Gender History

In 1978, four years after Mary Massey died, I started my first semester of graduate school at Harvard University. Some of my relatives were academics, but they were all men; other family members had attended the university, but they too were all men. So I felt like a true pioneer. The history department began admitting small classes in the 1970s, in response to the terrible job market, and it had also started to admit more women. My class had thirteen people, supposedly the smallest class since the Great Depression, and that included five women.

The combination of a bad job market, small classes, and more women meant that the issue of gender was controversial from day one. At the welcome reception for new graduate students in Robinson Hall, a man began shouting at a woman about the Supreme Court’s recent Bakke decision on affirmative action. After classes started, several male graduate students said repeatedly that women should leave graduate school because they would take jobs away from men; one of them made a habit of asking female students out of the blue, in the midst of conversation on other topics, for their GRE scores; yet another student gave women unsolicited advice about their physical appearance. Women qua women were objectionable; our very presence was unacceptable. The hostility had nothing to do with our areas of interest, our regional backgrounds, or where we went to college. With these personalities, the search for veritas, the university’s slogan, did not seem to be a priority.

I should add that most of the graduate students I knew at Harvard were smart, fair-minded, and well-meaning. This was true for most men and most women. They came from all parts of the country and abroad, and most of them easily accepted the social changes of the 1970s, including the then-controversial idea that women could have careers. Furthermore, most graduate students had a genuine love of the subject matter of history and were intensely focused on their work, with no interest in passing judgment on other people. Some of these wonderful students became lifelong friends. Nonetheless, that small group of aggressive personalities did a lot to undermine the atmosphere for women.

The tenured faculty at that time, which consisted entirely of white men, included professors who did not treat female students fairly. One of them refused to call on women in his seminar; another would not respond when a woman spoke in class; other faculty were notorious for giving female students poor grades. Yet another professor declared at a department reception in 1981 that the quality of graduate students had declined because the department admitted too many men from the lower-middle class and too many women. I asked in reply, what about women from the upper-middle class—did class cancel out gender, or did gender cancel out class? He glared at me and walked away. It was a valuable lesson in all-purpose elitism, in how bigoted personalities often harbor more than one kind of prejudice.

Fortunately, my advisor, David Herbert Donald, was one of the most egalitarian members of the faculty. He was an excellent scholar and a superb teacher, which was very important, but he also believed deeply in professional standards, and he had an instinctive hostility toward anything that undermined those standards. He had already trained other female scholars, although the number was small, and he could relate to women as intellectuals. The same was true for Bernard Bailyn, the department’s senior scholar in early American history, who served on my committee for my doctoral exams. But the behavior of some of the faculty surely contributed to the fact that numerous women quit the program, could not obtain full-time academic jobs even with a doctorate, or decided to go into other occupations.

While I was taking classes at Harvard, I had heard some faculty and students dismiss the new field of women’s history, and I thought their contempt for the field had a lot to do with their contempt for women in general. Even though my dissertation concerned the family in the antebellum South, that...