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“Once I asked a professor for . . . a ‘practical assistantship’ . . . and he said to me, ‘I can’t, Beth. You’re a very bright student but you’ll have children and quit working in the field and not be publishing papers which redound to the credit and illustrious name of the university. So I will choose a male assistant.’ He was quite correct.”1 So concluded Beth Isaacs, a subject (like Kathryn Greeley) in the 1966 study of former Columbia University graduate students. Isaacs, an economist, stopped just short of completing her Ph.D. in order to accompany her husband to his new teaching job in California. Her parents had emigrated from Russia to the United States, where her mother completed college and then pursued a 35–year teaching career. Inspired by her parents, Isaacs became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan and, in 1951, earned her master’s degree in economics at Columbia. She had finished all the coursework toward her doctorate, plus one year of thesis research, when her husband received the California offer. Isaacs and her husband soon had three children, and she chose stay-at-home motherhood. Of this decision, she explained, “I thought women could conquer the world, have children, and be great professors. Now I feel that expectation surely shattered. To be a warm, loving mommy you’ve got to be home with your kids.” However, in 1966, with her children growing, Isaacs talked about the “definite ache” she felt for stimulating work, and she had recently taken a half-time research job. She found the work reasonably challenging but termed the lack of her Ph.D. continually “annoying.”2 Did Isaacs harbor any regrets about her decisions? No, she explained, “not Educators Consider the Postwar College Woman c h a p t e r t w o 44 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 for what we’ve had together—but only for what I haven’t completed and gone on with.” Careers, children, and marriages all need careful tending, Isaacs noted, and it was unwise for a woman with family responsibilities to expect simultaneous success in all three. Beth Isaacs exemplifies a large number of middle-class postwar women who, while drawn to intellectual work, chose home responsibilities over the workplace. Isaacs was unusual in progressing so far in her graduate training, but the choice to adapt her life to the demands of family matched the decisions made by thousands of women students. In the postwar era, the prevalence of a domestic ideology , the appeal of homemaking, and the cool reception women sometimes received in the job market joined professors’ and employers’ preferences for men, whose productivity—as Isaacs’s graduate school professor explained—would be less affected by the challenges of family life. In reality, however, postwar women did not abandon college. The absolute number of women in higher education rose throughout the postwar era, so that, by 1957, college attracted one in every five women between the ages of 18 and 21.3 Just as the postwar labor market demonstrated a continuing upward trend in female participation, so did the numbers of women seeking college education . From 1948 to 1963, women’s collegiate enrollments boomed from about 700,000 to nearly 1.7 million (Table 2.1). Only in 1950 and 1951 did the otherwise consistent annual increments temporarily reverse. The widespread impression that women were forsaking advanced training was supported, however, by the fact that women’s proportion of the postwar collegiate and graduate populations dropped markedly. Whereas women had constituted nearly half of all college students in 1920 (47.3%)—a historic high prior to World War II—their proportion dropped to 40 percent in 1940, 31 percent in 1950, and rebounded only to 37 percent by 1960.4 This fact, when coupled with the visibility and numbers of the new male recipients of the G.I. Bill, diminished women’s campus presence. Table 2.1 reveals a similar decrease in the proportion of women at the graduate level. The proportion of women earning graduate degrees, and thus qualifying to become collegiate faculty, remained low long into the postwar period. Later, in the 1960s, women’s collegiate participation began a significant rebound, so that by 1980 women actually predominated...

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