MIT History: The Women of the Institute - Panel Discussion

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SEAMANS: Hi, I'm Warren Seamans, former Director of the MIT Museum. We're here today to talk about the history of women, and how that history has developed over the years, particularly the last 50 years at MIT. Ros--

WILLIAMS: I'm Roslyn Williams, now the Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs, and I have been for two years at MIT. I have many deep memories of MIT, going back to the '50s, as a kid, whose family was at MIT. So I'm both participating as an individual with that background, and also as dean. Emily, do you want to introduce yourself?

WICK: I'm Emily Wick. I came to MIT as a graduate student in 1946 to study organic chemistry. And that was right after World War II. And everybody, all the grad students, everyone, all the guys, could hardly believe they were still alive. But they were and it was a wonderful time to be here. And also, everyone remembered all the wonderful things MIT had done during the war. It was the national resource. And everyone was proud to be part of it.

Well, I got my PhD. And then post-doc'ed until '53. Then I worked at Arthur D Little for four years. And then I came back to MIT, this time in the Food Technology Department as a research associate. And in a couple of years, I was appointed assistant professor. And worked like crazy, because at that time there was an age limit when you would become no longer eligible to even be considered tenure. And I had about two years to go.

But I worked really hard. And I was fortunate in having some wonderful graduate students, who made it all possible, and some post-docs. And so I got promoted and got tenure. Soon after I did that, Kenneth Wadleigh, who was the Dean of Student Affairs at the time, wandered down to my lab. And he said, there are not many of you girls around here on the faculty. And there were two of us, myself and Margaret Freeman in the Foreign Languages Department.

And Ken Wadleigh knew that Mrs. McCormick-- at that time, this was about 1963, by now-- the first part of McCormick Hall was built. And the number of women students had increased considerably. But Ken knew that Mrs. McCormick was going to give money for a second wing of McCormick Hall. And there would be many more, many more, significantly more women students.

And so he said, how about coming halftime to the Dean's Office, and being an Associate Dean of Student Affairs, with primary responsibility for women students across the whole range of student affairs. So that's when I moved up the Dean's Office and met Dottie, who was already there, understanding all the students, and the way the system worked, and how the departments worked, and what was going on.

BOWE: I'm Dorothy Bowe. And I came to MIT in 1950 to work in the Metallurgy Department, where I worked with graduate students. My Professor Norton was about to retire. And so I knew a lot of women students, mostly because my office was sort of the main corridor. And lots of people dropped in to see me. And I had always ran a very open office. The door was always open and anybody could come in. Dr. Compton always came in on his way to lunch to say hello and how are things going today, which I always well remember. He had lovely blue eyes.

Anyway, a lot of women students at the time were not doing well academically. And were feeling that if the environment was better, that we might-- that they might do better and become part of the mainstream of the Institute, which at the time they felt that that wasn't happening for them.

Because Mrs. McCormick's money was becoming available for a dormitory, Ken had decided that it would be a good idea to have someone on his staff who could oversee that environment for students and their new housing. And in fact, women students across the board at MIT. And he went to talk to Polly Bunting at Radcliffe about this, to get some ideas. And she suggested that he hire Jacqueline Mattfeld to come down and do a complete research project, from a history, and write a program for women students at MIT, which she did.

And her second year at MIT, I was asked to come down and work with her. Because she was new to the Institute and didn't know who to contact about what and where to get different bits of information, which I was able to do. So I worked with her for, I think, about a year and a half, when she put together this program, which was a wonderful-- really, really hard-working person, who put together an awful lot of information. And it caused a great deal of discussion, both pro and con, but was certainly an important document, and something that I think has laid the groundwork for what went on since that time.

Jackie was then offered a position at Sarah Lawrence College and left to become, I believe, the dean there. And that's when Emily was invited to come down. I wasn't sure Emily would want to keep me on, because I had-- I had done a lot of this background work. And as I said, some of it was controversial.

And I figured someone new will want to bring in their own staff and lay it out. And I knew she had backgrounded at MIT, so that what I was doing wasn't always-- but anyway, she did ask me to stay. It was the beginning, I think, of an absolutely remarkable relationship. We worked together for--

WICK: Team.

BOWE: As a team, right. What Emily did very well, I didn't do very well, and the other way around. We got to know all the students. Really, every student, we really worked very hard to identify each person by name. Make sure that the office was always open and that no student felt, no woman student felt that there was nowhere that they could go if they needed even a simple question answered.

We did administer housing, athletics, just about every possible student issue for women came through our office. In fact, a lot of men students came to our office for the same variety of issues. But as time went on, and Ken left that job, I had been there seven years, and I decided it was probably time for me to move on as well, which left Emily there. And she left shortly after that.

In that gap time, we felt something needed to be filled in. We needed a fill in for the time that we were there. And Millie had come on board during that time, as the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor. And we were able to include her in many of the things that we did. And I will turn it over to her from there.

WICK: She took the ball.

BOWE: She took the ball.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, I actually came to MIT before this time. But I was at Lincoln Lab, starting in June 1960. And it was many years before we met, at least seven. And I came to Lincoln Lab because it was an absolutely first class research lab. And I had a family problem, because there was husband and wife, two members of the same family, both in science, in similar fields, in fact. And I was a post-doc at Cornell University, where my husband, Gene Dresselhaus was a faculty member.

But at that time, at 1960, there were nepotism rules and so as long as I was a postdoc with my own support. It was fine for me to be there. But when the NSF post-doc fellowship came to an end, that was the end of my appointment. And there wasn't even an opportunity to work for nothing. So Ithaca, New York is sort of the end of the world. There was no industry. There was no other thing. That was just it.

And so we were looking around for a place we could both work. And there were just two places that were willing to take two people in the same field. And MIT was one of them. IBM Corporation was the other one. So we had a choice of-- individually, we could go to all kinds of places, but together, we had very limited choice. And we decided we didn't want to have a traveling marriage. So that's how we came to Lincoln Lab.

And not only did they hire the two of us, but they encouraged us to interact strongly, and write papers together, and all kinds of things that were kind of against the rules of that particular period in time. Lincoln Lab was a wonderful place to work. I had a kind of job there that allowed me to do research on most anything I was interested in. And those kinds of jobs just don't exist today.

So to young people, it's almost impossible to describe this opportunity. And it was a great opportunity, except for the fact I was a female. And as the number of children that we had increased, conforming to the hours requirement that they had became more and more impossible. And the particular thing that led to my difficulties in coming down to MIT campus was the rule that we had to report for work at 8 o'clock in the morning.

And as the number of children increased, this became more and more difficult. And I was always late. And I got an awful lot of flack. There were two of us that were in this situation. We seemed to have our babies nine months phased between us. So there was always somebody with a new baby between the two of us. The other person was Laura Roth, who is a brilliant solid state theorist.

And she was the one that got fed up with the harassment first. And she left for Tufts University to take a faculty position there. And so with one of us gone, the brunt of the criticism fell on me. And after a while, I got so that I couldn't take it anymore also. So I was looking for something to do.

And at that time, I became aware of the Abbie Rockefeller Mauzé Chair, which had just been founded. And I was the-- I applied. Or somebody applied for me, of course, was, I guess, a more accurate description. And I was offered this visiting position, which I accepted. And it turned into a permanent position very shortly after I arrived.

So that's how I came to MIT, a very circuitous and different path. And it was several years later, in 1973, when I became the permanent holder of that chair. Which was a very, very nice chair. Because it gave me quite a bit of resources and freedom.

But I at any rate, when I first arrived, it's important to mention this, this chair, because the chair had-- one of the conditions about the chair was a scholarship for women. It was for women scholars to promote female scholarship or the scholarship of women scientists and engineers. And in reading the scriptures on the subject, it became clear that I should find out whether there were implications in a broader sense, if I was supposed to do something for the female students on campus.

So at that point, very early on, I made contact with Emily, I suppose, first. And you couldn't meet Emily at that time without meeting Dottie. They were sort of like two twins. So that's how I got to know them both. They each had played quite a different role in implementing women's issues and activities on campus.

And they made it clear to me that not only-- even though there was no stipulation within the chair, that I had to do any particular thing on behalf of women, they certainly would welcome any help I could offer, because there was so much work to be done. And it was far beyond what they could do. And having a third person would both make it fun and increase our effectiveness by a factor of two, something like that.

They said it would be a multiplication factor by the additional ideas that we could bring to bear and discuss. And it really turned out that way, I think. That we energized each other a great deal. And on days when we could be discouraged. We found ways to be encouraged. So our relationship started in 1967 and was very intense, until Emily left. And we will recount to you some of the things that happened during those years.

SEAMANS: Could we go back and talk-- you mentioned, Dottie, about the number of-- that you knew every woman student by name and so forth. What was the women student population that you could do this service to?

BOWE: There are about 100 in a class, at that time, if I remember right. Somewhere in there.

WICK: The class was-- how big was a class?

BOWE: It was about 800, total class, I think.

WICK: Yeah.

BOWE: If I remember--

DRESSELHAUS: How do you like the number 372?

BOWE: Sounds very close to 100 in a class, yeah.

SEAMANS: Total undergraduate.

DRESSELHAUS: That's a number that sticks in my mind for some reason. I don't know what it means.

BOWE: It sounds good, because I'm thinking of 100 in a class. And with the attrition it sounds about right.

SEAMANS: Less than 10%.

BOWE: Yes.

WILLIAMS: How about graduate students? Were you also involved with--

BOWE: Again our door was open and we saw many graduate students. The fact that Emily had been a graduate student, and was a faculty member, and had graduate students of her own, did increase the number.

WICK: If they're in a department that cares about graduate students and if their professor runs a place where there is a home like atmosphere, then they've got a home already. And it wasn't until you want to do something on a more Institute wide basis, or you needed a little outside help.

BOWE: I'm thinking in particular that Emily and Millie had meetings in Cheney Room.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, that was one of the first things that we tried. And the reason-- it had a purpose. That was partly to educate me on the milieu-- that is, the local climate-- and to meet with the students, without anybody else. I just did it more or less myself. I think you came once in a while.

WICK: Once in a while.

DRESSELHAUS: Stop in to check up on me. But this was a personal exchange to educate me about what the issues were, and to try to come to setting some priorities about where to put our time. And trying to improve those.

SEAMANS: Were these regular scheduled meetings? Or were they just sort of--

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, they were. And I guess that most of the kinds of issues that came up were that we had a group of students, it was clear that they were academically very gifted. But they had some difficulty getting through the system. And it wasn't related to academics. It was climate related. And they had, each and every one of them, it seemed had general concerns about-- oh, that they had low aspirations. They had confidence problems. They felt that the professors didn't pay attention to their questions in. Class. It went on and on in this way.

SEAMANS: And these are particularly gender related.

DRESSELHAUS: The issues that were brought up were almost entirely gender related. And this was the only way I could get into these issues, because the classes that I taught, for the most part, were all male. Because my department had essentially almost no women, had a very, very small percentage, much smaller than the Institute as a whole. Electrical engineering was kind of behind some of the other departments in attracting women. Although, I think that they made some effort. They appointed me and they appointed other faculty fairly early on. But where the students had to select the department, it took some time.

BOWE: That group of students was both graduate and undergraduate, who came to talk with you. I think they really-- I mean that was my first--

DRESSELHAUS: We fed them.

BOWE: That's right.

WICK: We gave them cookies and tea.

SEAMANS: Always the--

BOWE: That's right. But Emily knew a lot of students. And we encouraged them to use Cheney Room, which she had used as a student.

WICK: Oh, it was an oasis.

BOWE: It was an Oasis.

WICK: It was the oasis in the '40s.

BOWE: It was a place to get away if things weren't going well. And then having Millie there was just an added-- a plus, because she was there.

SEAMANS: I think this raises a point. To cover this early history, early '40s, '50s, history, what was the living situation for women students?

WICK: Well, when I came, it was the second year that 120 Bay State Road had been opened. And it was a nice house over there in Boston. I think the capacity was 18. And half of us were grad students and half undergrad. And Margaret Alvord, whose husband had taught at Tufts, was the manager. And she was a good, good friend.

Mrs. Compton was very much involved, and Mrs. Sage, in that house. Mrs. McCormick, there was a special fund Mrs. McCormick gave that allowed-- you could hire a taxi on torrential rain days and you didn't have to walk the bridge. Mrs. Alvord used to go to the Friday afternoon Boston Symphony concerts with Mrs. McCormick. And so we didn't see much of Mrs. McCormick, but we knew her presence was there. And of course, she was the class of 1902--

SEAMANS: 4.

WICK: 4. And she-- well, I think Mrs. Alvord, Mrs. Compton, the Killians, they were-- they knew Mrs. McCormick cared about women students.

SEAMANS: But wasn't there a restriction on the number of women's students, based upon the number of housing spaces that were available?

WICK: Yes. I don't know whether in the '40s whether they really cared where you lived. That's why I think there weren't very many women who came as undergrads. And then the other thing, to set the environment, is that we talk about how we tried to know every woman student. And in today's context, that almost sounds like we were babying them.

Well, that wasn't true. We were trying to nourish this little small-- it's like a little plant, surrounded by this big environment, which everyone really-- you know, love is not the right word. But you're stimulated by, it so exciting, just the learning, the information, you know, the wonderful people walking around on the campus that have done all these things in science and technology. But it was just such a small group of women.

And then the Margaret Cheney Room, I remember when I was a grad student-- well, when I first came-- I had gone to Mount Holyoke and graduated in 1943, in a liberal arts college. And we had real good science. And we worked real hard. You come to MIT, and I used to think, oh, those poor undergraduates, this is no way to live. But you get into the atmosphere.

And you become part of a group in your department. And then if you don't-- if the system doesn't break you into little bits, you're going to succeed. But if it does bust you up, that's the sad part. And I could have never have survived it as an undergraduate. I wasn't that professionally driven. I would have probably done something else. I probably wouldn't have major in chemistry.

SEAMANS: Were there women alumnae in the year when you were a graduate student?

WICK: Oh, yeah.

SEAMANS: That were particularly inspirational to you, that came to know? What gave you the force to go on?

WICK: Katharine Hazen, who had also gone to Mount Holyoke, some years before me. Had gotten her master's at MIT. Yeah, there were ladies--

SEAMANS: But these people were taking an active part.

WICK: There were these ladies. They were around. And they paid attention.

BOWE: These were-- Katharine Hazen was a good example of someone also we called on.

WICK: Oh, yeah, and of course her husband was Harold Hazen.

BOWE: He was here as a faculty member and she was knowledgeable about the Institute. And she was not a shrinking violet.

WICK: No.

SEAMANS: Isn't today.

BOWE: No.

WICK: And Margaret Compton, I mean, with all that college-- Worcester, and everything, in the Compton family, she was a wonderful lady right there to give a little moral support or say, well, tut-tut, that's not the right attitude.

WILLIAMS: When you came as a graduate student, then did you find that the department was a home for you in the way that you say?

WICK: Yeah, it was a good gang of people. And I think a lot of it was that it was right after World War II. And there was a special atmosphere around there.

BOWE: Yeah, it was different.

WILLIAMS: How was it-- how was it different?

WICK: Well it was because the war was really a terrible thing to be living through. And you-- while it was going on, you'd go home at night, or you'd read the paper, you didn't know about your best friend, or your brother, or your fiance, or whoever, they weren't alive anymore. It was awful time. And to have all that over, and to have Europe-- the Marshall Plan, and things were beginning to come back together in Europe and around the world. It was a time of--

DRESSELHAUS: But MIT had a family relation--

WICK: Oh, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: We did so much to win the war.

WICK: Absolutely. And so you were so proud to be here.

DRESSELHAUS: And particularly in my department. There was a real bond-- bond-ship between people.

WICK: Oh, yes.

WILLIAMS: They served in the Army together.

WICK: They had the ideas, the radar and--

DRESSELHAUS: Radar was born here.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: And people that weren't in radar, so many of them went to Los Alamos and other places--

WICK: Right, oh, absolutely.

DRESSELHAUS: --to work on the Manhattan Project and so forth. And then they came back here. So they had an inside track.

WICK: Yeah, and a kind of deep wisdom and seasoning. I mean, those people that-- I'll never forget when--

DRESSELHAUS: It was a club.

WICK: --Oppenheimer came and gave a seminar and talked, the look on that guy's face. You just-- you know, he'd lived.

BOWE: There was a group, when I was in metallurgy department, for instance, who never thought they would ever attend a university.

WICK: That's right.

BOWE: People who came with the GI. And super bright, super capable, very committed, but mature, and knowing what they wanted to do. And I think that was a very special group of people that I think you're both referring to.

SEAMANS: But Emily, when we think of the GI Bill, we don't think of women students coming in under that.

WICK: No, the women students didn't come in under the GI Bill. In fact, I don't think too many women grad students-- well, I have a true confession. The reason I came to MIT was it was near the Atlantic Ocean and I liked to sail. And if I was going to work like crazy, I would rather come to a place near the ocean, where I could sail. Otherwise, I would have gone to University of Illinois, where Roger Adams and a lot of very famous organic chemists had been. So I wasn't exactly professionally driven.

SEAMANS: But were you--

WICK: Very reasonable.

SEAMANS: Were there other women students in your grad class?

WICK: Yes, there were other women grad students at that time-- there weren't a lot of us. But I worked in Dr. cope's group, Arthur Cope. He was head of the department for many years. And a very distinguished chemist and very, very fine, nice-- absolute integrity. I learned more about-- nowadays, I read in the newspapers about people accuse scientists of fudging results and this and that.

Dr. Cope made sure-- and it didn't enter our heads that you would ever put in your research notebook something that you didn't observe. I mean, whether it was a big blot of coffee that you spilled or-- but it was wonderful training, just wonderful.

BOWE: Let's follow that a little bit, though, because I think Ken Wadleigh was one of those people.

WICK: Absolutely.

BOWE: Who came at that time in engineering through--

WILLIAMS: The mid century?

BOWE: Yes.

WICK: He's the same age as I. He was in the class of--

SEAMANS: He came in '43.

BOWE: And had been in the service, I believe. And was one of those people who didn't expect to be at a university like this. And I can recall one time, when we were talking about what his expectations were for women students, and he said I want it to be a first class place for women students, just as it is for men. And that's, you know, a goal that you should keep in mind when you're looking at any part of what your-- what he called across the board issues, was that we should be considering it as a-- making it a first class place for women.

SEAMANS: So he became Dean for Student Affairs in 63-- something like that?

WICK: No, before that.

BOWE: It must have been around '59 or '60, because I went down there, I think, in '62.

WICK: He'd been in the mechanical engineering department.

BOWE: I think he had won the Billard Award, or one of the awards for teaching.

WICK: Right.

BOWE: And had come to Dr. Stratton's attention in that route. And again, Dr. Stratton was influential, because he had three daughters, I think. And also had the contact with Mrs. McCormick. And all of this kind of came together at the time. I think Mrs. Stratton, we talked a little bit about her role. And one thing I remember about her-- she was the first president's wife whoever invited non-faculty, non-student women to participate in anything. And she had invited me, and Allison, and a number of other people to come to a discussion group of some kind at the president's house, where we talked about what it was like to be a woman at MIT. And I think that was the first time in my time at the Institute that anybody in that kind of a position had brought it up.

SEAMANS: You think it was a conscious decision on somebody like Ken Wadleigh or Jay Stratton's part to just start increase the number, to make it more affable.

WICK: They cared about excellence in education. And they figured that women were as human as fellows and we all deserved--

DRESSELHAUS: It wasn't my impression that they were after increase of numbers, rather than increase in the quality of life for the students that were there. I believe even when I came, and that was a few years after the time we're talking here, we didn't have expectations of large numbers. And I remember once doing a back of the envelope calculation, thinking that by the time I would retire, we would be up to 20%.

WICK: Yes--

DRESSELHAUS: It that was kind of the-- the outer limit of attainability.

SEAMANS: Why would you even think-- you think there was a drive to increase, to some degree, but within a limit? I mean, why was this 20% sort of?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, in our anecdotal contacts with the women students, it was just a question of interest. The ones that we had basically gave us the impression that it was pretty hard to make your way, even as a student, let alone as a career, in the fields that we featured here at the Institute. So that's one factor. And then it was felt that women just weren't interested. So there was both the bias and the reality of the difficulty in making your way through this place, or any other like institution, and then establishing a career.

WICK: The other thing is--

BOWE: And there was no history of it. The numbers in the profession were so small.

WICK: Since those times in the '60s, the whole curriculum at MIT has changed. I mean look at the required courses. I haven't been close enough to it to be able to speak of it in detail, but there are many more fields that are not just strictly the straight ahead engineering and pure science, that back when I was a grad student, or even in the '60s was the norm.

WILLIAMS: The core has been cut in half in the '60s. And the other thing that's happened is women are heading for specific majors. I mean, chemical engineering is now, or has been, over half women.

WICK: Right.

WILLIAMS: And of course biology has an enormous amount of women. And there's a sort of biomedical combination of bio engineers.

DRESSELHAUS: On the other hand, women have gone over critical mass in every single department, so that's not really the whole story. And in the early work that we were involved with, say just around 1970, we made some conscious efforts at that time. We had-- I guess we'll get to this later, our grant from the Carnegie Foundation.

BOWE: Oh, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: One of the main points about that grant was to set some priorities for women on campus. And I think that we put very strong emphasis to get women in the mainstream of MIT, not out on the peripheries, but have them study the same thing as the men. Because a very simple calculation would show that an institution has some strength in various areas of science and technology, and how do you see that? You see that in terms of the faculty appointments.

And if the women students would go one way, and the men's students would go in another way, that would limit how many women that you could ever have. And it would be a very undesirable situation. So we orchestrated our grant in a way to promote women's participation in fields where they hadn't been before.

WICK: The other thing we should say is that--

DRESSELHAUS: We'll talk about that later. That whole thing is going to come.

WICK: --the the number of women students that were admitted was governed by the number of dormitory--

DRESSELHAUS: That would be a good thing to talk about now.

SEAMANS: Yeah, I think that's a critical thing to cover--

WICK: That's very critical--

SEAMANS: --at this point during the '60s, I believe.

WICK: --because it meant that you filled the spaces that were available for women. There was a residence rule.

SEAMANS: Do we know when that actually came in? Was it existing when you moved to the Dean's Office, Dottie?

BOWE: I think so, yes, there was a residence rule for women students at that time. But that was--

SEAMANS: So sometime in the '50s.

BOWE: --the first tower, McCormick, had been--

WICK: Yeah, that came with the first half of McCormick.

BOWE: I think it came with the--

SEAMANS: So prior to that time--

WILLIAMS: Exactly, just--

WICK: A woman student, unless she lived with her family was required to live on campus. Now, at the time, there was no way-- there wasn't enough space at all for the men's students. I mean, they could never have applied that rule to the men students. But it was part of-- from the point of view of improving--

BOWE: Safety.

WICK: --the quality of life of the women's students. But it did put a limit on the numbers.

BOWE: And it did appear to be biased. And since that-- and remember, we had a group of women students who got very, very upset with this and went to Ken Wadleigh to accuse Emily of being unfair to women students by applying this rule or including this rule. And I've forgotten now what the-- it was resolved without too much difficulty, whatever. But the student brought in a jar of apple butter to Ken. I don't know if you remember that.

WICK: I vaguely remember that.

BOWE: And we said, we didn't get any apple butter, but he--

WILLIAMS: So when McCormick was built, then it made a huge difference, because all of the sudden--

WICK: It made all the difference in the world. Because smart young women who might have been attracted by MIT, but the living conditions were just crummy. And you didn't really have a chance at athletics, or the whole range of activities.

WILLIAMS: I was going to ask about that.

WICK: Why not-- and at the same time, of course, the former men's colleges were going coed. So they could go anywhere, able young women could. And then it came along that the second part of McCormick got built. And that meant the numbers just went right up. This was before any thought of affirmative action. Thinking of goals, and timetables, this is pre-history to that.

WILLIAMS: So how did admissions work at that point?

WICK: Well, I used to read about 250 folders. I'd read all the women's folders. And I'd read some men's too, to get calibrated. To know, well, is this all different. So we were always part of the admissions.

SEAMANS: But women admissions were handled separately?

WICK: Yeah, I think, yes.

BOWE: Up until I think your report.

WICK: Yeah, I think so. And then we recommend, as the dorms here began to go co-ed, student house went co-ed. And we could anticipate that women would be infiltrating the residence system, as well as there'd be McCormick for people who didn't want the co-ed experience. So then the numbers could grow more. And the outside world, the whole culture was changing so rapidly, that just all--

DRESSELHAUS: But what the report established was equal criteria for men and women.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: Which was very important.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And then a corollary of that, if you have equal requirements, why not have the same admission process.

WICK: Right.

DRESSELHAUS: So the same admission process, I think happened before 1970.

WICK: I think so.

DRESSELHAUS: About '68 or '69, something around in there.

BOWE: Actually, there are two things here that probably need to be said. Emily's report has very significant information in it which I think can be used for--

WICK: I had the numbers.

BOWE: -- a number of things. And it indicates what the quality of life for women students was before McCormick and after McCormick. Academics changed and went up. The whole participation in a variety of on-campus things all made this dramatic change the minute you saw this on-campus support system, so to speak.

WICK: And a larger number of women around.

BOWE: The numbers increased, and the whole thing just takes on a very different view of what happens to women students when they were here. The next thing is, though, that Millie then became a member of the committee.

WICK: And you just--

BOWE: And she just picked up from there.

DRESSELHAUS: I was involved with that original report.

WICK: Yes, you were.

BOWE: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And There were some aspects about that that were important. The men-- many men-- felt that the prospect, the potential of good students, was quite limited.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And that the numbers that we had would be limited by the cutoff. We had one cutoff for men, and another cutoff for women. The women had much higher qualification.

WICK: Right, the cutoff.

DRESSELHAUS: And it was felt that once that was equalized, that would be the number. And that was a very small number.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: In actuality. However, what they didn't take into account was that once people became aware that we were interested in having women students, and offering equal access-- and we were one of the few schools that had equal access at the time that we did this-- the numbers shot up far beyond any expectations. And not only that, but the quality of the applicants also went up. And this surprised the men greatly.

WICK: Yeah, they couldn't believe it.

DRESSELHAUS: It surprised me too.

BOWE: You were a member of the committee at that time, the admissions committee.

DRESSELHAUS: Oh, yes.

BOWE: Yeah, you we're able to--

DRESSELHAUS: I was working on that for a few years, a couple of years before our report. And that sort of led-- I think that we were working together on this led to courage to come up with this report.

WICK: I think I did one, and then as I left, you and Paula Stone, and a whole bunch of people, worked on--

DRESSELHAUS: That was a different report.

WICK: Yeah, right.

DRESSELHAUS: That was a different report. That report wasn't about-- the original admissions report, we did.

WICK: Yeah, right. okay.

DRESSELHAUS: We did that one.

WILLIAMS: Do you remember the date of the one your talking about?

WICK: 1970--

DRESSELHAUS: 1968.

WICK: Really?

BOWE: That was the first one, yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: The first report. And the second report with all these other people was 1970.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: And that started because of the demise of your office, Emily.

WICK: Yeah, that's right.

DRESSELHAUS: That what brought it about. And there were two things that happened as a result of the demise of your office, that happened very abruptly. Remember, one day it was and the next right it wasn't?

WICK: The demise.

BOWE: That's a good word for it.

DRESSELHAUS: Maybe you could explain what happened about that.

BOWE: I don't know we know, do we?

WICK: No, I knew that I-- I knew that I needed to go back-- if I wanted to have any credibility as a scientist, I had to get back there and do something. Then, no sooner than I got back to the department, then Mount Holyoke came, wondering if I would be interested in being the dean of the faculty. And I never thought I'd ever leave MIT. In fact, I told the faculty member on the search committee, who called me, and was an old friend of mine-- I said, oh, Tibby, forget it. I live where I want to live and I love it here, don't bother me.

Well, then, I sat down again, and I thought-- in all my experience at MIT, and during the Vietnam troubles and the divestment of the Draper Lab, because of my half-time position as dean, got me invited to meetings-- kind of across campus meetings, where you'd learn about what was going on, and how people like, oh gosh, Jerry Wiesner and Paul Gray, and all the people who had the whole burden of the Institute on them, were dealing with this. And I had become very interested in an educational institutions and how they worked. And I'd also become very much interested in women's education.

So I said to the search committee person-- I called her back. I said, I don't want the job, but if you folks want to waste your time, I'd love to come out and find out how Mount Holyoke works. So I went out. Yeah, it was fascinating. And I never expected I'd be the candidate. But then when I ended up being the candidate, in Mr. David Truman was the president-- I mean, it was a challenge I was ready for. And a smaller institution on a scale that you can encompass. And also, I liked the fact that there were classics departments and there were other kinds of departments. I still loved MIT, but you never know what's going to happen.

WILLIAMS: I'm just laughing, because this story is very similar to my being asked. I said to the search committee for the dean, I'm not interested, but I want to tell you a few things.

SEAMANS: A serious mistake. You've sort of raised something, which I had been thinking of. And this is the role of the horse late '60s in this whole student-- the student unrest, as I guess you euphemistically call it today. Did that make the role of increasing women's students more easier? Or did it-- I mean you think of so many things that happened during that time. UROP started, and IAP. A lot of things changed MIT's outlook considerably.

WICK: Well, IAP led to the Women's Forum, led to all kinds of women's activity.

BOWE: I think Ken started what he called gender days, when students could meet, I think usually at lunchtime in the student center. And bring to his agenda topics that they felt needed to be addressed or needed to be talked about. Or he would put an end to it right there, which he had a way of doing. But many really useful kinds of things came out of that for discussion, with students, with faculty.

DRESSELHAUS: I think we have to say that students were much more active. I'd been at the Institute now for a long time as a faculty member. And that was the one time when the students were most interactive with everybody.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And they felt that they were on an equal basis with each and every one of us, including the president.

WICK: Yes, yes, even more equal.

DRESSELHAUS: And so it was actually a rather good time to make changes. But most of the changes on the women's issues came about with the demise of your office, I think, Emily. I really think that. Because students felt--

WICK: Is that good or bad?

DRESSELHAUS: At the time we didn't-- my career has certainly been very much like this, and I don't know about the rest of you, but adverse things always happen.

WICK: Sure.

DRESSELHAUS: But adverse things often lead to a reexamination. And through the reexamination, good things happen.

WICK: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: I would say that the Women's Forum and the IAP activities, and many of the things that we did at that period, were directly connected with reexamination. And we were told that the way women's affairs were handled at MIT would be different in the future than they had been in the past. Well, if they're different, and everybody's on an equal basis, we should all get together and talk about it.

WICK: Sure.

DRESSELHAUS: So that's why we had that study. So that's the 1970 study. And you have a copy of that. It's amazing that you still have a copy of that.

WICK: I still have another one--

BOWE: Pre word processor.

DRESSELHAUS: That's history.

SEAMANS: What's the title?

BOWE: Well, that may not be the one you're talking about.

WICK: This may be a different one.

DRESSELHAUS: The 1970 study.

BOWE: This is the admissions study.

WICK: This is a proposal for new policies for admissions.

BOWE: The one you're talking about is--

DRESSELHAUS: Is a different study.

WICK: Yeah, I might have it at home.

DRESSELHAUS: Somebody has it around. Dottie used to be our archivist during those years.

WICK: I've got all kinds.

DRESSELHAUS: She used to do all the records and implementation. She was the only organized person. At least, I wasn't organized in this area. I had enough to do keeping my research stuff going.

WILLIAMS: So the ending of your office, was this a conscious effort to, should I say, mainstream women's issues?

WICK: I think the fact that I decided I should go back and do science kind of led to people thinking about, well, what should be done next.

BOWE: On the other hand, there was a change of deans that generated that, that review into what we were doing.

WICK: Also we had become really overburdened with pre medical advice.

BOWE: We were doing pre med at the same time.

WICK: It was wonderful to know all those wonderful young folks. But it really--

BOWE: It was a terrific amount of work.

WICK: And that was the time when the boom for going into medical school, was just burgeoning. And the Harvard--MIT--

DRESSELHAUS: Program was beginning.

WICK: Was beginning. And so we just had more than we could handle.

DRESSELHAUS: And women started getting interested in medicine at that time. Before that time, there were very few.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: So it was a big thing. But after Emily stepped down-- I'll give you my side of that story. I don't know if it's the same as your side.

WICK: I don't know.

DRESSELHAUS: When you stepped down, that was a conscious decision that you made. But the question was what next, what should happen next. And the students had one opinion. They thought things were going just beautifully the way they had been going. They didn't want to see a change. Okay, maybe Emily had enough of this, but there'd be somebody else taking Emily's place. And the new dean, Nyhart, his idea was that we wouldn't have another person with the same duties as Emily. Now he had made that known to us.

And so I was the recipient of many unhappy women students. And Dottie was probably the recipient of many more than I had. But we thought we should have some kind of strategy meeting. And the second thing that we thought we should do is to try to have some alternate methodology to give support to women that felt that they needed additional support. And the first year of IAP just happened, coincidentally, at exactly the same time as your office disappeared.

WICK: It was.

DRESSELHAUS: It was identical.

WICK: Yes, it was.

DRESSELHAUS: And it was even sort of plus or minus a month.

WICK: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I decided just about that time.

DRESSELHAUS: So it was amazingly coincidental what happened. So we put out an ad in that first bulletin for IAP that we would have kind of a workshop activity during that very first IAP, as a kind of a support group for women. It was supposed to be students. And so we advertised this in the IAP bulletin. Emily has a copy of the advertisement.

WICK: Not the ad, its notes taken at Women's Forum meetings, IAP, 1972. We didn't expect anybody would come.

WILLIAMS: This became the Women's Forum.

DRESSELHAUS: Yes.

WICK: Yeah, in the Cheney Room. At least 75 and maybe up to 100 folks were there-- staff, students.

DRESSELHAUS: The place, you couldn't admit another person. It was standing room and it was incredibly crowded. They couldn't get in through the doors. Because we made a mistake that we didn't put students, we just put women. And so all kind of women showed up.

BOWE: That was a good mistake.

DRESSELHAUS: And was that told us-- yeah, that was a great mistake that we made. That was the best mistake for MIT.

WICK: --we ever made.

DRESSELHAUS: Great mistake. It had great repercussions. Because we got the message that we needed-- as women faculty, we had to take the leadership for women at MIT, not only women students. And that was a very important observation that we had missed up to that point.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: Because that there was nobody else that's listened to-- there is nobody else that's listened to as a faculty member here.

WICK: I don't think that if you and I had gone separately to other women faculty, we wouldn't have had the success. In the first place, we didn't probably know them, the other women faculty particularly well. But when we were all in this room, with all these women, it just was clear.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, we had a pretty good inkling about the women faculty, because I remember with that from the period that I came, until you finished your term of office, we used to meet over in Ashdown House for lunch. Do you remember those?

WICK: That's right, we did.

DRESSELHAUS: And we had one table. And we would talk about priorities for women at MIT. I remember those very well.

WICK: I don't remember them well.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, you have you a zillion meetings and I had very few.

WICK: We had a different-- you have a better mind--

BOWE: Let me go back a bit, because your mistake wasn't quite a mistake. Just before that first forum meeting, it was advertised in the IAP people bulletin, and a contingent of women employees came into the office.

WICK: Talked to you.

BOWE: And talked to me, and said, can we come to this meeting. We're finding things at MIT not as good as they should be for employees as well as maybe students. And can we just come and listen. We won't be disruptive. We'll just-- and that's, I think why-- and I said yes, come.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, you thought it was going to be five people.

BOWE: I thought there would be-- I thought there'd be five or 10 students there. And it turned out to be--

SEAMANS: These were administrative staff, secretaries--

BOWE: These were, yeah.

SEAMANS: Across the board.

BOWE: Across the board. In fact, some on the building five corridor were the ones who had said, look, there are some issues that we'd like to raise, and we think if we talk with other women, it may be helpful, both for us and for other women to see that, see what's going on. So they passed the word. And I think that's how so many women showed up. You can blame that-- blame that on me. But it really was, it was a remarkable meeting.

WICK: It was exciting just to see all those women.

DRESSELHAUS: I would say, though, the whole series of meetings that we had that month were very exciting to me--

WICK: And it continued.

DRESSELHAUS: --because I got the message of what I had missed all this time and what was necessary. And we have to also point out that Jerry Wiesner was very, very supportive of our activities. They were really behind us.

WICK: Absolutely.

DRESSELHAUS: Because I remember-- I remember this-- and I often say this in public, actually, so I might as well own up to this. Because I know when it happened. And it happened in connection-- in conjunction with the Women's Forum and some proposals that came after that. So that's January of 1970, isn't it? I think--

WICK: '72.

DRESSELHAUS: 72. Well, it's that very first IAP.

WICK: Yep.

DRESSELHAUS: And I guess the paper that we put together, the very first draft, was not quite up to Jerry's standards. And I owe to him that he took me aside and gave me some counseling on how to do a proposal. And I never failed after that. That was the one and only time. He was my first and severest mentor on science policy. Because that's what I call this whole thing.

WICK: Oh, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: It's a different part of my career.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And what he said was you have to treat science policy and service at MIT, and elsewhere in the country, in the same way you treat your own research. And you have to have a level of excellence.

WICK: Absolutely.

DRESSELHAUS: And you have to think through what are the purposes and to fashion any proposal and document that you issue with the same kind of excellence as is expected of your MIT scholarly work. And that stayed with me. That was terrific advice.

WICK: What a wonderful, wonderful, man. And Mrs. Wiesner--

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah.

BOWE: She never missed a meeting.

DRESSELHAUS: She always came and she took notes.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: She was so always available for staff work. We used to do these studies. And she would take her part, along with all the other committee members. And called students individually, one on one. And we used to do telephone quizzes-- questionnaires.

BOWE: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: Remember?

BOWE: The telephone survey.

SEAMANS: There were a couple surveys done.

DRESSELHAUS: Housing and so forth. And she was one of the-- I don't know if you know that-- but she was one of the members that called the students. And she was one of the very best people that we ever had in doing those calls. She was a terrific staff member.

SEAMANS: Exactly during this time, from '71 to '73, work was being done on the Women's Centennial, the Centennial of Ellen Swallow.

CREW: We're going to change tapes.

SEAMANS: Okay.

BOWE: Good.

CREW: Let's take a break.

SEAMANS: Yeah, let's take a break.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah

SEAMANS: I'm Warren Seamans, former Director of the MIT Museum. We're here today to talk about the last 50 years of the women's history at MIT. With me is Ros Williams.

WILLIAMS: I'm the Undergraduate Dean, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs, since 1995.

SEAMANS: I'd like to pick up with the Women's Centennial in '73. At that point, all these other things seemed to be happening simultaneously. And working with the AMITA, we put together an amazing exhibit on the history of women up to that point at MIT. We lined the corridors in June of '73 with stories of the fascinating and phenomenal things that had been done by women alumni. And did this-- were you aware of this from the Dean's Office? Did this have any affect on the overall thing?

BOWE: I can remember the students being very impressed with the-- and coming into the office, and saying did we know certain students or did we-- but I also remember the story that some students were very impressed with Florence Luscomb and they wanted to locate her. So they went-- I'm not sure where they started, maybe the alumni office, but eventually found her living in Central Square. And I think a rooming house of some kind.

SEAMANS: A commune.

BOWE: But they were determined that they wanted to invite her to have dinner with them and talk with her, because they thought she had done such interesting things. So they asked a young man at the desk, or at the front, of Florence Luscomb lived there. And he said, yes. And he hollered up the stairs, "Hey, Flossie, there's some girls here who want to talk with you." And she was about 90 years old, I think at the time.

SEAMANS: She was class of 1909.

BOWE: Right.

SEAMANS: So this would have been--

BOWE: And she came down the stairs on the double and went and visited with these students. And had a marvelous time, and in fact, stayed connected to them for quite a long time. But I think the other thing that came out in that display, particularly, is not just these pictures then, but it made almost a personality out of many of these people that you depicted there. And I think too that Mrs. McCormick comes through as really an exceptional woman. I think the fact that she encouraged the birth control research, and that she was so active in the suffragette movement. I mean, after all, two things that are important to women--

DRESSELHAUS: Today.

BOWE: --today, were being able to vote, and being able to have some control over their lives. And I think that really left an impression. So whatever, from my perspective, at the time, that students came in to talk to me about, those were two people that I think were shown in that particular exhibit. And they came to life for the students through that.

WICK: That's right. Mrs. McCormick, some of the students would see every know and then, but she was just a little lady with a black hat. And it was hard to believe that this was the lady that did all these things. And isn't there a marvelous portrait of her in--

BOWE: In McCormick, yeah, I think so, there was.

WICK: There's a hat--

SEAMANS: There's one actually in--

WICK: It looks like Sargent or somebody painted it. I'm not sure he did, but you know, really, what a lady she was.

SEAMANS: There are actually two portraits. There's on in McCormick Hall. But there's a wonderful one in what I call the President's Auxiliary Office, Kathryn Willmore's office, as you go from the President's Office, directly across, Katharine has--

WICK: She was some lady.

SEAMANS: Yes.

BOWE: I think what I wanted to really-- is to show the enthusiasm that our students had for getting to know students who'd been here before them, and had gone through many of the things, perhaps, that they'd gone through, and really they were searching for stories and information about these people.

WICK: It was an easy way to capsulize the history of women here, a very effective way. That was just the time I was leaving to go up to Mount Holyoke. So it was kind of just a round up of--

WILLIAMS: Was there a sort of mixed message then, if your office was closing down, and this was perceived as a crisis, at the very time that you're celebrating this centennial. It sounds like a very--

BOWE: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: Crisis turned into good things.

WILLIAMS: But you don't know it at the time of the crisis.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, one point we should make about Mrs. McCormick, that's really important, I think, for women at MIT, it is often said that admitting women is a negative for fundraising, right? Because women don't have the resources and they're not as good donors as alumni. Now, I heard that a lot in the '60s. Before we had too many women at MIT, one of the arguments against admitting more women was it was going to do something terrible to our-- it was very detrimental to fundraising. But the truth of the matter is that of the alumni up to that point, Katharine McCormick gave more money than anybody else.

SEAMANS: To date.

DRESSELHAUS: Still to date?

SEAMANS: I think so.

WILLIAMS: I wonder what were some of the other arguments against increasing the number of women students at MIT. Because now, in 1997, it looks like sort of inevitability, right? This is the way history was, of course, marching. But I doubt if it felt that way in the '60s.

DRESSELHAUS: I'd take that one on. I think it was a question of off capacity to do the work. At the time that I came in, we had a bimodal distribution. We had women students that were truly superb . And then we had another bunch that were not-- below average, okay, let's call it that. And on the basis of the admissions process, there was no reason that they should be below average, because they were admitted with high capabilities.

And I would say, certainly people in my department, and we're sort of mainstream MIT, I think that there was a disbelief that women could do the work here. They felt that as high school students, when things weren't all that competitive, women were studious, and they were motivated, and so forth, diligent, and they would be fine. But put them in a college environment, and all the demands of the MIT undergraduate program, that they didn't have it to make it here.

And so the demonstration was that we had women around for 100 years. And they were substandard, based on the admissions criteria. So we have to lower the admissions criteria to get more women. I mean, that was the whole thing, and then they would flunk out of this place. So I believe that the fundraising was only part of it. The other part was there was disbelief that they could make it here. And I think that what, on my side of it, was that we didn't give-- we didn't have an experiment.

This is after you left. In 1974, you weren't here anymore. And I was asked to write a paper for the IEEE Education Journal. They asked me write a paper-- what to write a paper about? I didn't really know anything about-- there was anything particular about educating women in engineering. So I came up with a prediction about critical mass-- what was critical mass and why it was important.

So the premise was that women today weren't doing so well in engineering because they were below critical mass and they didn't have the same educational opportunities. Even though they were admitted to a university, they would be singled out. They'd sit in and a seat, and around them were a whole bunch of holes.

WICK: Yeah, right.

DRESSELHAUS: You remember how that was when we were teaching, and they had one girl in the class. And there was just no other student next to her. It was like poison or some kind of--

WICK: She's a dandelion. Weed killer.

DRESSELHAUS: And when she tried to ask a question, it wasn't taken seriously. We heard that time and time again from the women students, that to participate in class was difficult. And it was difficult because the professor didn't take them seriously, and because their colleagues, the cohorts, the same age, the other students, there was a barrier. And women didn't want to seem stupid, so they didn't want to ask a question that might seem stupid. You can't learn science if you won't ask a question that was on your mind. It didn't matter if it seemed stupid or not. The most important questions often do seem stupid.

SEAMANS: Would you define the critical mass to some degree?

DRESSELHAUS: Yes, well at that time, my formula for evaluating critical mass was, I took the size of a class, which is about 20 students-- I don't know if that's the right number, but 15 to 20 students. And I figured that you need more than one woman student in the class. That if there was zero or one, then she wouldn't participate in the activities on an equal basis.

And it wasn't before there were two in the class that there was a chance that she would ask a question. So I used that as the critical mass. And you worked that out, simple statistics, that gives you 15%. And what I have had the pleasure of watching over the years, and as the various departments increase their numbers of women students, and the numbers got up to 15%, there was a change in the performance.

And when we got close to 15%, the bimodal distribution that we were so used to, when you were in the Dean's Office, disappeared. And the distribution became similar to the distribution of all the students. But of course, at the time that I came up with this supposition, we didn't know. And this work is actually often quoted in the education of women students, let alone engineers.

SEAMANS: This critical mass thing, we have a wonderful photo of 26100, when it became the primary physics lecture hall, with two women students, one of whom is Sheila Widnall, by the way.

WICK: Oh, really.

SEAMANS: And sitting in this mass of 300 people.

DRESSELHAUS: And there were holes around them?

SEAMANS: Well, sort of. But I mean, they were all crowded, the professor forced them all forward. So they're not sort of a circle around them, but at least there were two white shirts. The rest of them all have coats and ties on.

DRESSELHAUS: I know my own teaching here, in the early years, until maybe 1975, or maybe even beyond that, I used to see this circle of empty seats around the women students. I saw that myself.

SEAMANS: I'll look at it. I'm sure there probably is--

BOWE: There are two areas that might respond to that question, though. Discussions that I remember sitting in on. Emily never went to a meeting without being absolutely so well prepared that there was no--

WICK: Yeah, don't be stupid.

BOWE: No, you had to be, because you just never knew what kind of question was going to come up.

WICK: Well, that's true.

BOWE: So she was always well-prepared. And when she presented this report that we just talked about on admission policy to the, I think it was Faculty Council, the room was very crowded. And I was sitting in the back row. And I had taken along a woman student with me, just for support and because I thought she'd be interested. But I dragged her along. Anyway, there are two questions came up. And one of them was, if we had met all these women students, and they're successful, and they graduate from here, what will they do when they leave?

WICK: What did I say?

BOWE: And you said, what do the men students do. And a dead silence fell in the room, because nobody knows what the men students do either. So I thought it was the only way to answer that question. I mean, we had a lot of data to indicate what the women students do. But our numbers were small. And even though we said, of the 100 in the last class, 80 went to graduate school, and so forth, it wasn't really what they were looking for.

But I thought that was a question-- an answer that needed to be said. Because I don't think anyone really knows where all our male students end up and whether they end up using the education that they had. And the other question that came up was of this class size and displacement. If we admit 100 more women students, will we have to reduce the number of male students. And that discussion, there's no answer to it. And you have to look. And I think, in fact, the discussion went on for several years. And I think finally they did increase the size, the class size to 1,000.

WILLIAMS: But modestly.

BOWE: But slowly and modestly, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, the increase in the women, numbers of women was small at first.

BOWE: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: So that it didn't disturb the balance. But look what's happened.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

BOWE: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: In the interim, it's not a small perturbation anymore.

WICK: No.

BOWE: But I think it probably was a good decision, the way it was done, to do it in that incremental way, so that you weren't--

DRESSELHAUS: It was the only way to go, because we didn't know ourselves what would happen.

BOWE: No.

DRESSELHAUS: In all fairness.

WICK: That's right.

WILLIAMS: I'm sure the hidden question in the first question was, aren't the female students going to get married?

WICK: That's right, that's what they were looking, I mean, clearly.

DRESSELHAUS: It's worse than that. There were very few career opportunities at that time for women.

WICK: Yes, it was very--

DRESSELHAUS: In science and engineering. And it was bad enough in the universities, but to get a good position was a lot more difficult. But I think that what we could do if we want to know how well they did is to look back what our graduates have done.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And that is the most amazing story. We know about the big successes, because they're prominent in the newspapers and they're national leaders, and they were our students, and so many of them.

WICK: Yes, that's right.

DRESSELHAUS: And the other thing is that when you go to a professional society, and you look at the women speakers that they have, and the people that are asking intelligent questions in the audience, and I look back, and I remember this was in the class of this, and this one was in my class of that.

WICK: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: And the percentage of people that are making their mark, that are our former students is large.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: So that tells us that we did something right. And I would like to mention one other data point, is recently we're starting a campaign to raise funds for a new building, CS building, Computer Science building. And so we go back and look at our alumni. And of course, alumni includes women nowadays. And how many women CEOs and vice presidents of this and that, the number is staggering. I had no idea that we had so many of our women students as entrepreneurs and running their own businesses, and this and that. We could never have predicted that at he time.

SEAMANS: Just backing up what Millie has just said, next year the 125th anniversary of Ellen Swallow's graduation.

DRESSELHAUS: We should look at some of those statistics, and you wouldn't believe what you see.

SEAMANS: But as part of that, we asked the Alumni Association, the Technology Day Committee asked the Alumni Association to pull out a list of all women CEOs and those with a professor or profer, professor in their title. It's a volume that thick. It's a staggering number of people that are-- and this is only those two categories. So I mean, it was just very-- just totally unbelievable. Because it's happened in a sense very gradually. And yet, obviously, it's very much a force right now.

DRESSELHAUS: I think it was a surprise to us.

BOWE: Sure.

WILLIAMS: If you go back to those pivotal years, and there clearly is a hinge there.

BOWE: Yes.

WILLIAMS: I mean something happened. You've just enumerated a lot of reasons why many people-- students, alumni, faculty might not have wanted to see MIT significantly increase the number of women. So who were the people who wanted to see this happen, or the allies? You've said you didn't feel isolated, or alone, or particularly embattled. So how were you helped by people in the MIT administration or faculty?

WICK: Well, I always felt that the whoever was the president, from Killian, and Stratton, through, they and the upper administration, they held you to high standards--

BOWE: That's right.

WICK: --and severe questions. But I never felt that, in principle, they were against this happening. It was a matter of excellence, quality, doing it right.

BOWE: I think we were carrying a banner to do it. But I never felt that we were shut off from--

WICK: No, never.

BOWE: We always were allowed to-- as I said, you were invited to--

DRESSELHAUS: I think that facts were strongly on our side.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: Because the admissions take that particular case. We were admitting men and women by different standards. And our faculty thought that was repugnant.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: We should have the same standards. So they were on our side. It made it easy.

BOWE: Who was the director of the-- the head of the Committee on Admissions from the Aero Department. I'm terrible with names today. But I know he called me one day and said, I'd like to try a social experiment and see how the women-- how we could admit more women, and just kind of see how that would work. And so he asked me for some data. And he was really the committee chair at the time.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah.

BOWE: Do you know who I'm talking about?

DRESSELHAUS: I know who you mean. And I forget his name. He's still on the faculty now.

BOWE: Yes, he is.

DRESSELHAUS: And if I go through the AeroAstro list, I can easily identify him for you.

BOWE: It will come to me, but he really was-- he had this open kind of-- he had heard some facts. He wanted to get some more. And he considered this to be a very, as I said, social experiment that he wanted-- an engineering experiment, almost. He set it up that way. And I think was one of those, as you asked about allies, I think I always considered him to be one.

DRESSELHAUS: He was proactive on our parts.

BOWE: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: There were a number of people that were proactive.

WICK: Well, the other thing about the MIT faculty is that, with so many-- I don't mean to slam the humanities people, but most of the faculty are fact--

DRESSELHAUS: Fact oriented.

WICK: Evidence oriented.

DRESSELHAUS: Yes.

WICK: And if you can bring up-- if you can say, look, look at it yourself. What conclusion do you come to? They look at data and--

DRESSELHAUS: And we were very careful about our reports.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: Our reports have lots of statistics, lots of data.

BOWE: We were fortunate that you too-- one a scientist, one an engineer, could speak the same language.

DRESSELHAUS: We spoke the same language as the men.

BOWE: That's right, but there was not a whole lot of social kind of stuff.

WICK: No, there wasn't.

BOWE: There was never a whole lot of how many came in for counseling and how many came in for this problem or that.

WICK: It was education.

BOWE: It was always educationally based, yes.

SEAMANS: I think it's proper to point out these two trailblazers here. We have Emily, who is the first person who sort of came up through the ranks to gain tenure at MIT. And the first person to be appointed professor in the entire school of engineering.

DRESSELHAUS: First tenured member. Actually, Sheila Widnall preceded me, but I got tenure before she did. I came as a full professor.

WICK: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: And she came through the ranks.

SEAMANS: I think that says a lot, in the sense that these were then the people who pushed the whole ball further and opened the door.

WICK: We were part of the whole culture.

BOWE: Well, they had, yeah, they had credibility.

WICK: We liked the place and enjoyed the environment. We were stimulated by all the intellectual activity and fun, as well.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, we liked the competition.

BOWE: And the challenge.

DRESSELHAUS: And the intensity of the place.

WICK: Oh, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: I always thought that was a great thing about MIT.

BOWE: But that's what it took. Any lesser people-- group would not have been able to--

DRESSELHAUS: We did the same thing with the women that we did with the guys. Academic excellence and leadership, I think these are the two things that we emphasized. And I'd say we did rather well. I think that we got leadership in our women, which was very difficult.

BOWE: Yes.

WICK: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: To do academic excellence was relatively easy, because they were expecting that when they came here. But leadership is not something they were expecting to do when they came here. But they left with it, one way or another.

SEAMANS: I think we could mention a few of those people. We talked earlier about, not during one of these sessions, but about Maria [? Kivacel ?] and Scotty Margaret MacVicar. It'd be nice to get some recollections of those people.

WICK: Dottie, you tell about them, because you knew them best when they were undergrads.

DRESSELHAUS: You spent the most time with them in a way.

BOWE: I spent a lot of time with them. I think of Paula Stone, who you knew very well.

DRESSELHAUS: Paula Stone, yes, I remember her.

BOWE: Civil engineering, and when she lived in Senior House, and I would go over and eat lunch with her in her room, well, that was co-ed living, and I got to see co-ed living in its--

DRESSELHAUS: Reality

BOWE: Reality, right.

WICK: Somewhat messy.

SEAMANS: Harsh extreme.

BOWE: Right, right. But received her PhD and went on to-- as a matter of fact, I think outstanding water resource in, I think, in Washington, I believe she is now. I have a Christmas card from her now and then. But Margaret MacVicar, of course, who started out being quite social, and sailing, and doing all the fun things, and then sort of said, you know, hey, there's a lot more here to be done. And just went ahead and did it.

SEAMANS: Let's go into a little bit of her career. I think that's interesting, because of her long term, however shortened, career here.

BOWE: Yeah. Well, as I said, she started out being active in sailing and doing all the things that first year women students were doing at the time. And then, all of a sudden, the whole world opened up for her. This was a place where she could be Margaret MacVicar and not play a role that I think she was concerned about when she first came.

So she did, I mean, she just got into her academics. And she got into opening up connections. Europe is a good example, where she felt that there was just so much to be learned if you could connect up with a lab, and work there, and be part of what was going on. She was president of the dormitory when it first opened, when McCormick first opened.

And I remember her coming into the office and asking me to read her acceptance speech from Mrs. McCormick. Which was it was hard to believe that a student had written this. It was just so right to the point how important it was for the women students to have this dormitory, how much it meant to them. And then, of course, she went on to do graduate work and on to Cambridge. I always remember her.

To show what kind of a person she was-- she told me the story about going to Cambridge. And how, when she came back, she told me the story that, while she was there, you remember Margaret kind of swung along and went anywhere she wanted to and did most anything she really wanted to learn about. But she walked across the lawn at Cambridge, a lawn which people were not supposed to walk across, at least students weren't supposed to walk across. And she didn't know that.

So she went-- she was called to her tutor's office to explain why she walked across this particular part of the green. And so she said, well, she had to get from one place to the other. I mean, that was the shortest way and that's the way she went. And she was told that that was not the way to go and that students weren't allowed to do that. So she decided that she should call students together and stop this nonsense about where you could walk on the Cambridge campus.

However, I have a feeling that it was not successful. In fact, when she left Cambridge, students who are still not allowed to walk across that lawn. But it was very typical of the way Margaret-- if there was something that she didn't see any purpose for doing, then it ought to be challenged. And she did that.

DRESSELHAUS: She was a product of the late '60s and Vietnam era and everything. And students were just questioning authority. She was part of that era.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And that was one of her great strengths.

BOWE: That's right, absolutely, absolutely.

WILLIAMS: She was classes '65, but Europe started early '70s.

BOWE: That was after she came back.

WILLIAMS: I know, but still, amazingly short time.

BOWE: That's right, when she had something to do, she set about doing it.

DRESSELHAUS: She's very methodical and organized.

WICK: And she knew people. I mean, she--

BOWE: She would march into Paul Gray's office, when Paul was in the Dean's Office, and say I want to do this. And she had it all laid out. And what could he say?

WICK: Because when I was in the Dean's Office, Paul Gray was the Dean for the freshman class. So he was all part of the Dean of Students team.

DRESSELHAUS: Margaret was totally fearless.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And she was appreciated much more so in later life and much more so on the outside than the inside. It took a long time before the MIT community appreciated her.

BOWE: That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: And the people that were closest to her in her department gave her the most trouble.

BOWE: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And their expectations of an academic was research and teaching. And Margaret was a leader. That was her focus.

BOWE: Walter Rosenbluth was really very fond of Margaret. And in fact, understood--

DRESSELHAUS: But he was another visionary.

BOWE: That's right, exactly. He was the same kind of person.

DRESSELHAUS: He was sort of cut out of the same cloth as--

BOWE: He understood her. And he could see what she was trying to accomplish.

DRESSELHAUS: But her colleagues that were close to her had much more difficulty in seeing the big picture about her.

BOWE: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: Well, she's a real bridge figure, because there's certainly people in the Dean's Office today who worked with her closely and revere her.

WICK: Oh, yes.

WILLIAMS: She really kind of connects that era with, really, with the present.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, she's the one that did UROP not only at MIT, but the whole country.

WICK: Right, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: This is where it all started. And we're thankful that it's started here.

WICK: Absolutely.

DRESSELHAUS: Because it's always worked the best here. And we have a few competitors here and there.

BOWE: But it didn't matter where Margaret's office was or any of what she called trivial things. The point was to get to the goal that she had set to accomplish. And none of these other things were important. And I've often admired her for being able to do that. She just cut away all the things that didn't need to be--

WILLIAMS: It doesn't make for an easy life.

BOWE: That's right.

SEAMANS: It certainly didn't in her case.

BOWE: Yes, that's right, exactly, exactly. But we've had many other outstanding women.

SEAMANS: We talked about Shirley Jackson a bit earlier.

BOWE: Yes, Shirley, yes.

SEAMANS: Another one who you would have known in those early days. It must have been fascinating to meet that person as an undergraduate here.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, I guess you know her better than I did as an undergraduate.

BOWE: As an undergraduate, yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: She took a few courses with me, so I had the pleasure of teaching her. I think you had much more social interaction with her.

BOWE: During her undergraduate years, yes.

WICK: She dropped in to see you often--

BOWE: Almost every day, yeah.

WICK: Just about every day.

BOWE: Yeah.

WICK: Part of the luck of the office was, it was sort of on the natural pathway from McCormick to wherever you were going. You just came in the side building.

WILLIAMS: Where was it?

WICK: Just down the hall from--

BOWE: 5106.

WICK: Yeah, 5016. So they could just duck in the Naval architecture doorway, where the anchors are. And walk down the hall and talk.

SEAMANS: That was a perfect location.

BOWE: It was. And there were times when you'd see someone go by with their head down, clearly unhappy. And you could run out and walk the rest of the way with them.

WILLIAMS: When did Shirley graduate? What's her era?

WICK: Well, she and Margaret were about the same, whatever year that was.

BOWE: I guess we must have been in the same-- well, I guess Margaret might have been a year or two ahead of her, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: I think she was about the same time as Aviva Brecher.

WICK: Yes, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And they were great friends. They were both in physics.

BOWE: Yes. And

DRESSELHAUS: And they were good support for each other.

WILLIAMS: Were the women students--

DRESSELHAUS: So that would be about 19-- when I first came, they both took classes from me. And I thing Aviva was still an undergraduate. She must have been about a senior. And she was taking graduate courses. She was terrific.

BOWE: Yeah, outstanding.

DRESSELHAUS: And a lot of leadership.

WICK: I don't know whether we could say-- Shirley came in to celebrate when she really passed-- she really hit some big exam. I don't know whether it was physics and math, but she came in to celebrate, lit up a cigar.

WILLIAMS: Those were the days.

WICK: We all kind of sat around on the couch, and--

BOWE: There were times, for instance, when a faculty member would call and say, I have a woman student who can't take an exam. The tension is too great in this room with all the-- she was maybe the only woman student in the class. Usually, that was the case.

DRESSELHAUS: I had one like that.

BOWE: And I would say, with your permission, can she take the exam in my office? And so that often happened. We had a little office that wasn't used much, or maybe some days Emily wasn't going to be in the office. She'd be in the department. And I would say, with your permission, she can take the exam here. And that often happened. A student would-- a faculty member would bring the-- and I'd proctor it, so to speak. They'd sit in the inner office and take the exam. And there were, I think, times when that helped.

WILLIAMS: Was it the female student who was-- I mean, was it the men who didn't want to-- who were the source of the tension? Or the woman student? I don't quite understand where the request came from?

BOWE: I'm not sure. I think it was, at the time, the student might have just been feeling the pressure. I don't think that was--

WILLIAMS: Did the women students do a lot of support for each other?

DRESSELHAUS: Yes, a tremendous-- it was unbelievable. And they still do. That hasn't changed. That's been our tradition.

BOWE: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: Shirley Jackson was an unusual case, because she was the oldest, or the most senior, I think, of the black students here in physics, or close to the most senior. And she organized the younger ones under her. And she did the mentoring and the tutoring. And she got a whole cadre, a whole generation of black students through. They wouldn't have passed without her. And they look up to her like almost like a demigod.

SEAMANS: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: She has a real special place in our history.

WICK: Oh, she does.

BOWE: Definitely.

WICK: Still, I mean, it's still going on. I feel good when I think of Sheila Widnall there, running the Air Force, and--

BOWE: I do too.

WICK: Shirley Jackson, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I know, jeepers, there's some honest people that have good heads.

SEAMANS: Finally, we're in safer hands.

WICK: Yeah, we're in safer hands.

DRESSELHAUS: With technical skills. And also, good problem solving skills.

WICK: Absolutely. Human--

BOWE: Common sense.

WILLIAMS: Humane people.

DRESSELHAUS: Knowing both sides of it, the technical side and the people side. There aren't too many people that can do that.

WICK: Yeah, Vera Kistaovkosky was on the faculty. And she had gone to Mount Holyoke. She was the class behind me. And when we were undergrads, her father would come to visit. He was good friends with the faculty at Mount Holyoke. And that was all the time when Los Alamos and all that was going on. And when he died, I felt the world was not quite safe. I was wrong, but it was another person that you felt--

DRESSELHAUS: Tremendous integrity.

WICK: Trusted the integrity.

DRESSELHAUS: Yes.

WILLIAMS: Did Sheila play an important role here?

DRESSELHAUS: Oh, very much so.

WILLIAMS: In either opening up admissions or with the women faculty?

DRESSELHAUS: She wasn't so much into the admissions thing. She came-- her contributions were many others, but it wasn't so much admissions. The athletics program--

BOWE: That's correct.

DRESSELHAUS: --was one area that we owe a tremendous amount to her. Equal opportunities, overall, was something that she did.

SEAMANS: Along that line--

DRESSELHAUS: And in the early days, she was our Institute problem solver. When there was something that-- a faculty issue, not a women's issue, but just across the board--

WICK: A human issue.

DRESSELHAUS: A human issue. And I think some of that experience came from the work that she did with the women students. She was really outstanding. The fact is that we don't know about each other's contributions so well, because after you left, Emily, the two of us, Sheila and I, divided many of the responsibilities.

WICK: I'm sure you did.

DRESSELHAUS: And this was-- we did this purposely, so that if she was doing something, I wouldn't do it. I had total confidence that she would do a tremendous job. And likewise, if I did something, she didn't do it.

WICK: Right.

DRESSELHAUS: And so, therefore, I don't know as well--

WICK: What was going on in her corner.

DRESSELHAUS: On her plate. But one thing that we did do-- there were two things that we did, that I think is important for the history. One of them has to do with our Carnegie grant. And the other one is the faculty tenure review. And I think you wanted to hear about both of these.

SEAMANS: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And they're somewhat connected. So Dottie worked very hard on the Carnegie project. And so I'm sure you can contribute much where I leave off.

WICK: Okay.

DRESSELHAUS: But in 1973, all of a sudden, we got a bunch of money. And there was some ground rules about what we were supposed to use this money for. And maybe Dottie can tell you better than I can what it was supposed to be used for. But when we had the money, we decided that we would use it for things that would have some impact. So we did sort of most everything against the rules.

BOWE: That's right.

[LAUGHTER]

DRESSELHAUS: Well, I remember that the rules basically was that faculty would take some-- pay some of their salary and we would do some kind of scholarly studies. And for most of us, we decided that it was most important for us to be in the classroom. For most of the students that I ever taught, I was the only female faculty they would ever, ever see.

And to keep me out of the classroom was the worst thing that Carnegie could ever do for MIT. And this was true of the others. So we just did our own thing and we didn't pay very much attention. And hopefully, the Carnegie-- I'm not sure exactly about the report, but we maybe should go back to David Hamburg, who's still around, would appreciate the effect of this grant on MIT. Because it really had a lot of things.

So some of the things I worked on was, we set up a course, a subject-- What is Engineering. And I want to give you the bottom line of that. At the time we started-- this was 1973, approximately-- women were in selected fields, but they were not in the engineering school, by and large-- very, very few, and they weren't doing too well. And we thought that we should use resources that we had to get a better distribution of women through the different departments at MIT.

So we set up this course. And we thought we would have like about 10 or 15 students. And we would work on Heath kits and get them more comfortable with engineering things when they were freshmen, so that they would be comfortable in going on to the sophomore, et cetera, courses. Because freshman is sort of a common curriculum. So this was kind of what the idea was.

So in the freshman year, we set this course. And I did it one semester and Sheila did it the other, we alternated. And we did this about three years. And the first time was offered, we had about 10 or 12 students, which is-- the second semester, we had 100. And it went up from there. And we had a huge fraction of the women students and even huger fraction of the minority students. Just about all the minority students would take this course.

And so they would have as role models Sheila and myself, when we were doing-- we'd do some of the classes. And then we got all the great people at MIT who would come in and give us guest lectures-- Doc Draper, and Edgerton, and all the great people. They would tell us about their career. And those were just marvelous stories.

And this had a big impact in the enrollments, because the people that came, they decided all of a sudden that they could do it too. That was the message of the course, that if you were admitted to MIT, you could get a degree in almost any department, certainly. There were many options for you in the engineering school. So that led to many very good careers.

Another thing that we set up from that was a faculty group, a faculty luncheon group. It probably had a name, but I can't remember exactly what the name was. And we met about approximately once a month, talking about issues for women students, graduate students, faculty, et cetera. And we provided lunch. So that was what the grant provided. I'm not sure that that was supposed to be, but it was--

BOWE: [INAUDIBLE]

DRESSELHAUS: But it was important in getting our women-- keeping the attendance up. And then once the usefulness of these meetings was established, the attendance was quite good. And one of the activities we had had to do with how to get tenure at MIT. And what we discovered from these monthly meetings is that the women faculty got almost no information from their colleagues about what it took to get tenure in their departments. And that most of the people in the departments were obviously men, and they didn't feel all that comfortable in discussing these kinds of issues with women. So if they weren't doing so well, they wouldn't be told. And then pretty soon, that tenure clock came around, and they wouldn't make it.

So we thought of ways to improve the information, the fact sharing, information sharing. And we developed a technique. We had a sort of Mutt and Jeff type show. And we took Sheila Widnall's resume. And she was the candidate-- we did a little play. And she was the candidate that came up for tenure every time we ran this program.

And I was the department head. And I would-- I had been a department head at that time, so I knew what the issues were. And Sheila had received tenure, so we knew that this was a proven case. So then we went through the resume. And we kept the resume at the time she got tenure. So we could look to see what counted. And we went through each of the things-- publications, grants, students, teaching, et cetera, letters of recommendation.

We went through all the different things and how one prepares one's career to have a better shot at tenure. And also, the message that if you did the right things to get tenure at MIT, you were doing the right things for your career, that these were one and the same thing. And we had sessions on how to get grant proposals through, and all of these kinds of useful things.

SEAMANS: What years did these start, approximately?

DRESSELHAUS: Carnegie, 1973. And we did them for 10 years.

BOWE: Did we really?

DRESSELHAUS: Yes.

BOWE: I didn't realize it was that long.

DRESSELHAUS: We did for 10 years. Because all the years, through the time I was head of the Material Center, I was chairing this and staffing. In the beginning, you staffed it and did the work to get the whole thing--

BOWE: To get it going.

DRESSELHAUS: Because there was a lot of staff work that was necessary-- notices sent out, and reserving rooms, and reserving meals. And all this sort of nonsense to get the thing--

SEAMANS: To put it in perspective, how many were there in that tenure track in '73?

DRESSELHAUS: Well the numbers increased a great deal around 1970, in the early years. Because Wiesner had the-- he was an original proponent of affirmative action before it was ever--

WICK: Ever, yes--

DRESSELHAUS: Recognized, or had a name, or a concept, or anything.

SEAMANS: That "he" we're talking about?

DRESSELHAUS: I'm talking about Jerry Wiesner. He had it up in here.

WICK: Yeah.

DRESSELHAUS: And he decided that women-- he said that the women faculty that we had had a very large impact on the place. And he said that we needed more of you. That you people were just totally overloaded. You've heard him say that.

WICK: Sure.

DRESSELHAUS: You remember that still. And he said that we needed more people to help him to improve the quality of life of all the students, because he thought we had contributed not only to the women students, but to all the students.

BOWE: Yes, he did.

DRESSELHAUS: So there was a sort of a hidden campaign. And about 1974, there was some kind of committee that was appointed to try to improve the recruitment of women faculty. I don't know how well it worked, but whatever means, the number increased. But the mentoring was terrible in those years.

So our faculty group mentored-- that was what-- we were a support group, basically. And we were across the whole Institute. And obviously, the requirements in the engineering school are a little bit different than humanities. I mean, I won't argue that. But there was some irreducible--

WICK: Principles, exactly.

DRESSELHAUS: --principles. And the process was mainly the same.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: It's an MIT process, so we explained all of that

WILLIAMS: I remember attending a year of luncheons when I first came to MIT. That was in the early '80s. And I remember that quite well. And they were quite well attended.

BOWE: Yes, they were well attended, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, they had some impact of increasing the probability of tenure. And toward the last few years, when I thought it was time that I could bow out of this, because it was quite a bit of work, the probability of women getting tenure, in proportion to the number that we had in the pipeline, was equal to that of men. And when that happened, I thought we were doing okay.

BOWE: Yeah, we'd done it, right.

WILLIAMS: It also, though, gave you an opportunity to meet faculty in other departments and schools.

BOWE: That's right

WICK: That's hard to do.

WILLIAMS: That's difficult to do.

DRESSELHAUS: I remember we used to take on projects, like looking at the undergraduate curriculum, and this and that, and what the effect of pass-fail was, and we would talk about Institute wide issues, because we were a small enough group that we could focus on things. And I believe that was appreciated by all the faculty.

WICK: I think, probably.

BOWE: The Carnegie grant, we did a lot of things with it. And it was originally, as you said, set up in a certain way. And we decided that was not the way that MIT ought to do it. And other schools that received these grants had--

DRESSELHAUS: There were six schools.

BOWE: --had identified an office and hired a person to sit there and to administer. And we decided that was probably not the thing to do here, that we should spread it around, and do some faculty, some students, some variety of kinds of things. So we did have some student interns who worked on projects with women faculty, which was also a wonderful way to get-- students who were interested in physics, for instance, worked with Vera on a project, and, I think, Millie and Sheila's course.

There are a variety of things that we did with that-- with those funds, which spread them. They reached far more people than they would have, had we set up an office and just directed them in some sort of administrative way. But we just sort of flew in directions. And I think all of them-- I think it was a useful--

DRESSELHAUS: One of our proteges-- I'm not sure if she was exactly in the original Carnegie or came a few years later, but I set up, sometime in the '70s, a lab at one of the dorms, at McCormick. Do you remember that, Dottie?

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: That was Denise Denton, and there was another young lady. I've forgotten her name. And Denise became a very, very young Dean of Engineering at a very large engineering school, University of Washington, age 36.

WICK: Oh, my goodness.

DRESSELHAUS: Can you imagine that? And what she learned as an undergraduate, to begin with, and then as a graduate student, was really quite amazing. Because she was working with students, as an instructor when she was still in undergraduate, setting up this lab course. And they ran it themselves. It was very effective. And then that training allowed her, when she was a graduate student, to help out with some teaching at one of the neighboring colleges here.

So by the time she graduated, she had all this teaching skill and documentation. So it made it easy for her to get a faculty position. And then she got tenure. And then from that, went to this dean's job.

SEAMANS: At 36.

DRESSELHAUS: 36. We really have an amazing group of students.

BOWE: A group of women students.

DRESSELHAUS: And she's another case that's a little bit like Margaret MacVicar. Where people judged her just on her engineering achievement. But that wasn't the whole person. The whole person was all the things she was doing.

BOWE: That's why I brought up previously that I would have loved to see more of those people here on the faculty. It would have been wonderful to be able to keep more of them, which we just haven't done.

DRESSELHAUS: We've kept quite a few of them. And what I'd like to say-- I'd say it differently, Dottie. That as I go around the country, here and there--

WICK: I go and see them.

DRESSELHAUS: I see them everywhere.

WICK: Missionaries. That's true.

DRESSELHAUS: They're missionaries. And I believe that the leadership that they brought with them to their institutions was kind of unique, because they weren't used to women with so much independence and knowing where they're going.

WICK: That's right.

BOWE: Well, I appreciate that, because I guess I just miss them.

DRESSELHAUS: I guess we need both. But many of them are on our faculty. If you look at the-- especially in the Engineering School, you look where they come from. We have quite a few of our own.

BOWE: Let me go back to Sheila for a minute. I was the first woman to be on the Athletic Committee. And it was a time when we were just trying to get facilities that were available, and get-- what do you call them-- intramurals moved into the-- what do you call the--

WICK: You mean women in an intramural system?

BOWE: Yeah, well we were trying to get them into some other-- into teams to be competitive with other schools and so forth. It was a really difficult task at the time. But I was on the committee and was able to-- we had some supportive faculty members on the committee.

But there was a time when that wasn't working very well. And the woman they hired as the athletic director was just terrific, as far as being an entrepreneur, and getting women excited, and onto programs, and so forth. But she had crossed some of the male staff members over there. And so it looked like she was going to leave. In any case, I couldn't take on the job, because I was on the committee, and it would look like I was playing too-- So I asked Sheila if she would look at that.

Well, that's all she needed. She just jumped right in and got a group together of students who were participating in all the different sports. And we came up with another report, which I can't give you the date, but it certainly is worth reviewing.

DRESSELHAUS: About 1977.

BOWE: Was it? Yeah, I know it was--

DRESSELHAUS: That would be about the time.

WILLIAMS: It would have been on equity in athletics.

BOWE: That's right. That's right.

DRESSELHAUS: We had it in a 1972 report, where Paula Stone and [INAUDIBLE] were the co-chairman. We had a section on athletics. But that sort of preceded--

BOWE: That's right.

WILLIAMS: That was the year Title IX.

BOWE: That's right.

WILLIAMS: Because we're just celebrating the 25th anniversary.

BOWE: Yes, we did. We did. We never really struggled with Title IX.

WICK: Correct.

BOWE: I think we've always been able to-- yes, we were always headed off in some-- but the sports programs weren't equal, in the sense that some of the students felt that we weren't teaching those courses as well as we could have. But Sheila's report, I think, settled it. It's never been an issue since. I mean, she addressed all the right issues. She got all the right people to jump in. And we met several times, I remember, at McCormick.

DRESSELHAUS: That was a model report.

BOWE: And it was an excellent report.

DRESSELHAUS: I thought we did a whole bunch of great reports.

BOWE: Well, that's true. That was one that was--

DRESSELHAUS: And each of them had an impact, amazing. After that, when I started doing things for the federal government in our National Research Council and so forth, I thought that all the reports should have equal impact. And it was hard to beat these MIT reports.

BOWE: That's right. The reports were so very--

DRESSELHAUS: I really learned a lot from this.

BOWE: And I think would what would be a model report for today, that kind of-- but it's intercollegiate sports that I was trying to get out. Because there was a lack of other teams to play. Because we weren't in the various sports programs. And we needed someone to get us into them. And the woman who was here at the time was not in that kind of position.

So we did hire then Jane Betts, who came and, I think, just recently left. But was just great. I mean, she just knew her way around the sports world, which none of us did. But Sheila was really the person who made that go, made that work.

DRESSELHAUS: And she also made work on better facilities, and locker rooms, and--

BOWE: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And I remember even the principle-- equal tuition, equal treatment.

BOWE: She missed one--

WILLIAMS: Lockers.

BOWE: She missed her little-- she had a daughter, Anne. And one day we were at a meeting, and we were really making good progress. And everything was coming together. And she looked at her watch, and she said, I've just missed Anne, who was her daughter, soccer game, and I have to get out of here to go see that. So we knew she was encouraging Anne to participate in soccer.

WICK: You know, the one thing, good reports have been written here.

BOWE: Yes.

WICK: But they didn't go to just sort of faceless bureaucracy. There were people up there that were reading the reports.

BOWE: They cared about the reports.

WICK: And listening. And if it hadn't been a good report, probably nothing would have happened. But you do need--

DRESSELHAUS: We had our first bad report back in 1972 or something, when Jerry Wiesner taught us how to reports. We didn't repeat our mistakes. After all, we do learn.

SEAMANS: From your perspective now, which is, there is a unique perspective collectively here, what does the next 50 years mean for women at MIT?

WICK: I wouldn't hazard to guess. Good things, probably, and struggles. But challenges, but that's life, and that's-- all educational institutions are up against real challenges. And so are the students who go to them.

DRESSELHAUS: And the faculty who teach there.

WICK: And the faculty. You know, it's a real-- it's a very, very, very important cause. And it's got to stay on equality, but it's hard to predict how it's going to turn out. But I have my faith that people that work hard and have good brains, something will come of it.

BOWE: I still work with a women's independent living group as an advisor. And I'm always very impressed when I go there, how much in stride they take things that maybe some years ago were not taken in stride. I think these things are-- they deal with things, and they don't feel that they have to run for help for everything. They feel they can deal with it as a group.

SEAMANS: Very capable.

BOWE: Very capable of managing their own affairs and taking--

DRESSELHAUS: Their expectations are similar to the men, and we didn't have that 25 years ago.

BOWE: Yes, yes. And I think the fact that there are alumni of that group, that they invite back every year and-- I just went to their banquet, which was very impressive. People who said how much they loved being at MIT, how much it had meant to them and their careers. And living there had been-- it's a real tribute to what's happening here. I think that's a good message.

WILLIAMS: I guess one challenge is to get the faculty and graduate students more in sync with the undergraduate experience here. Because there still is a disparity, just in sheer numbers.

BOWE: Yes.

WILLIAMS: The critical mass is a very different critical mass in each of those layers.

DRESSELHAUS: That will come with time.

BOWE: Yes, it should.

DRESSELHAUS: In a way, we have to look and see where the graduate students are coming from. Within our own place, we're 40 some percent women, for the undergraduates. You know the numbers better than I do. But we only accept a small number of our own students for the graduate program. And when you look around the rest of the country or the world, the percentage of women in these various fields that we specialize in here is a smaller number than our own undergraduate population. So we could expect-- we cannot expect that the numbers would be the same. So we'll have to wait a while for that to happen.

WILLIAMS: That's where 50 years will make a difference.

WICK: Yeah, right.

DRESSELHAUS: And likewise, for faculty ranks. I think it's the same thing. And we should just continue to advocate some measure of affirmative action.

WICK: Yes.

DRESSELHAUS: As we have. And it seems to work. Because we have enough women out there, that when they come, they participate in the mainstream. And by and large, they do just as well as the men do. And we-- it's a matter of time. It's not easy being a faculty member here.

WICK: Oh, no.

DRESSELHAUS: The demands are great.

WICK: Oh, yes.

DRESSELHAUS: And this has nothing to do with the Institute and regulations. But the pace here is intense. And it's hard to combine family life and try to have an international career.

WICK: Right.

DRESSELHAUS: It's really hard to do that. And the problem is that it all hits you at the same age group-- 25 to 35 is the critical time for all of us. And we don't have the answer to that one. And it's not an MIT--

WICK: No, it's a worldwide--

DRESSELHAUS: --problem. It hits us the most, because we're so intense here. Makes it more difficult.