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Nine [professors] lost their jobs [because they were suspected of lesbianism] and it really put the fear of god in me. . . . Being a lesbian is not an easy choice . . . so graduate school was my year to really try the straight life.
—A lesbian who was a college student in the mid-twentieth century
Educating Women for “a Woman’s Life”—Again
EDUCATIONAL LEADERS such as Charles Eliot of Harvard, who had opposed higher education for women from the beginning, were happy to observe in the 1920s that the factions that had pushed women into scholarship and careers at the start of the century were losing ground. They had been doomed to failure, Eliot wrote with some glee. “Women as a whole”—normal women (the opposite to whom must be “abnormal” women such as Carey Thomas and Mary Woolley)—had demonstrated that they were content in woman’s sphere. “Wiser ways and methods” had prevailed, he said, because “it is not the chief happiness or the chief end of women, as a whole, to enter these new occupations, or to pursue them through life. They enter many which they soon abandon, and that is well—particularly the abandonment!”
Though women went to college in increasingly high numbers as the twentieth century progressed and more and more colleges opened to them, the ideas of leaders such as Carey Thomas and Mary Woolley about educating women for scholarship and careers slipped out of fashion. Even most women’s colleges did not follow the lead of Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke in resisting the pressure to offer a domestic science program. Some institutions, such as Vassar, dressed up such programs with titles such as “euthenics,” meaning “the scientific study of the home,” and offered courses such as “Chemistry of Food and Nutrition.” But as Debra Herman observes in her study of Vassar, these developments were virtually an acquiescence to the belief that “equal education for women . . . was folly in a society committed to divergent roles for men and women.” Instead of educating women for careers, Vassar—which by 1920 had moved far from the ideals of early faculty members such as Lucy Salmon and Maria Mitchell—had decided to educate women “for a woman’s life.”
That trend reached far beyond Vassar, becoming for many years the reigning view on female education. Not only were the female leaders in education who had bucked that trend considered obsolete, but they were castigated for having harmed young women. They gave “little thought to the unique kind of education that [women J should have” and foisted on women an “education designed for men,” as a 1942 book, Women After College, phrased it. The old leaders were accused of pretending that there were no important differences between the sexes. They had tried to invert gender by making men out of women.
By mid-century they were long forgotten. In 1920, women made up 30.1 percent of all college professors in America. By 1959, their proportion had dropped to 19.4 percent. Though some women were hired at coeducational institutions during these years, it was generally to teach in women’s areas, such as home economics, women’s physical education, nursing, and social work. In women’s colleges, the one kind of academic institution in which women had once been taken seriously and hired to teach in all disciplines, they were disappearing as faculty. For example, at Smith in 1910 women made up 75 percent of the faculty. By 1966, they made up less than 35 percent. Departments often made no attempt to hide their preferences for men in hiring. And if both men and women were hired, women were likely to receive appointment as instructors, while men received professorial appointments, even at women’s colleges.
The decrease in female college administrators was similarly dramatic, as Cynthia Brown has pointed out in her historical work on female leadership in higher education. However, interestingly, African-American women were being appointed to head black colleges at just about the time that white women were being replaced in predominantly white colleges by white men. Perhaps this was because black women fell outside the gender dictates that were applied to white women. Indeed, the institution of racism may have been threatened more by the ascendancy of black males than by that of black females, and African-American women were thus allowed to attain token power in black colleges that were dependent on white philanthropy. Mary McLeod Bethune held the presidency of Bethune-Cookman College until 1942, when her work with the New Deal’s National Youth Administration began to require most of her time. Other African-American women assumed college presidencies in the 1920s and ’30s. For example, Artemesia Bowden became president of St. Philip’s College in 1926, and thus the first woman, black or white, to head a college in Texas. Mary Elizabeth Branch assumed the presidency of Tillotson College, also in Texas, in 1930.
That countertrend aside, the mid-century saw a spate of books and articles written by new college presidents (almost invariably white men) with titles such as On the Education of Women and “How to Educate a Woman,” which insisted that young women were best served by an education that differed from that of young men. These male college presidents were sometimes joined in their views by a new breed of female professor who saw herself as a woman first and foremost and believed that college women should be trained in her image. As Professor Dorothy Lee observed in a 1947 Mademoiselle article, more valuable to a female student than learning about Plato was learning how to make the home peaceful and comfortable—for instance, learning what a wife ought to say when her husband comes home upset because he has been stuck in a traffic jam or fired from his job. Views such as hers held sway even in the women’s colleges of the era. As members of the Radcliffe class of 1952 bitterly recalled in their twenty-five-year alumnae report, the “prevailing view” foisted on them at Radcliffe had been that they must and would “seek a successful husband on whom to piggy-back for the rest of [their] lives.” The Mrs. degree had become the only really desirable one for a woman, even in institutions that had once led the way in serious higher education for females.
College administrators and educators sometimes did recognize, however, that what was true of “most women” was not true of all women. Some space was therefore reserved for the exceptional few. It continued to be possible for highly motivated, stubborn, “odd” women to pursue stringent study, to get into decent graduate programs, and even to earn Ph.D.’s. But by the 1920s, those exceptional few who wanted to pursue such a course were generally stigmatized. As the psychiatrist John Meagher wrote in “Homosexuality: Its Psychobiological and Psychopathological Significance,” a 1929 article that reflected prevalent ideas of the era, it was not the normal woman “who yearns only for higher education and neglects [heterosexual] love.” A woman’s passion for education, Meagher believed, was connected to her immaturity; female homosexuals, he observed, were often “intellectual and cultured, though sexually infantile.”
Through equations such as these, a woman’s desire for an education “like a man’s” signified that she was inverted—not just in terms of gender, but also with regard to her sexuality; that is, she was a homosexual. Intrinsic to such a theory was the notion that homosexuality signified an arrested development. Thus, in one neat sweep, women were warned against desiring both a serious education and the love of another woman. Those two desires were seen as often intertwined, and both were characterized as pathological.
Ideas such as Meagher’s were not new, of course. Havelock Ellis and other nineteenth-century sexologists had long ago observed that inverted women were attracted to such “male pursuits” as education, and the early twentieth-century theories of Freud are also evident in Meagher’s language. But what had changed was that such views, promulgated by “experts,” were now no longer relegated only to medical journals. They were also fed regularly to the public. For example, Carl Jung’s 1928 essay “The Love Problem in the Student,” published in a Modern Library edition, observed that “homosexuality among women” was prevalent in those who have notions about women’s rights and advancement. In such ways, higher education for women, and especially for those unmarried women who had been instrumental in leading the pursuit, came under hostile public scrutiny.
Obviously, the mental health profession was not single-handedly responsible for convincing large numbers of young women that they did not want a man’s education or the love of other women, which only men should want. As Christina Simmons pointed out in her classic article on companionate marriage in the 1920s and ’30s, the popular print media were inundated with books and articles that reminded young women that real happiness could be achieved only in heterosexual marriage, that study for careers and independence interfered with the pursuit of such happiness, and that only “mannish” females would put their energies into goals outside domestic fulfillment. Serious higher education for women, which had been promoted most effectively by women who wished to make lives for themselves outside heterosexual marriage and conventional womanhood, was tarred by its connection with those pioneers.
Perhaps young women were somewhat complicit in the push to guarantee that college would not prepare them for independence. After all, what were the ramifications of study for a lifelong career? Marriage and motherhood were full-time jobs—or at least they were still constructed as such, even with all the labor-saving devices that were becoming available to the ordinary household by the 1920s. (The invention of vacuum cleaners and the availability of packaged bread did not come to mean that a woman had more time for her own pursuits but rather that she should find new, different, and more time-consuming ways to care for the home.) If, as common wisdom had it once again, marriage and motherhood alone could fulfill one as a woman, what was the purpose in studying for a career that would inevitably interfere with domestic bliss? And after arduous study, was there even any guarantee of happiness in professional life? Would it be worth the sacrifice of married love and children? Who but abnormal, mannish women could be content to substitute twosing for heterosexual domesticity? A 1923 survey of women at Vassar, where same-sex twosing had once been a norm, found that 90 percent wanted marriage, which they regarded as “the biggest of all careers.”
The Effects of the Heterosexual Imperative on Women’s Higher Education
As the sociologist Jessie Bernard observed in her study of academic women, the excitement the pioneers had experienced when higher education was first opened to women had quite worn off by the 1920s and ’30s, when college-educated women “turned their backs” on scholarly life and career preparations “and ran to rock the cradle.” Clearly a heterosexual imperative had developed to counter the efforts of women such as Carey Thomas and Mary Woolley. The imperative of the 1920s and ’30s often sounded different from the Victorian imperative, which had relied on tradition to keep women in the home. The new feminine mystique was given voice by women such as the author of “Autobiography of an Ex-Feminist,” who could argue “been there, done that” with regard to women’s higher education and the false values it fostered. The “Ex-Feminist” claimed in her 1933–34 Atlantic Monthly articles that at the age of twenty she had naively “thought with the founders of our best known women’s colleges that young women should have ‘opportunities for education equivalent to those provided for young men.’ There was no sex to the mind. There should be no sex in education.” But life had taught her differently, she wrote. Her education had been a failure; it had not prepared her for “a woman’s work,” the tasks that inevitably lie in wait for the “normal” woman. Her education had sent her to seek after the false gods of professionalism, which were totally incompatible with motherhood and domestic peace.
It may also be that by the 1920s, the college experience was attracting different kinds of women from those it had attracted earlier—women who, unlike their predecessors, did not see themselves as rebels against the accepted constructions of womanhood, or even as fired by the intellect. As increasing numbers of females went to college, higher education for women came to be seen not as a bold statement of feminism or intellectual hunger but rather as a credential to show that one was a reasonably cultivated, non-working-class female. William Neilson, the president of Smith in the 1920s, astutely compared Smith students fifty years earlier with those of his day. The pioneering students had been that “handful of eager souls, brought into this place because of their appetite for intellectual things.” Their present counterparts had come to college, “we must confess, largely in obedience to social convention.” On the backs of the rebellious pioneers, college for women had become not only commonplace but even conventional. In fact, by 1920, as a result of little more than half a century’s efforts by those with a feminist bent, the number of women in college had almost reached parity with men: 47.3 percent of American college students were female.
However, the growth of the number of women in higher education proved to be unstable whenever the going got rough. If a college education really had no grander purpose than to create a cultivated housewife, was it worth the time, effort, and money? Young women and their parents rethought the college fad from time to time, such as during the Depression years, when money was scarce and what was dispensable had to be dispensed with. College educations that did not end in material advantage had to be sacrificed. By the end of the 1930s, the proportion of women among college students had dropped to 40.2 percent. By 1950, when a new, post—World War II feminine mystique was recreating the happy housewife, it had dropped an additional 10 percent, to 30.2 percent.
There were undoubtedly diverse reasons for this dramatic drop, but one important influence must surely have been the fact that the goal of many pioneers in female education—to help women achieve interests outside traditional domesticity—had become suspect. Such a goal was associated (often rightly, as I have illustrated) with a willingness to forgo heterosexual marriage, frequently in favor of setting up a household with a like-minded female. By mid-century, the motives for such twosing were widely thought to be not convenience or even romantic friendship but lesbianism—which signified abnormality and morbidity.
Predictably, the percentage of women getting graduate degrees also decreased during these decades. Women who had been undergraduates during the 1920s or earlier had attended graduate school in record proportions in order to earn Ph.D.’s. In the nineteenth century, Carey Thomas had had to go to the University of Zurich (which opened to women in 1867) to get her degree. But by 1930, 18 percent of all Ph.D.’s awarded in America went to women. The proportion (though, in a generally expanding university population, not the number) dropped precipitously in the decades that followed. By 1940, only 13 percent of American Ph.D.’s went to women. In 1950 and 1960, women claimed only 10 percent of American Ph.D.’s.
Perhaps the major clue in explaining the proportional drop in female doctorates can be found once again in marriage statistics. As the detractors of higher education for women had been screaming from the start, serious study and the careers to which it led were inimical to married life. Of 1025 women who received Ph.D.’s between 1877 and 1924, 80 percent were not married. By the mid-twentieth century, the pursuit of the Ph.D. apparently continued to conflict with married life—but proportionally fewer women were willing to give up married life than had been the case in the pioneering generations.
As Helen Astin has shown in her study of women who received doctorates during the 1950s, an unmarried woman continued to have a far better chance of completing a Ph.D. than a woman with a husband in tow. Fifty-five percent of the women Ph.D.’s whom Astin studied were single, as opposed to 6 percent of women in their age group in the general population. The married women in Astin’s study complained often of the difficulties that marriages in the 1950s imposed: problems in getting help at home while they pursued their work, husbands’ negative attitudes toward the wives’ professional goals, husbands’ job mobility, which meant wives had to move too and often sacrifice career development, and so on.
If marriage interfered with the pursuit of a highly desired degree and a subsequent career, why marry—particularly if one felt that the alternatives, such as a domestic life with another woman, were attractive? In fact, only 11 percent of female professors were married in the 1920s; many of them continued to live together in long-term relationships. But such a life had become much less comfortable than it was in earlier eras. Academic women who did not marry were suspect. They were besieged in all directions, even by those they might have assumed would be protective. For instance, in 1922, the journal of the American Association of University Women published a critical, even snide article about unmarried female faculty members, who were accused of presenting “an air of single superiority toward the commonplace of being married and bearing children, which Herr Freud might define as a defense reaction.” In the same vein, a speech given later in that decade by Clarence Little to the National Association of Deans of Women criticized unmarried female college administrators who “threw off the normal biological inhibitions of gender” and were “pseudo-masculine.” He called them “amazon” types (using the nineteenth-century euphemism for those who were suspected of sexual inversion), and he more than hinted that they were dangerous to students and should be eliminated from college administration.
These various shifts in attitudes and concomitant decreases in female representation on faculties and in college administrations had far-reaching effects. A critical mass of women in academia—who would fight for women’s right to be educated, funded, hired, and promoted just as men were—was lost. The academic woman who could happily have made her life with other women was actively discouraged, as the student whose recollection prefaces this chapter observed.
Not only was it difficult for the woman who actually believed herself to be a lesbian to acknowledge an identity that was so widely stigmatized, but it was also difficult for her to prepare herself for the economic independence that would permit her to live without the help of a man. Even she felt pushed into marriage, as Lorraine Hansberry, the African-American playwright, who was married to a man though she was a self-identified lesbian, observed with agony in a 1950s lesbian magazine: “The estate of woman being what it is, how could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their ‘natural’ destiny—AND—their only expectation for ECONOMIC security.” Despite her lesbian desires and her talents (which she did not know in 1957 would bring financial rewards), Hansberry felt constrained to marry.
Attacks on unmarried women in the academy became absolutely virulent in the 1950s. For example, in 1951 the Mellon Foundation provided a grant to study academic and personal advising of students at Vassar. The study was headed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger, whose subsequent resignation from the project made the front page of the New York Times because he revealed that he was leaving in disgust at what he saw as Vassar’s woman-centered policies. “I don’t believe that matriarchy provides a wholesome atmosphere in which students are likely to develop satisfactorily,” he was quoted as saying. He was especially concerned about “sexual developments of undergraduates in an atmosphere of supervision by matriarchy.” There were “too many unmarried women at Vassar in supervisory capacities,” he concluded. It is not surprising in the context of such patent homophobia that when President Blanding, an unmarried woman, retired a few years later, a man was chosen by the trustees to replace her.
Unmarried female college administrators who managed to keep their jobs were on the defensive, both for themselves and for their female faculty members. For instance, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, who was the top administrative officer at Barnard from 1911 to 1947, never married. She lived with an English scholar, Caroline Spurgeon, until Spurgeon’s death, in 1942, and then with another Barnard professor, Elizabeth Reynard, until Reynard’s death, in 1962. (During World War II, Reynard was instrumental in organizing the WAVES, the American women’s naval force, whose advisory council Gildersleeve chaired.) Though Gildersleeve fought fiercely to encourage female scholars, she understood by the 1930s that she had better make some heterosexual noises if she wished to maintain credibility in her position as dean. She instigated a revolutionary year-long paid leave of absence for pregnant (married) faculty members, but the justification that she made for this excellent policy in her 1932 annual report seemed pointedly to emphasize her encouragement of her faculty’s heterosexuality and to ignore the possibility that there were roads to “full and rich lives” outside heterosexuality (as she had herself discovered). “It is of great importance that our teachers should be normal and interesting human beings, with as full and rich lives as may be,” she wrote. “Neither the men nor women on our staff should be forced into celibacy and cut off from that great source of experience, of joy, sorrow and wisdom, which marriage and parenthood offer.”
That even M. Carey Thomas, the once bold standard-bearer for women like herself, should have felt the pressures of the heterosexual imperative indicates how powerful that imperative had become. As a Bryn Mawr student during the later Thomas days remembered years later, at senior receptions Thomas seemed “almost always” to encourage discussions of “how we could best combine a career with marriage and children. She was more realistic than the feminists of today [1950s].” According to this same alumna, Thomas even presented herself as a frustrated heterosexual, quite erasing her lifelong romantic involvements with other women; she “used to say regretfully that she had given up both marriage and close friendship with men because she feared it would damage her effectiveness in running a women’s college.” Such defensiveness and erasure of their personal histories on the part of Gildersleeve and Thomas attest to their perceptions of the venomous homophobia directed at female academics as the twentieth century wore on.
“The Attraction of Colleges . . . for Overt, Hardened Homosexuals”
Female students, for their part, were wind harps on whom the contending forces of their immediate milieu and the larger society played. As early as 1920, veneration of the learned female professor, the female students’ crushes on her, which had been common in earlier generations, and the desire to take her as a role model and follow in her footsteps seem to have been disappearing. The learned spinster was becoming laughable instead of admirable to a generation that was discouraged from sharing her lust for knowledge and power. As a limerick by a female student in 1920 put it,
There was an old maid of Peru
Who thirty-one languages knew;
With one pair of lungs
She worked thirty-two tongues;
I don’t wonder she’s single; do you?
The growing “sophistication” in the population about what was perceived as sexual pathology scared young women away from what, as Alfred Kinsey phrased it, comes naturally to all mammalians—attraction to members of the species regardless of gender. College women thus chose heterosexual marriage in increasingly greater numbers throughout the twentieth century, so that by the end of the 1950s, 90 percent of all female college graduates married. The female college graduate’s tendency to spinsterhood, established in the nineteenth century, was quite reversed (though again, as with college presidents, the reversal was not true for African-American women: only 42 percent of African-American female college graduates married in the 1950s, attesting perhaps to the paucity of African-American men with college degrees).
Students who did not follow the heterosexual imperative also suffered from the slings of homophobia. Books such as Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten’s Youth and Sex (1938) demonstrate how closely and with how much disapproval same-sex intimacies among students were scrutinized, “whether or not [they] were accompanied by physical manifestations of affection.” Love between persons of the same sex had become so pathologized, first by the “experts” and then within the popular culture, that even a hint of it now met with opprobrium.
In their study of 1300 college students, Bromley and Britten insisted that only 4 percent of their female sample had had same-sex love experiences. Their figure, when contrasted with that which Katharine Bement Davis produced in a comparable 1920s study, provides an eloquent statement regarding ostensible behavioral changes that accompanied the growth of homophobia. In Davis’s study of college women of the previous generations, 50.4 percent said they had had “intense emotional relations” with other women, and half of those admitted that their experiences had been accompanied by sexual expression or “recognized as sexual in character.” Indeed, of those born in the late nineteenth century in Davis’s sample (they were between the ages of thirty and thirty-nine at the time of the study), 46.2 percent admitted to homosexual experiences! Of those born in the early twentieth century, only 21.4 percent admitted to having had such experiences. As a further illustration of the growth of homophobia by the time Youth and Sex was published, Bromley and Britten also insisted that of the 4 percent who admitted to homosexual experiences, all but one individual had “outgrown” it.
Of course, the researchers’ own nervousness about same-sex love may lead one to suspect that their interviewees were not entirely forthcoming. Bromley and Britten warned, for example, that even when homosexual relationships were not accompanied by erotic exchanges, “they frequently tend to encourage tyrannical possessiveness, incessant demands in the name of love, recurring states of instability, and an exclusiveness that cuts off the partners from other interests and friendships.” If they shared such opinions with their interviewees, how many would have lied rather than admit to homosexual interests?
Books such as theirs not only denigrated same-sex love and alerted others to the existence of that “morbid” phenomenon; they also created a self-consciousness—an awareness of “difference”—in those young women who continued to love other women. Yet such an awareness did not have to be wholly negative. Self-consciousness made possible a lesbian identity, which had barely existed in the United States during the previous century. Potentially, that identity could allow young women with a passion for education and careers to regroup and fight with renewed vigor the trend to lock all women into dependent heterosexual domesticity. However, in the milieu in which the concept of “the lesbian” had been formulated, it was difficult for “lesbians” to accept without conflict that potentially useful identity.
In fact, the recognition of those feelings that society now dubbed as sick could literally make a young woman sick. Lenore Thompson, who was a student from 1936 to 1940, recalled a half-century later that “I felt passionately toward one of my classmates, but I was petrified someone would find out, and [I| wound up in the infirmary every once in a while at the edge of some kind of breakdown.” To counter her sick feelings, she married and had four children. (She returned to lesbianism, but not until the milieu had changed significantly, in 1985, when she was sixty-seven years old.) In her fear of what had come to be seen as lesbianism, she—and probably many thousands of other young women between 1920 and 1970 -—became paralyzed by the very feelings that Mary Woolley had once been able to characterize as “the greatest power in my life.”
It would be no exaggeration to say that during the 1950s, homosexual students in American colleges and universities were the victims of a witchhunt. They were threatened with expulsion, exposure, and worse. A 1955 article, “The Sexually Deviant Student,” written by the dean of students and his assistant at UCLA and published in a journal for education administrators, actually warned other deans about the “attraction of colleges, both public and private, for overt, hardened homosexuals.” The deans’ recommendation was that homosexual students be identified and given the choice of expulsion or psychotherapy to change their orientation. Entering freshmen at UCLA had to undergo psychological tests that asked such absurdly blatant questions as “Have you ever wished to kiss someone of the same sex?” and “Do you have fantasies about being close to a person of the same sex?” All who were savvy about homosexuality surely answered no. But sometimes homosexual students were discovered through other means. A student at Vassar during the 1950s was called up before the president and told that “if I didn’t relate the names of my [lesbian] friends to her (she had a legal pad handy) they would fix it so that I could not be accepted in any college or university in the United States ever.”
Despite threats, or ridicidous claims such as Bromley and Britten’s that only one out of 1300 students never “outgrew” her homosexuality, women’s intimacies did not disappear entirely from academic life. Yet the female couple in academia became much less commonplace. The once ubiquitous crush among female students virtually disappeared or was unspoken when it occurred. Women in intimate relationships with other women, whether students or faculty members, knew they had to hide what was central to their lives if they wished to remain at their college.
Perhaps the most notable same-sex academic intimacy in the post—World War I decades was that between the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and a woman who had been her student at Barnard, Margaret Mead. Benedict, a Vassar graduate, had married in 1914, but when she decided four years later to get a Ph.D. at Columbia, her husband was not happy with her. They soon separated. In 1922, as a teaching assistant at Barnard, she met Margaret Mead. According to a recent biographer, the chronic depression from which Benedict had suffered apparently disappeared permanently in the course of their lesbian relationship. As their journals and letters reveal, they fostered each other’s brilliant work. Ruth Benedict was the first woman in America to become preeminent in an academic field dominated by men—and her lover may be said to be the second.
Mead, who was bisexual, eventually married, but she and Benedict continued to use each other as sounding boards for their work, and they engaged in joint projects for the next twenty-five years. After Mead married, Benedict began a relationship with Ruth Valentine, a psychotherapist, with whom she lived until her death, in 1948. Central to Benedict’s best work (for example, Patterns of Culture, 1934) was the idea that traits that are considered abnormal in one culture may be highly valued in another—a concept she may have come to understand by being involved in a same-sex intimacy at a time when such once-honored relationships were taboo.
The histories of the pioneers in women’s education provide ample proof that an individual’s affectional and sexual cathexis has reference not simply to biology or to the Freudian “family romance” but also to what will help her realize the internal image of who she is, and to what is possible and permissible in her immediate milieu and the larger society. M. Carey Thomas is a salient example of how and why one might choose whom to love. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pioneers in women’s education knew that to choose heterosexuality, as it was constructed in their day, would make it impossible for them to realize their internal images of who they might be. The choice of a female mate (especially one who engaged in similar pursuits, or at least valued them) offered a far greater potential for nurturing the realization of that image. And they had little difficulty in making that choice. The larger society was generally complicit with female twosing, considering it a romantic friendship or a convenient domestic arrangement between spinsters, and their immediate milieu—either the all-woman campus or a coeducational institution where they had to band together against hostile male students or professors, who might ridicule them for their desire to get an education—fostered such intimate relationships between women.
In the decades after World War I, heterosexual marriage may have become companionate, but it still interfered with a woman’s intellectual ambitions. Yet the Wellesley marriage was no longer the easy alternative it had once been for academic women. The larger society, and even the college milieu, now frowned on those intimacies that had been greatly responsible for making women’s earlier academic successes feasible. It is assuredly no coincidence that for the subsequent half-century, women’s further advancement in academia was on hold.
However, in the 1970s, not only did the nature of heterosexual relationships begin to change, but also women could once again claim intimacy with each other with relative impunity—though now that claim was often called lesbian or lesbian feminist. The proliferation of these new styles of relationships (both heterosexual and homosexual) surely played a significant role in helping to break the feminine mystique that had reigned through much of the previous half-century. And when women were finally able to resume the academic quest in large numbers, they did not have to begin at the beginning. Pioneers such as Carey Thomas and Mary Woolley had already established their right to serious higher education and a position within the academy.