As North American colleges and universities enter the twenty-first century, dozens have instituted special initiatives to support women in science and engineering. Backed by campus funds and grants from major organizations such as the National Science Foundation, these pro-grams can play a vital role in nurturing female students who choose to major in traditionally male fields. Potentially, such efforts can influence science and technology curricula, infusing those disciplines with a women's studies perspective and feminist concerns. Each year, schools across the United States hold literally hundreds of eventscourses, lectures, symposia-discussing women's role in science and engineering.

Such programs have not evolved by accident. Rather, they emerged out of a specific political and philosophical context, one informed by and intersecting with the broader American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In this article I examine such developments through a historical case study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beginning in the 1800s, students, faculty, and staff had wrestled with one vital question: should MIT give women a place in science and engineering, and if so, how?