Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965

6 Women’s Continuing Education as an Institutional Response

Mary “Polly” Bunting traveled a long road to the prominence of her membership on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 and chair of the ACE’s Commission on the Education of Women. Her experiences as a female scientist, widowed mother of four, and president of Radcliffe College marked her as unusual during the postwar era. Yet in trying to establish herself professionally , Bunting encountered the same challenges faced by most women academics, and her history offers clues as to how some women managed professional success in an often unwelcoming postwar milieu. Born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, Bunting and three siblings found support and high expectations from their lawyer father and activist mother. Bunting’s mother, Mary Ingraham, who served as national president of the YWCA during its challenges in the 1940s over integration, set a model for involved leadership. In her teen years, Bunting developed an interest in science, earning her M.A. and Ph.D. (1934) from the University of Wisconsin in agricultural bacteriology.1 At Wisconsin, Bunting met her husband, Henry, whose father taught their class in pathology. After graduation, Henry pursued two years of medical training at Harvard, while Polly remained at Wisconsin conducting postdoctoral research. When Polly received a teaching offer at Bennington College, she took it for one year, followed by another year teaching physiology at Goucher College. The couple delayed marriage until 1937, while Henry completed an internship at the Johns Hopkins Medical School (he was required to sign a pledge not to marry during his time there). When Henry settled at Yale, Polly took a job as a laboratory Women’s Continuing Education as an Institutional Response c h a p t e r s i x 180 h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n f o r w o m e n i n p o s t w a r a m e r i c a technician because the director gave her free use of the lab facilities, permitting her continued genetics investigation into the bacterium Serratia marcescens. The Buntings had four children between 1940 and 1947. Polly stayed at home with the children, characterizing herself as having “dropped out,” although she actively pursued civic affairs, including public health nursing and the school board. Family life shifted, however, when Henry died unexpectedly from a brain tumor in 1954. With four children to support, Polly returned to work full-time, as dean of Douglass College at Rutgers University. There she established credentials as a creative educator, tapped for highly visible positions on national committees , particularly those related to scientific manpower. In 1960 she accepted the presidency of Radcliffe. In later years, Bunting cited her five years of postdoctoral experience as key to her ability to reenter academe after her husband’s death. Cognizant of both the difficulty and the importance of returning skilled women to the job market, Bunting created several programs—first at Douglass and then at Radcliffe—marking her as a founder of a new movement in continuing education that “reclaimed” women for educational and professional contributions. Bunting and other educators recognized the nascent labor market potential in women who had left school or the labor force to raise families but now wished to return. They also understood the psychological benefits that would accrue to both women and their families from active, personally fulfilled motherhood. Their ideas for specialized continuing education programs for women wove together patriotic, economic, cultural, and psychological ideologies by providing ways for women to resume schooling while still fulfilling their roles as wives and mothers. The women’s continuing education movement of the early 1960s created a structural response to the educational challenges facing women in the early postwar period. Such programs, designed to return women to the college classroom and the academic profession, built on the work of the ACE Commission on the Education of Women (CEW), the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW). Because of those previous efforts, educators had significant professional networks and a firm research base on which to build the continuing education movement. As a structural answer for women’s concerns—particularly for middle-class, college-oriented women—continuing education demonstrated a slow movement away from individualized answers and toward a collective response on behalf of women. As such—even...