Women's Colleges and Women's Lib Author(S): Caroline Bird Source: Change, Vol
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Women's Colleges and Women's Lib Author(s): Caroline Bird Source: Change, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Apr., 1972), pp. 60-65 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40161437 . Accessed: 26/11/2014 17:06 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Change. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 137.113.81.22 on Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:06:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 Women'sColleges and Women'sLib by Caroline Bird liberation isn't as big at women's bastions of resistance to women's liberation. colleges as it is at some coeducational Paradoxically, however, those that have joined the universities,but it raises issues that can't be currentmovement to reformthe Catholicchurch have settled by addinga staff gynecologistor a coursein the producedsome of our most radicalfeminists. Nuns like historyof women.The searchfor a new femaleidentity Sister Joel Read, president of Alverno College in strikes the women's colleges at their ideologicalcore: Milwaukee, are ecumenical about sisterhood. They why a separate college for women to begin with? want to broadenthe bond between womenin ordersto Women'scolleges, including those that have recently include all women everywhere. Alverno does admittedmen, can be classified accordingto why they everything that women activists want women's were founded for women only: collegesto do. It has day carecenters, women's studies, First there are the Catholic women's colleges, researchon women,political action on behalfof women, foundedto educategirls whileprotecting their chastity. community services for women. Nuns administeredsex segregationin the service of a Next- and very numerous- are the "finishing tradition that prescribes two inflexible biologically school" type women colleges which are typical of the based roles for women: ritual celibacy or repeated South. They are frankly sexist in origin, founded to childbearing.As such, these colleges are the ideological preparegirls for marriageand motherhood,or failing a suitablematch, self supportin a "feminine"job such as school teaching. The response of their students to CAROLINE BIRD wrote Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down, women's liberation has lagged in part because they published in January 1968- one of the basic manuals for the start of women's have attracted students from conservative liberation. Her new book, The Crowding Syndrome: Learning to LJve With Too socially Much and Too Many, will be published by David McKay in May. familieswho see these colleges as a haven fromcampus This content downloaded from 137.113.81.22 on Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:06:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CHANGE/April 1972 61 turbulence and the sexual revolution. course for women titled "Nuts and Bolts in But the "finishing school" colleges are hard hit by Contemporary Society." Students learn small changing styles of marriage, which make coeducational appliance repair, carpentry, plumbing and electronics. colleges better places to find a husband for those who This dismal record of the women's colleges was still regard marriage as a primary vocation. And some confirmed when I made a similar list of the institutional of them are desperate enough to pitch the "female affiliations of witnesses before the 1970 House hearings haven" appeal in rhetoric that co-opts the women's held by Congresswoman Edith Green on liberation "line." A recruiting brochure issued by the Discrimination Against Women. People came or were Southern Association of Colleges for Women promises quoted from the Universities of Wisconsin, Buffalo, that at a woman's college "you can be your own Chicago, California, Illinois and Maryland; from woman, playing the dating game on your own Columbia, Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue, Cornell and terms . you do not have to stand in line behind men to Kansas State Teachers College. Victoria Schuck, use expensive scientific equipment, computer professor of political science at Mt. Holyoke, and Alice terminals, studios, the pool, tennis courts, or the Rossi of Goucher were the only witnesses from colleges gymnasium." founded for women. Finally, there are the colleges of the Northeast, the Women's liberation first attracted national attention academically rigorous Ivy League Seven Sisters- in 1968 when radical New York women picketed the Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Miss America contest in Atlantic City and got Radcliffe and Barnard- all of which now admit male televised attention by threatening to throw their students. Philosophically they are the antithesis of the brassieres in Freedom Trash Baskets. (For the record, "finishing school" colleges: they were founded not to they didn't.) It erupted that year on the big prepare women for marriage, motherhood or a special coeducational campuses, often as an offshoot of radical feminine role, but to give them the Harvard or Yale movements for civil rights, peace in Vietnam or education denied them during the nineteenth century student power. From these campus hotbeds the new on the ground of their sex. For many years- possibly movement spread and so came ultimately to the as late as the 1930s- they offered the most exacting women's colleges. college education a woman could get. Because they At Vassar, as well as at her sister colleges, there has educated the movement's ideologues- Betty Friedan long been a kind of intellectual disdain for the whole and Gloria Steinem went to Smith, I went to subject of the special qualities and duties of women. Vassar- they should have cradled the new demand for Because of this, the first consciousness-raising groups sex equality. Instead, women's liberation has been an were small and so ill-understood by the administration embarrassment to which they have reluctantly been that according to one possibly apocryphal story, forced to react. (See Kate Millett, "Iibbies, Smithies, President Alan Simpson didn't know there was such a Vassarites," Change, Sept.-Oct. 1970.) thing. On being asked whether Vassar had them, he The record is startling. To check it quickly, I counted decided to investigate personally only to discover that the references to colleges among the hundreds of events he was not welcome because he was male. and statements in the Chronology appended to The Nor is it only male administrators who respond Rebirth of Feminism, the exhaustive history of the new coolly to the new movement's unabashed emphasis on movement by Judith Hole and Ellen Levine published femininity. Many of the single women scholars who set this spring by Quadrangle Books. Between 1961 and the tone of the Ivy League women's colleges are now the fall of 1971, some things worthy of inclusion nearing retirement, and they patronize the young happened at or to the following institutions, in activists. Like a majority of women on most chronological order of first mention: University of cross-sectional polls of opinion, they applaud the goals Washington, University of Chicago, Grinnell, Cornell, of women's liberation but deplore its tactics. "You University of California at Berkeley, Columbia can't expect us to get excited about the need for University, New York University Law School, Harvard upgrading women," the dean of Mt. Holyoke University, University of Michigan Law School, remarked: "We've been saying this all along"- and, Princeton University, San Diego State College, City she implied, in more temperate prose. College of New York. Sometimes it looks like a generation gap, at other There were only two references to women's colleges: times a difference of personal style or even semantics. May 9, 1966: Sarah Lawrence College President But the gulf is as frustrating as if it were on Esther Raushenbush and Radcliffe College President substantive issues and is well worth exploring. In 1970, Mary Bunting charged that American universities fail for instance, the fledgling women's liberation group at to recognize that many college-trained women want Vassar protested that the Vocational Bureau was not both families and careers. actively "demanding" jobs for graduates commen- January 1971: Goucher College (Maryland) offers surate with their education. "The Vocational Bureau This content downloaded from 137.113.81.22 on Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:06:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 62 Women's Colleges must stop telling women who want to be doctors that curriculum. At one point, child study became the they ought to become nurses instead," a student leader biggest undergraduate major at Vassar, and young demanded. families were installed as house fellows in residence The director of the Vocational Bureau, a dedicated units to provide a "warmer, more home-like" and skilled personnel officer, indignantly denied that atmosphere. At Mills College in California, fondly she had ever discouraged any student from a medical known as the "Vassar of the West," President Lynn career. Jane Johnson and I were Vassar classmates and White designed a "truly feminine" higher education for I can't imagine her ever doing such a thing- or women in child care, homemaking and such womanly forgiving anyone for distorting a fact to make a phrase vocations as occupational therapy, medical library "We haven't been talking about equal opportunity all work and domestic science. these years, we've been doing something about it!" she The shift is not something I am making up out of complained.