What was it like to be a female student at Harvard in the age of Harvard-Radcliffe?
That’s an interesting question. I thought, “Oh, I dunno, it just was .” When you’re doing it, in your own experience, it’s just sort of there. It was indeed second-class citizenship, but I was very lucky to be there, all at the same time.
Did you sense that?
Yeah, both! “Boy, I’m glad to be there”, and, “Boy they look down their noses at me.” And the president of Radcliffe spoke to the freshman class that I later joined—I transferred in; I went as a sophomore, but I’ve heard about this—but he said, “Well, we know that the men are here to get bachelor’s degrees, but you are here to get the MRS. Let the men…let your husband buy the house for you, and you raise the children.”
What was the general response from women?
I don’t know. That was what he said to the incoming freshmen of Radcliffe; I was not present that day. Actually, the experience of my mother’s family after the Civil War was kind of useful, because so many men had been killed, but the women really had to root hog or die. And it was…I think it’s why mother picked up a hammer. Nobody’s going to do it for you; do it.
Did you feel like you were a part of that change, to a place like Harvard-Radcliffe?
No. I was just there .
How did you feel about opportunities for women? Did you feel like there were going to be more at the time?
No. It was just—”hmm!” There were no opportunities. When I got home from college, I spent a year at home, getting engaged and unengaged, behaving generally badly. I had a job, and it paid me $42.50 a week. I was assistant archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society. My Uncle Sam, who I loved dearly, shoehorned me into this. There were two employees—the archivist, and the assistant archivist—and we cut the paper, to make a carbon copy, in half for short letters, because that was thriftier—position it behind the carbon copy, type very carefully—and the archivist was a woman. I thought partly because I could see that the job opportunities for me in Charleston were essentially nil, and also because I was behaving badly, and I saw no sign of stopping this, that I had better go to New York to find work, and my bad behavior would be less noticeable. I mean, I had three engagements that year; this is not what was expected behavior. So I did go to New York. Some guy I met at work, actually, said he would give me a letter to the head of copyeditors at at John Wiley & Sons, and I ended up going to work there.
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