Harvard Wives' Tales
It was not out of character for former Harvard President Charles W. Eliot — a white-haired, bespectacled man partial to a priest’s high collar — to predict the suicide of the Anglo-Saxon race. During his presidential tenure he regularly decried racial mixing and spoke in praise of eugenics. Two years before his death in 1926, he declared that the one of the chief risks for race suicide was this: “The idea held by some of the modern young women, that marriage is not the most important thing in life.” Ironically, his audience was a roomful of married young women, the wives of Harvard undergraduate and graduate students.
“I hope you all realize that no career offers the happiness, the hopefulness, and the contentedness, which being the mother of a family gives,” Eliot said.
Eliot was hardly the first speaker to address this group — called “The Society of Harvard Dames” — on the topic of matrimony. Anna P. Lowell, wife of former Harvard President Abbott L. Lowell, founded the group in 1896 to promote “acquaintance and social fellowship among its members.” Much of this fellowship took place in the lecture room, and many of the lectures covered how to be a woman and a wife.
The lecture topics evolved over the twentieth century. In 1925, Miss Alice Bradley spoke on “Intelligent Housekeeping.” In 1951, the wives were “fascinated and delighted to hear” Harvard architecture professor Jean P. Carlhian weigh in on the subject, “Can Mrs. Blandings Build her Dream House?” In 1962, Mary B. Newman, the first woman to win a seat in the state legislature, gave a talk titled, “Is Politics for Us?” and eight years later the Dames hosted the “Take It Off Girl” — a Swedish model, actress, and feminist named Gunilla Knutson who became famous for her daring “take it all off” shaving commercials.
But for much of its history, the Harvard Dames and its analog groups across the University — Business School Wives and Law School Wives — engaged in largely domestic work. The tea committee was prolific and meticulous in recording its activities. A 1963 report reads, “Jan. 10: Planned for 150. Served coffee (6 gal.) and tea (2 gal.) and one-layer cakes (8x8 or 9x13 cut in squares) (14 people brought cake).”
Each new club president inherited a “Passbook” from the last, filled with decades of advice, on how to host the best teas, or how to attract the most wives for bridge club. Monthly and yearly reports celebrated the success of fashion shows, elaborate holiday parties, choral productions, and bonding events with other wives’ groups. The MIT Dames, who held weirder events, invited the Harvard Dames to attend their Stop and Shop Meat Program. “Five of us won delicious cuts of meat which were offered as prizes!” one president recorded. Club excursions to Harvard Yard at the beginning of the school year invited Dames to “come find out where your husband hangs out,” along with instructions to wear low-heeled shoes.
EXCELLENT STUDENTS, EXCELLENT WIVES
In his influential 1873 book “Sex in Education,” Harvard Professor Edward H. Clarke argued that intellectual pursuit and the female reproductive system were fundamentally incompatible. He offered the case study of a “Miss G----,” a New Englander who attended a Western college. “She was unable to make a good brain, that could stand the wear and tear of life, and a good reproductive system that should serve the race, at the same time that she was continuously spending her force in intellectual labor,” he wrote. “And so Miss G---- died.”
The book appeared just six years before “The Harvard Annex” was founded as a small, private institution for girls up Garden Street. Radcliffe was chartered as an official college 15 years after that in 1894. And two years after that, Anna Lowell founded the Harvard Dames.
As Radcliffe women began to break into Harvard’s academic sphere, the Dames stuck resolutely to the domestic sphere. If the Harvard Man remained the central figure of university life over the course of the twentieth century, the Radcliffe Girl and the Harvard Wife each floated at his periphery. But where Radcliffe students came to Harvard for their own educational purposes, the wives’ arrival was incidental to their husbands’ scholarship.
In the late twentieth century, against the backdrop of second-wave feminism, some Radcliffe women saw the traditionally feminine functions of the Dames as frivolous and archaic. While a Harvard undergraduate, Amanda P. Bennett ’75, opined in The Crimson that “[t]here is an enormous difference between attending a fashion show (if you like them) with a friend to relax, and relaxing at a fashion show in order to make friends.”
She continued, “Even though the factors that necessitate the existence of a group of women like the Dames can be readily understood, the existence of a group of women only for the purpose of meeting other women socially certainly cannot be praised, even faintly.”
Poet and feminist Adrienne Rich ’51 was both a Radcliffe student and, later, the wife of Harvard professor Alfred H. Conrad ’47. In an interview with The Crimson in 1973, she argued that female undergraduates suffered as much misogyny as the wives who shared their campus. “These equal chances, equal opportunities, this ready acceptance—it’s all an illusion and a lie. They’re not nearly aware of the ways in which they’re being taken,” she said.
There were those who would always see the two groups, wives and female students, as one and the same. Radcliffe President Wilbur K. Jordan founded the Jordan Co-operative House in 1961 because he thought it would teach necessary skills for life after Radcliffe College — namely, cooking and cleaning. At the dedication ceremony, he told the first residents, “Cooperative living is an experience not unconnected with the process of an education and what excellent wives [Radcliffe students] will make.”
THANKS FOR TYPING
Though teas and parties were central activities to wives’ groups in their early years, wives also performed significant labor to support their husbands’ scholarship.
During World War II, as American women slipped through new openings in previously impenetrable employment fields, Harvard wives followed suit. In 1946, Harvard’s student body consisted almost entirely of veterans. That was the year Mabel E. Baker, sometimes called “Dean of Wives,” took over the just-established Bureau of Veterans’ Wives office. Under Baker’s 21-year reign, the office was simply referred to as “Harvard Wives.”
Baker found employment for young wives while husbands pursued their studies. “It’s [sort] of hard on [the wife] for a while but after [the husband] finishes his education she can relax,” she said in 1953. She coached husbands to give up their “false pride” about their wives’ full-time jobs. She pointed wives toward affordable housing, recommended pediatricians, and doled out tips for bargain shopping. She provided counseling services to married student-couples. People seeking babysitting services could call Baker’s office, and she’d connect them to a wife. If a woman came in with a peculiar skill she wished to monetize — meat-wrapping, horse training — Baker would try her best to find her a client.
“Harvard Wives” shut down in 1967, but the University’s Information Center kept a list of wives who offered specific services, such as childcare and typing, for those who still needed them.
In March 2017, the hashtag #ThanksForTyping trended on Twitter, aggregating acknowledgement pages in which male scholars thanked their wives for typing, editing, researching, and even translating academic works. Caitlin O. Casiello, a graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, tweeted about her 2013 convocation in Sanders Theater, when a dean described how his wife had typed his dissertation and advised students to get married. Casiello identifies as a bisexual woman, and same-gender marriage was not yet legal in the U.S. “Of course, if I were to marry a man, he would likely not perform that sort of labor for me,” Casiello told The Crimson in an email.
Instances of uncredited academic labor predated even Baker’s “Harvard Wives” and World War II. From 1877 to 1919, the Harvard astronomer Edward C. Pickering employed a rotating cast of over 80 woman assistants. They worked as computers to handle the massive amounts of data that Pickering’s research at the Harvard Observatory produced. Several made significant scientific contributions. Williamina P. Fleming, originally Pickering’s maid, conducted research that prompted the discovery of White Dwarf stars. Nevertheless, the women were referred to collectively, by the moniker “Pickering’s Harem.”
ALONE AT HOME
I saw the best minds of my gender destroyed
by marrying Harvard professors, starving
intellectually repressed, well-dressed, willing
themselves through one reception after
another...
These are the opening lines to “Harvard Wives,” a poem by Mia You. Now a lecturer at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands, You wrote the poem in 2016 while living in Cambridge with her husband, a Harvard professor. At the time she was working on a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley, but in an email to The Crimson, she writes that she was always asked about her husband’s research before her own.
In 2013, she tried to enter Widener Library with her infant daughter strapped to her chest, only to be turned away from the stacks by a college-aged man who cited children in the stacks as a security issue. You wrote a blog post about the incident, and a few days later, Harvard Library revised its policy on allowing children into the stacks.
Still, You was struck by the enduring resonance of a passage written by Rich in her 1976 book “Of Woman Born,” describing her own years as a Harvard wife.
Rich wrote, “The life of a Cambridge tenement backyard swarming with children, the repetitious cycles of laundry, the night-wakings, interrupted moments of peace or of engagement with ideas... I did not then understand that we … were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess and nurse.”
Returning to Harvard in 1973, Rich told The Crimson in an interview, “Coming back here, I’m very conscious of the way the careers of men are built on bright and brilliant wives who do everything for them. The parties, the contacts, typing their manuscripts, doing their research... So the women fragment their own lives and throw away careers they could have had.”
In accompanying their husbands to Harvard, many women abandoned not only their careers, but also their countries. The 1950s saw the rise of the “Cosmopolitan Club,” a Dames committee established to accommodate an influx of international wives. The club showed movies to illustrate American culture: “Welcome to Washington,” “Fabulous Florida,” and “This is Louisiana,” to name a few. In return, international wives hosted tortilla- and sushi-making sessions.
In many ways, the Cosmopolitan Club is all that remains of the Harvard Dames, which has entered the 21st century rebranded as the gender-neutral Harvard Students’ Spouses and Partners Association (HSSPA). According to President Aparna Sethi, today’s partners are overwhelmingly international, and the club functions as a support group as its members face drastic career, familial, and cultural changes.
Sethi, for example, moved from India to the United States in 2016 after marrying her husband, who completed his post-doctoral studies at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Medical School. In India, Sethi lived in a large, joint-family home. She was a school principal with a Ph.D. in Literature. In America, she found herself alone often, with a visa that did not permit her to work.
“It was not easy,” Sethi says. “You are alone at home and figuring out your life and not knowing what to do.” Leading HSSPA is Sethi’s antidote.
Digging through the Harvard Dames’ archival files, it’s difficult to glean the emotional experiences of the Dames’ social and domestic activities, to read pleasure or sacrifice into so many lists of party arrangements.
One early Dames President, passing down a list of organizational responsibilities to her successor, called the position the most rewarding job she had ever had, before instructing, “Request that each girl bring a certain amount of cookies to each meeting.”
Not all wives shared her enthusiasm. In 1936 wives of the Class of 1912 started a mutiny when they tried to boycott their husbands’ 25th reunion. “The Wives would rather die than go to the Reunion,” one wife wrote under a pseudonym. “They didn’t want to be paraded around like so many hogs at a state fair. They didn’t want to meet any more Harvard men, they had met enough.” In the end, though, they relented, and attended the reunion.
SOMETHING WHOLLY THEIR OWN
Over a century after the Dames’ founding, men and women are admitted to Harvard’s schools at about equal rates. Although today’s partners’ clubs have abandoned their “Wives” status, the change is more in name than composition.
At the Law School, female-identifying students now outnumber male-identifying students, but the former Wives’ Club — rebranded as the Harvard Law Couples and Families Association (HLCFA) — is still almost entirely female. Its president, Joanna P. Abaroa-Ellison, says about five men participate in the group’s events each year, usually accompanying a female partner who attends the Law School, or as a “one-off thing.”
She speculates that the group’s activity offerings, like book clubs, appeal more to women. But the Harvard Business School Partners’ Club attends Celtics and Bruins games, cider-tasting events, and brewery tours — and still has low male representation. Liudmyla Goncharenko, the group’s president, estimates that there are currently 10 or fewer male members out of up to 150 partners. One man sits on their leadership team — elected after the club specifically set aside a slot for a man to fill.
“When we [male partners] did participate, we were viewed as an oddity,” says Dana Milbank, who was briefly involved with the group in 1997 when his wife was a student at the Business School. He and a few other male partners splintered off to form a tongue-in-cheek rival group called the “Harvard University Male Partners’ Club,” or HUMP — though, as Milbank says, “We [didn’t] actually meet.”
The stagnant gender demographics of the partners’ clubs might simply be due to inertia: the convening of wives has been long institutionalized. The phenomenon of a man following a female partner to graduate school is relatively recent in the history of higher education, whereas its reverse is centuries old.
“Many women were also academics who were exactly on par, or once even more promising, academically with their husbands,” Mia You wrote in her email. “But due to having children, and having to prioritize one career [or] income over another, ended up as ‘Harvard wives.’”
As You puts in her poem, these are women who “debate the U.S. / intervention in Syria with Stephen Greenblatt and Steven / Pinker based on what they’ve all read in The New Yorker.” Or, these women are “parenthetical asides / reciting from memory the abstracts / of their husbands’ latest publications and examining / red lipstick on napkins in search of something / wholly their own.”
—Magazine writer Sonia F. Epstein can be reached at sonia.epstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @sonia_epstein.
—Magazine writer Eva K. Rosenfeld can be reached at eva.rosenfeld@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @EvaKRosenfeld.