Progress for Women in Education

Women and Education.

When Harvard president Nathan Pusey realized the Vietnam draft would reduce the numbers of young men applying to graduate schools, he said, "We shall be left with the blind, the lame and the women." Although Pusey was speaking tongue-in-cheek, his comments reflected much of the reality of women's status in the field of education in 1970. At his institution there were no tenured women professors. At Yale, alumni responded positively to the administration's refusal to admit fifty more women, cheering when officials announced, "We are all for women, but Yale must produce a thousand male leaders every year." The January 1970 issue of the American Association of University Women's Journal reported that a majority of the three thousand men who had responded to a survey believed that a woman's first responsibility was to be a feminine companion and mother; that women had less need to achieve in the...

[The entire page is 938 words long]

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