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by
Kate Zernike
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March 25 - March 30, 2024
The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab. James D. Watson, The Double Helix, 1968
As for women, God help them. Barbara McClintock, letter to Nancy Hopkins, September 21, 1976
Spence instilled in its girls an understanding that they were privileged, and that with privilege came responsibility. They were cultivated to do important things, to go on to Seven Sisters colleges and be the best students there, to be leaders, though leaders of a certain kind: in the Junior League, or charity work. And they should be well mannered in their pursuits: the school taught its girls never to chew gum on the bus or speak loudly in public, to defer to elders and to not boast. Arriving at school each morning, they curtsied to a uniformed doorman, which their teachers told them was
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Nancy would have recognized him from the photograph in Jim’s office of the two men gazing at their six-foot model of the double helix, had she time. But Crick arrived so suddenly behind her in the little side lab that she realized he was there only because his hands were on her breasts.
FFS
premarital sex was taboo; state law banned birth control and abortion. In the fall of 1963 Harvard administrators cracked down on “misuse” of parietals, the limited hours that women could be in the Harvard houses (provided they kept the door open and one foot on the floor). The dean of students warned that it would be “scandalous” if the public discovered that students were having sex in the Harvard houses: “It’s our positive duty to deal with fornication just as we do with thievery, lying and cheating—by taking severe disciplinary measures against the offenders.”
This is what the GOP wants to go back to.
“The young women of today are a race of culturally induced schizophrenics,” the Radcliffe yearbook for 1964 declared. “They are reared and trained to be the equals of men, and have heard innumerable stories of women who carved out places for themselves in science or politics. Yet these women are also fed the Great American myth of house and home, of children and of a husband with pipe in mouth, paper in hand, and wife on his lap.” The problem, the yearbook editors proclaimed, “is unique to our generation.” Every generation thought it was unique, but this one could feel the ground moving
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Nancy thought she’d only make it worse if she spoke up or told her graduate students to say no when others came looking for cells, or even if she said, “Have them come ask me.” She didn’t want to be known as a bitch, or a difficult woman.
She didn't want to be known as a bitch.
Women were not allowed to work in the observatory at night, told, “You’re likely to get raped up there.” Calendars featuring topless women hung on the doors of engineering labs. One young woman reported that a professor had invited her to his home and tried to have sex with her, offering that she could use his wife’s diaphragm to avoid getting pregnant.
“the minutiae of sexism,” the slights against women that were so casual that in isolation they weren’t “actionable.” “Most are such petty incidents that they may not even be identified, much less protested,” she wrote in a presentation for the American Association of University Women in 1974. These were the invitations to seminars and meetings that were not extended, the pages that were not typed, the professor who refused to learn his female students’ names or vowed that if a woman was given tenure, he’d make her life so miserable she’d quit: “It is her work which by mistake is not properly
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The minutiae of sexism
A landmark report in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female faculty members had experienced sexual harassment, and that the biggest complaint was not “sexual coercion” but put-downs about their intelligence, exclusion, and the kind of marginalization that the women of MIT had described twenty years earlier.
