The Fifties

by David Halberstam

But that was nothing compared to an article in Colliers entitled “No Father to Guide Them.” The article managed, as Reed noted, to combine antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and a phobia of science. Pincus was depicted as a kind of Rasputin of the science lab, bent on evil deeds. A photo showed him, with a cigarette dangling from his lip, holding up a rabbit that was clearly soon to be sacrificed. In Pincus’s world, the author, J. D. Ratcliff, wrote, “man’s value would shrink. It is conceivable that the process would not even produce males. The mythical land of the Amazons would then come to life. A world where women would be self-sufficient; man’s value precisely zero.” In reality, Pincus was the gentlest and most orthodox of men, a devoted husband and father, who left little poems behind on the pillow for his wife when he went to the lab in the morning. Still, the publicity did not sit well at Harvard. Pincus was already something of a controversial figure: He was Jewish in an age when American academia was still largely anti-Semitic; and his critics claimed he was too ambitious for his own good (and theirs).