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chapter two Women among the Professors of History THE STORY OF A PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION / When I entered graduate studies in 1963, women represented a tiny fraction of professional historians. Women entering the profession in middle age were considered “freaks” and wereviewed with suspicion. Most of us never sawa woman ora nonwhite professorduring our doctoral studies. Isolation, alienation, and a sense of being there on sufferance, always offered with the expectation that we would not measure up and were likely to fail, defined our environment. I had entered graduate study after several decades of involvement in grassroots organizing and political activism.Thus it seemed natural to me to address these problems organizationally , especially since they were also reflected in the attitudes and environment of the annual conferences of historical societies. Shortly after earning my Ph.D. in 1966 I became active in the Organization of American Historians and later took a leadership role in the formation of the caucus of women historians at the 1969 convention of the American Historical Association.The following essay describes what we did and how we managed to transform the professional societies and with them the career choices for both women and men in our profession.* As I look back to the beginnings of feminist organization among historians in the late 1960s, I am aware of the fact that I entered the field with an unusual background. I came to academic life as a mature woman, having been a committed political activist since age fifteen. A refugee from Hitler, I had experienced fascism, racism, imprisonment, and persecution. As an immigrant in the United States I worked in typical unskilled women’s jobs, from domestic work to file clerk, and it took me years to work my way up to becoming a medical technician. I had long worked with women *Based on two previously published essays: Gerda Lerner, “Women among the Professors of History: The Story of a Process of Transformation,” in Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds.), Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional, 1–10 (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1999; Gerda Lerner, “A View from the Women’s Side,” Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (Sept. 1989): 446–56. Women among the Professors of History 39 in their community organizations, and I knew in my bones that women build communities. But as I entered academic life as a student, I encountered a world of “significant knowledge” in which women seemed not to exist. I never could accept that patriarchal mental construct and resisted it all through my training. My commitment to women’s history came out of my life, not out of my head. I first attended a convention of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in 1963, the year I entered graduate school at Columbia. It was a discouraging experience: I knew no one there, and there seemed to be no way of getting to know anyone. The group was overwhelmingly male; there were so few women and so very few female graduate students that one noticed each woman in the room. Yet no one seemed to want to be the first one to speak to a stranger.The social highlights of the convention were something called “smokers,” organized by various prominent schools. The Columbia smoker, true to its name, took place in a smoky room without chairs, in which men, each carrying the obligatory over-priced drink, milled around trying to connect with others they knew. The few women present usually turned out to be wives. The famous professors were surrounded by a few nervous and eager young men, whom they had chosen from among their graduate students to be introduced to other important professors who might further their careers. At that time there were no accepted ground rules for hiring and interviews . Most jobs were never advertised, but were announced informally through the old boys’ network. When a job opened, a professor from that department would call his friends and contacts in other schools and elicit the names of their favorite and preferred students. The job search then took place privately, at the convention or on campuses, as a sort of competition between the pre-screened chosen few. Less favored students or those whose professors were not well connected in the network simply lost out. Women and minorities tended to be among the losers. At the smokers one could stand in a corner and watch the ballet of eminent professors introducing their favorites to other...

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