgrounds. Any threat to the status quo threatened their whole social standing.

I'm Radcliffe, Fly Me! is not a book likely to reach a wide audience; it is not geared to anyone outside the small circle of people who are concerned with the Seven Sisters Conference--administrators, faculty, and students at these small, unique schools. Baker cannot answer the questions she poses. In her conclusion, she turns to a brief discussion of President Horner's "fear of success" thesis about women's motivation, suggesting that the people who make up the Seven Sisters community may be too socialized into deference to take the steps necessary to keep their institutions from becoming complete anachronisms. It is not an earth-shaking problem, or an earth-shaking examination of the issues. But for those people involved in women's colleges, Baker's book is as good a place to start a critical self-evaluation as any.