“I regret, Mrs. Whitman, that it is impossible for us to accept a student of your caliber into our graduate program, but we just don't have facilities to accommodate women students.” With this apology for its lack of sufficient bathrooms for women, Princeton's president shot down my plan to begin graduate work in economics at the university where my father had begun his American career and my husband was now teaching. Frustrated and furious, I couldn't foresee that the world of the 1950s, reflected in President Dodds's response, would be swept away by seismic changes in the national culture before the next decade was over, opening up new opportunities for me. Even less could I imagine the public violence and serial assassinations that would mark these changes' bloody birth.
Arriving in Princeton after our honeymoon summer, Bob at last carried his bride over the threshold. As we kissed, I tried to hide my dismay at my first glimpse of our new home, a sharp contrast to the large, gracious one of my Princeton adolescence. I was standing in the visible, tangible evidence of our lowly status on the academic totem pole, a cramped apartment far on the other side of town, in a group of wooden military barracks (bachelor officers' quarters, Bob insisted, but the distinction was lost on me) hastily constructed on the university's polo fields during World War II. They had been built to last only as long as the war did. Instead of tearing them down, though, Princeton took them over and today, more than sixty-five years after the war's end, married graduate students and members of the university's maintenance staff still inhabit both the original buildings, shored up with aluminum siding, as well as look-alike new ones built to house the overflow.
The apartment's two miniscule bedrooms—one served as Bob's study—had no doors; we separated them from the living room with sackcloth curtains hung on wooden poles. The floors were cement, painted red, and the bathroom, which housed a grimy galvanized metal shower along with a sink and toilet, was cut off from the living room by a louvered door that let every sound through. The paper-thin walls that separated our unit from the one next door made us an unwilling audience for our neighbors' constant fights and the orders and admonitions they barked at their children. And, as we were trying to get to sleep, we could watch the smoke from their cigarettes curl over the top of the wall that separated our bedroom from theirs.
Most daunting of all was a large black kerosene heater, the only source of heat, which sat against a living-room wall. The previous occupants of our apartment had installed a gravity feed, bringing the kerosene in from outside; without it, we would have had to go outdoors every morning and carry in the day's supply in a bucket. This convenience feature very nearly caused my premature demise. On the first cool day, I flipped the switch on the heater to activate it. When nothing had happened after several hours, I called Bob at his office to complain and ask for advice. “Well,” he asked, “did you light it with a match?” I'd never before encountered a furnace that required a match but said I'd go do it immediately. “Good Lord, no,” he shouted. “Don't touch anything, and I'll come home right away.” When he did, he bailed several cooking-pots full of kerosene out of the heater, enough to have burned the place down if I had tossed in a lighted match.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the incongruity as I set out our elaborate wedding presents, heavy on sterling silver and leaded crystal, against this drab background. But I got a new perspective when my mother brought as guests a family of Hungarian refugees, including two teenagers. The four, led by their sixteen-year-old son, had risked their lives to walk across the Austro-Hungarian border in the midst of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and had wound up in a hastily established refugee camp at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Fresh from communist Hungary and several stopovers as refugees, the whole family couldn't stop exclaiming how wonderful it must be to start off married life in such a cozy apartment of our own. Seeing it through their eyes gave me a new appreciation of our surroundings.
Our summer as Mama and Papa Woodchuck had postponed a test of my abilities as a homemaker, but now that honeymoon was over. Things had gotten off to a bad start on our first morning together in Princeton, when I attempted to make coffee for my husband, even though I never drank it myself. He thought the result had a rather peculiar taste but attributed it to the exotic Hungarian brand of coffee my grandmother had given us at the end of our brief visit to Washington. Only as I was washing the dishes did I discover that every drop had been filtered through the cardboard packing that I had neglected to remove from our new coffeemaker.
Like many university towns, Princeton had more bright, well-educated young faculty wives than there were interesting jobs for them. In the usually brief interim between marriage and motherhood, these women were expected to occupy themselves with “little jobs,” most of which were excruciatingly boring and made inadequate use of their intelligence and education. I considered myself fortunate to have been hired as an administrative assistant in the planning department of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the producer of the College Boards and a variety of exams required for graduate school admission. But I soon chafed at the vague, ill-defined nature of my job and the fact that I was sent off to perform technical tasks, like time-motion studies, for which I had absolutely no expertise. I felt both that my talents were being underutilized and that I wasn't doing a very good job on the assignments I was given.
Most of my friends from high school had moved away by the time I returned to Princeton, and my father's friends belonged to a different generation, so our social life tended to center on the English Department faculty. A few of the other junior newcomers became good friends, but the Princeton English Department was not a very welcoming place to our small cohort. Many of the older members of the faculty had started teaching at Princeton when it was a traditional WASP institution that reflected its southern origins—most of the town's black residents were the descendants of slaves that undergraduates had brought to college with them before the Civil War. That ambience was reflected in the stir created when, the same year we arrived, the English Department hired Princeton's first black faculty member.
Some of the senior faculty members, with private sources of wealth, owned elegant homes, while others rented one of the large Tudor houses that had been built for Princeton faculty decades earlier. They were an ingrown, clubby group, without the cosmopolitan diversity that had characterized my father's intellectual circle. I was relieved to learn that the wives of senior faculty members had recently abandoned the tradition of a formal visit to newcomers, with white gloves and calling cards. Being condescended to by people who would have sold their souls to be invited to one of the von Neumann cocktail parties while I was growing up would have been bitter medicine.
By the time Bob and I arrived in Princeton, my father had already been in Walter Reed Hospital for several months. He and Klari had moved to Washington when he became a member of the AEC, and he continued to try to carry out his duties as his physical condition steadily worsened. Knowing that time was short, Admiral Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, saw to it that my father was awarded two of our nation's highest honors. He went in a wheelchair to the Oval Office, where President Eisenhower presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As the president was pinning the medal on him, my father commented, “I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor.” “You will be with us for a long time,” the president replied, glossing over the obvious, “we need you.”1 That same year, 1956, my father became the first recipient of the government's highest accolade in science and technology, the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award.
Despite his illness and the overly full schedule demanded by his AEC appointment and his membership on a number of military advisory committees, my father somehow managed to find time to start preparing his Silliman lectures, a prestigious series originally scheduled to be given at Yale in the spring of 1956. This project was particularly important to him because in it he extended the insights that had made the development of the modern computer possible into what was for him a totally new area, neurobiology. The lectures were to be a comparison between the logical processes of the human brain and those of the stored-program computer.
When he entered Walter Reed Hospital for the last time, in April of 1956, the notes for these lectures went with him, and when I visited him that same month he gave me bits and pieces of his ideas. I found these conversations an enormous relief, a positive note in his world, which was becoming increasingly dark. And they helped us avoid a discussion of personal matters, especially my approaching wedding, which gave him so much mental anguish and me such a deep feeling of guilt at being the cause of it. It is one thing for a daughter to defy a father who is in good health, quite another to defy one who is dying.
The Silliman lectures remained unfinished because, as Klari put it in her touching preface to the published version, eventually “even Johnny's exceptional mind could not overcome the weariness of the body.”2 But the unfinished manuscript set forth the reasons for his conclusion that the brain's method of operation is fundamentally different from that of the computer; that while the computer's “von Neumann architecture” means that it operates sequentially, one step at a time, the human brain is “massively parallel,” that is, it performs an enormous number of operations simultaneously. Increasingly intensive explorations in neuroscience over the last fifty-plus years have shown this insight to be not only pioneering but prescient. One of my father's most overwhelming fears as he lay dying was that his work would not endure and he would be forgotten; the unfinished Silliman lectures are but the final addition to a body of work that has given the lie to his fears, though too late for consolation.
We had been in Princeton only a few months when, in February 1957, my father died. Many of his friends and colleagues had been amazed when, a few months before his death, he had expressed a desire to return to the Catholic Church, in which he had been baptized many years before, and asked for the assistance of a Catholic priest. He and Father Anselm Strittmatter, a Benedictine monk, spent many hours together while he could still communicate, and even after he fell silent. His brother, my uncle Nicholas, believed that his request arose primarily out of a desire to talk about the world of Greece and Rome with a fellow classics scholar, but I knew differently. My father had told me more than once that Catholicism was a difficult religion to live in but the best one to die in. Terrified of his own mortality, he found comfort in the promise of personal immortality in an afterlife. Although I didn't share that belief, I had never argued with him about it; I was grateful that he could find some comfort in the midst of his despair.
The funeral mass, held in the chapel of Walter Reed Hospital, was attended by a considerable array of the city's notables and scientific colleagues from around the country. In his homily, Father Anselm spoke eloquently of my father's inquietude of soul: “But as he came more and more to realize that the control over the physical forces of nature which he and his co-workers had placed in the hands of their fellow men could be used for evil as well as for good, that as the world is moving today this control might quite possibly be used for destruction rather than up-building, he felt with steadily increasing intensity the moral problems bound up with the greatest of scientific triumphs…It was not easy for one who had never known frustration, still less failure, to submit to the designs of an inscrutable Providence, to say ‘Thy Will be done,’ once he had come to realize that science could not check the progress of his disease.”3
In contrast to the very public service in Washington, my father's burial next to his mother in the Princeton cemetery was a brief, quiet ceremony, attended by family and a small group of intimates, including both Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, who delivered the graveside eulogy. I was dry-eyed at both events. I had done my mourning months earlier, when the father I knew had already slipped away, leaving only a shrunken shell of a body to linger a little while longer. Although I had long known that it was coming, the finality of his death left me with a lingering sadness and sense of deep regret that my last conversations with my father had been marked not by the epiphany of mutual understanding that so often marks deathbed scenes in novels and plays but by tearful intransigence on my side and a profound sense of disappointment, tinged with betrayal, on his.
During the spring following my father's death, and perhaps accelerated by it, my dissatisfaction with the job at ETS, and with the unfamiliar and humiliating second-class citizenship in Princeton's intellectual circles it represented, crystallized into the recognition that if I wanted to prepare myself for the kind of challenging and rewarding career that was a rarity for married women in the 1950s I had better go to graduate school. During my brief time in the Planning Division, I had discovered that most of the more interesting problems that crossed my desk seemed to relate to economics. Combining that interest with the enthusiasm for journalism nurtured during my college summers at the Long Islander, I decided to pursue two master's degrees, one in economics and another in journalism. The combination, I fancied, would prepare me to write insightful articles on business and economic issues for the New York Times or some equally respected journal.
By the time these plans had crystallized in my mind my new boss at ETS, John Valentine, had been on the job only a week or two. I didn't know him very well, so it was with some embarrassment that I told him I was going to resign and become a graduate student. In a well-meaning if slightly condescending way, John tried to persuade me not to do anything so rash but rather to stay on at ETS and, if I was really serious about a long-term career, work my way up the ladder there. But I held firm; the emotional turmoil caused by my father's decline and death had only intensified my determination to equip myself for professional achievements that lived up to his, and my own, expectations, while at the same time fulfilling my commitment to a family life with my husband and our future children at its center.
As it happened, ETS's Planning Division was abolished shortly after my departure, so I don't think it would have made a very promising launching pad for the career I envisioned. Many years later, when I was a vice president of General Motors and a trustee of Princeton University, Polly Bunting, who had successfully led Radcliffe as its president through the tumultuous 1960s, asked me if I remembered John Valentine. When I replied “of course,” she said John, who was by then president of the College Board in New York, had given her a brief, cryptic message for me. In its entirety, it was “tell Marina Whitman she was right.”
The upshot of my decision was that a good friend, Burt Malkiel, and I applied simultaneously to the graduate program in economics at Princeton. The departmental faculty looked with favor on both our applications but pointed out that, in my case, there was a technical obstacle to overcome. I would have to persuade Harold Dodds, then in the final year of his thirty-five-year career as Princeton's president, to change the university's rule against the admission of women.
As I've described, my interview with President Dodds did not go well. Two years after my vain attempt, Princeton, led by a new young president, Bob Goheen, accepted its first female graduate student. But by that time I was preparing to take my doctoral qualifying exams and start writing my dissertation at Columbia University.
My choice of Columbia was entirely pragmatic; I simply picked out the closest school on the Pennsylvania Railroad that was well known and had an excellent reputation. I was not only accepted but received a generous fellowship, despite the fact that when I walked into the office of Columbia's financial aid officer wearing the fashionable going-away dress from my wedding, along with white gloves, he told me that I looked much too well dressed to need financial assistance. When, as a faculty member, it came my turn to handle admissions and financial aid for the economics department at the University of Pittsburgh, I realized that I would never have admitted myself, let alone awarded a fellowship to a student whose entire preparation for the graduate program had been Harvard's Economics 1. But, fortunately for me, the requirements were more elastic when Columbia decided to take a chance on me.
Commuting daily by train from Princeton to New York, and then taking a long subway ride from Penn Station to the Columbia campus and back, made for very long days, and it wasn't easy to study on the jerky, overcrowded commuter trains. But Bob, who worked long hours himself both in intensive research and in crafting little jewels of lectures that met his perfectionist standards, did everything possible to make things more manageable for me, providing a strength of support that was virtually unheard of among husbands in the 1950s. And I had one of my closest friends from Miss Fine's School for company on the daily trek to New York and back.
Petite Daisy Harper, whose enormous blue eyes and fetchingly tousled curls had been attracting a male following ever since she was a little girl, had started at Radcliffe with me but dropped out at the beginning of her junior year to get married. By the time we moved to Princeton, she had had two children and a divorce in quick succession. She was muddling along as the single mother of two active toddlers, a very different life from the one she had anticipated when, as a talented teenaged violist, she had played string quartets with her family's next door neighbor, Albert Einstein. Determined to finish her college education, she had applied and been accepted to Barnard College, then the women's division of Columbia. We made the daily trek together and often studied together at home over endless cups of coffee.
I was entering uncharted waters when, despite my lack of undergraduate preparation, I signed up for a full load of graduate courses in economics, and I had to work harder than I ever had in college to catch up. The course I found both most challenging and interesting was the required one in microeconomics. It was taught by a brash, brilliant young professor named Gary Becker, whose pathbreaking work in applying formal economic analysis to such decisions as marriage and childbearing eventually won him a Nobel Prize.
Becker's innovative approach to teaching microeconomics gave me a whole new way of making sense of a wide range of questions. It was what I thought of as a mental filing cabinet that enabled me to take real-world questions apart for systematic analysis and then reassemble them into a coherent whole, an approach that has proved invaluable to me not only as a teacher and researcher but as a corporate executive and board member as well. At the end of the term, I was amazed to discover that only two students had received A grades: the sole undergraduate in the class and me. When I asked Becker how that could be, he replied, “That's simple. You two had the least to unlearn.”
My one venture into a course given by the Columbia Business School, on corporate finance, was not such a happy experience, although it was a useful one. The instructor was both boring and unhelpful; when I asked a naive question, he told me I had no business taking his course without the prerequisites and, if I didn't withdraw, he was going to fail me. I replied boldly that I might be ignorant but I wasn't stupid, and I intended to stick it out. When Bob learned about the B+ I got as a final grade, he bought champagne. For the first time in my life, I had broken through the A barrier on the downside, a long-overdue lesson in humility.
Early in my second year at Columbia, Gary Becker called me into his office and asked me if I had considered going on for a PhD in economics. I answered no, that I intended to stop with a master's degree and then move on to a master's in journalism in preparation for the career I envisioned. He commented that he was prepared to offer me a doctoral fellowship if I should chose to go in that direction. The fellowship, underwritten by the conservative Earhart Foundation, carried no teaching duties; its only requirement was a good-faith declaration that I believed in the superiority of a market-oriented economic system.
I had always resisted being pigeonholed politically as either liberal or conservative, but my parents' views, the Cold War environment in which I grew up, and my own research on alternative systems during my high-school and college years had all engendered in me a deep suspicion of statist regimes. So the commitment required by an Earhart fellowship came quite naturally to me. And Becker's proposal intrigued me. I was thoroughly enjoying my study of economics, and I was beginning to think that writing about economic developments as a journalist might not be as satisfying as actually having some impact on those developments. So with little more reflection than a “sure, why not?” I accepted his suggestion and the offer that went with it. With that decision, I took a big step toward defining the direction my intellectual and professional life would take, rather than drifting in a sea of choices, as I had done with my dilettante's selection of undergraduate courses and then with the plan to get master's degrees in two different fields.
In the middle of my second year of doctoral study, I discovered that I was pregnant. We had really meant to wait until I was further along in my studies, but Bob and I were excited at the prospect of becoming parents. There was no way, though, that we wanted to introduce a third person, however small, into our crowded quarters—I had seen too many lines filled with damp diapers strung across the living rooms of other apartments like ours. Armed with money inherited from my father as a down payment, we went looking for our own house. We found one a few blocks away from where we were living. It was a Christmas-card white ranch, small but with a lovely, tree-filled backyard, on a quiet street. We bought the little house and lovingly painted each room a different color—the only do-it-yourself project we have ever successfully completed. Now we had a bathtub, a furnace properly located in the basement, and a nursery for the upcoming addition to our family.
I was uncomfortably aware of the disdain felt by a number of my professors for a married woman, “who would drop out as soon as she became pregnant,” taking up a place “that might have gone to a man” in the PhD program. That knowledge, combined with my natural impatience to get on with it, made me determined to take the doctoral exam before my pregnancy started to show. This meant advancing to the end of my second year an ordeal that most students preferred to delay until the third, after they had completed all the necessary courses and had time for review. The exam, a two-hour oral inquisition on four different subjects, would determine whether or not I would be allowed to go on to write the dissertation required for a PhD. Horror stories abounded about students who, in the stress of the moment, couldn't remember the name of John Maynard Keynes. And the fact that I intended to take the exam early created even more pressure.
As I plunged into intense hours of cramming for the dreaded orals, no amount of coffee could keep me from falling asleep. Guessing that this had something to do with my pregnancy, I tried to make an appointment with a highly regarded obstetrician. He indicated that he had no interest in seeing me until I was a further six weeks along but, told of my difficulty, said he would phone a prescription in to my drugstore. I picked it up, took one pill from the unlabeled bottle every morning (in those days prescription bottles gave no hint as to their contents), and, miraculously, had no more trouble staying awake. Only much later did I find out that I had been popping amphetamines. Given what we have since learned about fetal vulnerability, hardly a day has gone by that I haven't given thanks that such an irresponsible act did no harm to our unborn son. And I've never again taken unidentified pills.
By the time my oral exam came, I could barely squeeze my expanding waistline into a regular suit—if I had sneezed, the crucial button would surely have popped. I was nervous enough anyway, confronting the serious miens of four of my professors across a seminar table. Most terrifying of all was Arthur Burns, the economic forecasting pundit whose mop of iron-gray hair, rasping drawl, and interminable pulls on a pipe between sentences had become familiar outside, as well as inside, the academic establishment. Eventually, he and I would meet again, as near equals, when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and I was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. But I never quite conquered my fear of him, nor got away from the feeling of being student and professor again, as we sat across from each other at monthly meetings in the Fed's elegant lunchroom.
I honestly don't remember how I managed to answer the variety of questions that were put to me during those endless two hours. I only remember the huge sense of relief I felt when I was called back into the room and congratulated on having passed. I had gambled and won my high-stakes bet.
Having passed that hurdle, the next one was to hone in on a subject for my dissertation and find an appropriate supervisor. My long-standing interests pointed to an international topic, and my teacher of international economics, Ragnar Nurkse, a wise and kind Estonian who had previously worked for the League of Nations, would have been my chosen supervisor. But that spring, while hiking in the mountains near Vévey in Switzerland, the fifty-two-year-old Nurkse had suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. Fortunately for me, Albert Hirschman had just come from Yale to join the Columbia economics faculty. A specialist in international trade and economic development, he was already well known for his innovative ideas on political economy.
What made Hirschman a true original among academics, though, was his heroic past, concealed by his merry blue eyes, calm demeanor, and courtly manner. When war broke out in Europe, shortly after he had completed his PhD, the German-born Hirschman joined the underground in German-controlled Vichy France. There he worked with the American journalist Varian Fry, head of a rescue network that helped many Jewish artists and intellectuals escape the Nazis and the Holocaust. Surviving numerous narrow escapes, Hirschman made his way to the United States and joined the American army, before settling into a career as a financial adviser and then a professor. His underground code name was Beamish—which means “beaming with optimism, promise, or achievement”—a name that suited him very well indeed.
Hirschman readily took me on as an advisee, and we talked about how I might focus a dissertation in international political economy, reflecting my long-standing interest in both relationships among nations and the interactions between economics and politics. There was then a great deal of interest in the question of how government loans and guarantees could be used to attract private money into economic reconstruction and development projects abroad, with the goal of shifting more and more of such funding from the public purse to private investors. I had observed that, although proposals for new programs to implement the goals of public policy abounded, much less attention had been given to careful evaluation of how well the programs already in operation were working. So I decided to investigate how effective the existing loan and guarantee programs were at pump priming. When, several years later, a revised version of this study was published by Princeton University Press, I took it as a sign that I was beginning to be heard in the public discourse on policies affecting international relationships.
While I was doing this research, I received another badly needed lesson in humility. I could do a lot of my work at home, but one hot, late summer day, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, I went to New York to keep an appointment with Gary Becker, whom I still regarded as a mentor. I arrived at Penn Station from Princeton in the midst of a subway strike and had to battle a huge crowd, all trying to get taxis.
When I finally arrived at Becker's office, hot, disheveled, and out of breath, I found that he wasn't there. Filled with righteous indignation, I stomped into the office of the department secretary and unburdened myself of a long soliloquy on the irresponsibility of faculty members who didn't keep appointments with students, particularly in light of all I had gone through to get there. When I finally paused for breath, she asked quietly if I would like to know why Professor Becker hadn't showed up. “I certainly would,” I replied. It turned out that his wife, who suffered from postpartum depression, had attempted suicide that morning. My self-righteousness evaporated in an agony of embarrassment.
A few weeks after this incident, our son Malcolm was born. My friends had been amused at the thought of bluestocking Marina becoming a mother, but like many first-time parents, I couldn't believe how enchanted I was by this newborn creature. Fortunately Bob, who had diapered more than one young cousin, could fill in for my total lack of experience where babies were concerned, and it didn't take me long to catch on. My brain, which seemed to have gone into hibernation toward the end of my pregnancy, stayed there for several months afterward, and Bob and I spent much of the time in the happy but sleep-deprived daze common to new parents. It was clear from the very beginning that Bob regarded himself as an equal partner in the parenting adventure, long before such an attitude was fashionable or even socially acceptable.
My husband and my parents were totally supportive of my intention to finish the PhD and then combine motherhood with an academic career. But in the world of the late 1950s my decision was more generally regarded with surprise and, often, disapproval. During my pregnancy, acquaintances and even strangers would respond with raised eyebrows when they learned, in the course of a cocktail party conversation, that I intended to lead a double life as both mother and scholar.
I could take these reactions in my stride, but my mother-in-law was a different matter. A strong and intelligent woman, herself a college graduate at a time when that was rare for a female, she was also an old-fashioned lady closer in age to my grandmother than my mother. Although I liked and admired her, I had always felt that she didn't entirely approve of me. When she learned of my plans, she was horrified. Convinced that I would ruin my health, make my husband miserable, and neglect my children, she told me I was being selfish to insist on going on with a career outside the home. I was upset at the effect that the tension between us was having on Bob, trapped between the views of the two strong-minded women he loved most. I was also terrified that there was a chance she might be right.
Without Bob's staunch support, I might have succumbed to the then-current view of the proper role for a married woman with a family. As it was, I cried a lot and demanded constant reassurance from my husband but stuck to my course. My first publication, my master's thesis revised into a monograph, came out at about the same time that our son was born. In response to my mother's long-ago warnings that I shouldn't let my brains show too much, I inscribed her copy “As evidence that blue stockings don't necessarily form a chastity belt.” I thought I was being terribly clever, but as usual she had the last word: “I think you've married the only man in the world who would put up with you.” The longer Bob and I have been married, the more convinced I am that she was right.
When I resumed my monthly trips to Columbia to discuss the latest chapter of my dissertation with Professor Hirschman, he commented that he hadn't received either a chapter or a visit from me in several months and asked why. When I told him that I had recently had a baby, he looked surprised. Although I had last seen him less than a month before Malcolm's arrival, he had never noticed. Inured as I was to the apprehensions with which other professors regarded the possibility of pregnancy in female students, Hirschman's cheerful insouciance and the genuine warmth with which he congratulated me made me want to hug him. At last someone seemed to recognize that a woman could exercise both her brain and her uterus at the same time.
During all the time that I was going to graduate school and embarking on motherhood, I was in a constant state of anxiety about my husband's career prospects. I nagged him constantly to write more and publish faster in order to enhance his chances for promotion in a department that put a heavy emphasis on scholarly output. But Bob, who preferred to let his ideas germinate at their own pace before committing them to paper, and who devoted as much care and time to the preparation of a lecture for his students as on research for his next journal article, felt that I was trying to impose on him priorities different from his own.
Having grown up in two households where emotions were quick to surface in shouts and arguments, it took me a while to realize that Bob's New England reserve was suppressing the tension and unhappiness created by my nagging. I, on the other hand, assumed that his lack of overt response meant that he didn't share my concerns, increasing my fears about the future. If he didn't get the promotion required for tenure, he would have to leave Princeton, and heaven knows where we would end up. Perhaps my father's fears about exile in some academic outpost, far from the world with which I was familiar and offering little or no professional opportunities for me, might come true.
As it turned out, Bob didn't get tenure at Princeton and had to start looking for a job somewhere else. Over the next few months, he received several job offers and decided to accept one at the University of Pittsburgh, whose ambitious new chancellor, backed by Mellon money, was determined to raise it from a largely commuter school to national status as a research university. My mother, who believed, along with the New Yorker magazine, that civilization stopped at the Hudson River, was appalled. She asked if I would come back to New York to buy my clothes. But I took comfort from the fact that we were going to a good-sized city with several universities, offering the possibility of interesting friends and decent opportunities for me.
One of the first things I discovered about my new hometown was that it didn't deserve its bad rap. Like almost everyone else, I had an image of Pittsburgh as the city where coal-fired steel mills and home furnaces belched smoke that produced actual “darkness at noon” on winter days. Stories about executives going through two white shirts a day and housewives washing their window curtains every week were legion. My own memory of Pittsburgh, where my father and I had spent a night on the homeward leg of our cross-country car trip in 1946, was of a darkened sky and black smoke belching from the “dark satanic mills” that ringed the city's downtown.
By 1960, though, Pittsburgh had undergone the first of several transformations: a drastic cleanup of its polluted atmosphere. What emerged from the murk was a very livable city that converged on a compact downtown located at a point where two rivers, the Allegheny and Monongahela, meet to form the Ohio. Approached from the west, the first view of the city as one emerged from the Fort Pitt tunnel onto the Fort Pitt bridge was—and is—positively stunning: a city bordered by rivers, with high hills on one side and a downtown of landmark corporate headquarters, which became increasingly elegant as the building boom progressed, on the other.
By the time moving day came, I had started to look on the bright side: we were starting the next chapter of our lives in a new city, where no one knew me or my family. “Here's the first chance I've ever had to establish myself as my own person, on a blank slate rather than a template formed by other people's expectations,” I told myself. It was an exhilarating thought. As for my own next steps toward a career, as I commented years later, “I had this kind of innocent, sublime self-confidence that something would turn up.”4
We had been in town only a few weeks when unexpected good fortune walked into our lives in the form of Josephine Pierce. Josephine was a divorced African American single mother of two school-age daughters, girls who called her faithfully every day when they got home from school. It seemed perfectly natural to both of us that she should take on the washing, ironing, and housecleaning, on top of taking full charge of first one and later two small children while Bob and I were at work—a set of duties that would require two or three different people today. She stayed with us for twenty-three years, even moving with us to California, Washington, and Princeton, once her daughters were grown. By the time she retired our own children were adults and, sadly, she was in some ways the only child left, having suffered a series of small strokes that neither she nor we were aware of. In the days before widespread day care, I could never have achieved my twin goals of career and motherhood without such loyal assistance.
While I was still in the midst of finishing my dissertation, I met Benjamin Chinitz, a senior faculty member in the economics department at the University of Pittsburgh. Ben was teaching a course in econometrics at the time and asked me if I would be his teaching assistant. Although my knowledge of econometrics could have gone through the proverbial eye of the needle and left room for the thread, I saw the offer as an interesting challenge, as well as a potential learning experience, and said yes. By dint of some late nights poring over the textbook, I managed to stay a chapter ahead of the students and apparently did a good enough job to persuade Ben to offer me a much more ambitious assignment.
Ben was not only a professor of economics; he was also codirector of an ambitious multiyear study of the economy of the six-county Pittsburgh region, which was beset by a steady decline in employment in the steel industry, the traditional core of its economy. Money for the project was running short, and the academic economists who had been brought together in Pittsburgh to do the research were scattering back to their home institutions before the final volume of the study, a forecast of the region's economic future, had been written. Desperate to finish the project within their rapidly shrinking budget, Ben and his codirector, Ed Hoover, took a chance on an unknown with a PhD completed only a few months previously (in 1962). They asked me if I would be willing to pull together the pieces of the forecast, the work of several different researchers, into a coherent volume.
Never one to just say no to a new challenge (my stepfather Desmond once said I needed “a chastity belt for the mouth”), I took on what all three of us thought would be a fairly simple job of assembling and editing the material. Actually, the task was more complicated; I had to do most of the writing and even fill in some of the gaps in the research. I was driven to the edge of despair several times, but the book, Region with a Future, was completed and published in 1963.5 The two directors of the project were relieved and delighted that I had been able to pull it off. And I could say, only half jokingly, that I written one more book in the field of regional economics than I had read.
With that project completed, Ed Hoover and Ben Chinitz returned to full-time teaching at Pitt, and they took me along with them into my first academic job, as a part-time lecturer teaching the introductory course in international economics to evening students. Most of these people, all men and usually in midcareer, came to class after a full day's work, and it wasn't easy to hold their attention. The fact that I was female, and younger than any of them, made it all the harder to establish my classroom authority.
Just as the first class began, a tall, gray-haired man near the front said, “Excuse me, but are you the teacher?” My yes was followed by a pause. Then he blurted out, “Oh. You see, at U.S. Steel, we don't pay women to think.” Covered with confusion, he tried unsuccessfully to backtrack. I'm sure he blamed his mediocre grade in the course on that revealing gaffe, but I hadn't taken it personally. He had simply stated a fact; an accurate reflection of the culture that prevailed, not only at U.S. Steel, but at other big industrial firms as well. And Pittsburgh, then one of the country's main manufacturing centers, had cleaned up its air but not its social structure, represented not only by its attitude toward women but by the fact that it was a town divided into bosses and workers; there wasn't a group of middle-class professionals large enough to buffer the city's “us against them” mentality. Up until that moment, I had studied and worked in academic environments. When the man from U.S. Steel blurted out his surprise, the extent of male domination in the “real world” hit me full force.
With a toddler at home and now another child on the way, I found part-time teaching was just the right amount of professional involvement. But on the first day of the fall term in 1963, the senior professor in my field dropped dead of a heart attack in the departmental office. Desperate to fill the holes in the teaching schedule, and without knowing that I was pregnant, Ben, the department chairman, asked me to change my status from part-time lecturer to full-time assistant professor and take on the two courses now without a teacher. With some misgivings, but with the “I can tackle anything” enthusiasm of youth, I agreed. It turned out that hiring the spouse of a faculty member into a full-time position violated the university's strict nepotism rules, but by the time the bureaucrats in the personnel department noticed I was settled into my courses, and no one wanted to do battle with the economics department to dislodge me.
The course I was most excited about was one on the interactions between international trade and economic development that I developed and taught with a friend and colleague, Jerry Wells, who had spent several years in Nigeria doing field research for his PhD. Jerry and I both were committed to the idea that being open to economic relationships with other countries was a distinct plus for countries trying to mount the ladder of economic development. Ours was a contrarian view; the theory of development popular at the time called for government dominance of economic activity, high import barriers, and an economy as self-sufficient as possible. We were ahead of the curve, but the mainstream began to move gradually in our direction. And we pulled at least some of our students along with us, although we didn't find out how successful we'd been till decades later. One of the most radical and anticapitalist of those students, who later became a distinguished professor and department chairman at Bryn Mawr, teaching courses in business, as well as economics, wrote me that “the seminar the two of you taught changed my life.”
While Bob and I were settling into our family and professional lives in Pittsburgh, all hell was breaking loose in the world around us. Two events in 1961 escalated the temperature of the Cold War with the Soviet Union: President Kennedy's failed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba through the Bay of Pigs; and the Soviets' construction of the Berlin Wall, which isolated the population in the eastern part of the city from their counterparts on the western side. The Cold War very nearly boiled over into a hot one the following year, when American ships blockaded Cuban ports in order to prevent the Russians from placing missiles with atomic warheads in that country, only sixty miles from US shores. I walked into Ed Hoover's office when we got the news, to ask him if he thought this meant the onset of atomic war. Ed, ever calm, was reassuring, but it was a couple of days before the nation was sure that the Soviets had backed down.
Worse was yet to come. I was sitting under a hair dryer on the Friday before Thanksgiving 1963, heavily pregnant with our second child, when word came that President Kennedy had been shot. As our disbelief was gradually replaced with horrified acceptance, my colleagues and I wandered around the department offices in a daze, trying to figure out how to respond to a national tragedy far beyond our experience. At home, Bob and I struggled to explain to four-year-old Malcolm what had happened. He found the permanence of death a hard concept to absorb and, at one point, shouted triumphantly, “Mommy, Daddy, he isn't dead; I just saw him on TV.”
In the days that followed, Jack Ruby emerged from obscurity to shoot and kill John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in full view of millions of Americans glued to their television sets. And, in La Jolla, California, my father's widow, my stepmother Klari, now remarried to a research physicist, fulfilled her father's legacy of suicide by walking into the Pacific Ocean to her death. Sadly, there could be no question as to her intentions. In ruling that her death was attributable to “suicide by drowning,” the Coroner's Office of San Diego County noted that the skirt of her elegant black cocktail dress had been rolled up to hold “approximately 15 pounds of wet sand.”6
Although her emotional demands had driven my father crazy throughout most of their marriage, Klari had turned into a dedicated caretaker, closely attuned to his needs, exhausting herself both physically and emotionally after he fell ill. I had hoped that in her marriage to the gentle, low-key Carl Eckart she would at last find the tranquility that had eluded her throughout her life. For a time, she thought she had. In one draft of her autobiography, she describes her life in California: “I have met and made friends with many new people, I also get to see many of my old pals, Carl works at his desk, I swim and loaf and, for the first time in my life, I have relaxed and stopped chasing rainbows.”7
I will never know what happened to move Klari from satisfaction to suicide. Whatever it was, her death revived my guilt at having unwittingly contributed to her deep-seated insecurity, by rejecting her efforts to serve as a stand-in for my mother during my teenage years. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, the pileup of tragedies made the idea of a day commemorating our blessings seem like a cruel irony.
True to her academic heritage, Laura Whitman was born during Christmas vacation, on January 3, 1964. Her timing allowed me to finish the teaching term, despite my mother-in-law's admonitions against exposing myself to “the young people” in such a delicate condition—then a common view among the older generation. From the start, Laura was a placid and cheerful baby; a good thing since, thanks to her brother's vulnerability to childhood illnesses, the circumstances surrounding her arrival were anything but.
Just before Christmas, Malcolm had come down with chicken pox. My obstetrician told me, first, that my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, who was visiting for the holidays, might contract the disease in the form of painful shingles and, second, that if I hadn't had chicken pox and did contract it, the baby might actually be born with it, which meant I certainly wouldn't be allowed to deliver at the maternity hospital. Fortunately, I did have the disease in childhood, and Laura was born in Magee-Women's Hospital without incident.
On the day that she and I came home from the hospital, though, Malcolm developed scarlet fever. He wasn't dangerously ill, but it meant that an infant who was fed every six hours had to be awakened to take a preventive dose of penicillin every four, rendering her parents even more sleepless than usual. Malcolm topped off the plague-house syndrome by coming down with German measles when his sister was less than a month old. It was a mild illness but dangerous to the fetuses of pregnant women, and no vaccine was yet available, so I thought it might not be a bad idea for Laura to get it over with early in life. My mother-in-law was horrified at the idea, and, despite my efforts to expose her, Laura remained robustly healthy.
When I returned to teaching from maternity leave, the economics department had a new chairman. Mark Perlman was an economist with an impressively broad knowledge of history, literature, and philosophy, in addition to his own field. He was also a deeply religious Conservative Jew, who viewed the world through a moralistic lens without the narrow-mindedness that is so often associated with the word. The formality of his dress and manner of speech was leavened by the brightly colored bow ties he habitually wore and by sudden, surprising bursts of humor.
Mark was a wise and generous professional mentor to me, the first person who took seriously my goal of climbing the academic ladder, and gave me practical advice on how to go about it. He asked me to spend a year as the department's associate chairman, handling all the applications for graduate admissions and financial aid, while he got his bearings in a new environment. In return, he promised to guide and encourage me through the steps required for promotion. He was as good as his word; within two years of his arrival I was promoted to associate professor and received the lifetime job security of tenure that went with it.
At a time when women were first entering this man's world, managing my relationships with male colleagues was not always so smooth. Over several years, I wrote a series of articles with a somewhat younger junior colleague. As coauthors, our skills were complementary: I was good at formulating ideas about how international monetary interactions worked, and he had the statistical skills needed to test how well these hypotheses fitted the facts. But after we'd been working together for a while, he started touching me “accidentally” and hinting that we should make our relationship more than professional. “Back off,” I growled. When he didn't take the hint, I told him that he would have to behave or our collaboration would stop. Our joint articles, which appeared in several leading economics journals, were an important part of the publications portfolio he needed to be promoted to tenure, so my threat had the desired effect. But this was neither the first nor the last time, beginning with my evasive action to keep my senior thesis adviser at Radcliffe at bay, that I had to use my wits to keep relationships with male colleagues from straying off the reservation.
As I was climbing the academic ladder at the University of Pittsburgh, Bob was moving upward a couple of rungs ahead of me. Recruited as an assistant professor in 1960, by 1967 he had become both a full professor and chairman of the English department, having published a well-received book on dramatic literature the preceding year. During the four-plus years of his chairmanship, he rejuvenated that department, recruiting a number of talented young PhDs from leading universities, many of whom became widely recognized scholars during their careers at Pitt.
In the second half of the 1960s, three developments together transformed American culture: the civil rights movement, the emergence of feminism in the form of a definable women's movement, and the mass protests against the escalating Vietnam War. The coalescence of these three movements—which spurred a broader economic, social, and cultural radicalism in many professors and students—permanently altered the face of American college campuses and, ultimately, of the nation itself.
No one knows exactly how and when mass movements originate, but two events, both in 1963, were important markers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr articulated the goals of the civil rights movement in his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to some two hundred thousand demonstrators in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28. At about the same time, Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique struck a chord with many American women as she described the frustrations and limitations of the housewifely role that postwar American culture defined as a return to normalcy. This consciousness-raising, together with the increasing availability of the Pill, which enabled women to make individual decisions about birth control and the connection between sex and motherhood, created a powerful launching pad for the developments that, over the succeeding decades, vastly broadened women's choices in shaping their own lives. And I, who had started out without role models for encouragement, gradually acquired more company in knocking down gender barriers and had to spend less time defending the path I had chosen.
While the impact of the women's movement built gradually, in an evolutionary and nonviolent way, the civil rights movement spurred powerful responses. The positive response was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the brightest spot in the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson. The negative responses were both numerous and horrifying. They included the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the “freedom summer” of 1964; the brutality with which local police responded to the peaceful marches for civil rights in Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama; and the Ku Klux Klan's assassination of one participant in the latter march, a white wife and mother from suburban Detroit named Viola Liuzzo, because she was riding in a car with a black man. And the mid-1960s were scarred by riots in the black ghettos of many large American cities that caused deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction of property. The worst one was in Detroit in 1967; after more than forty years, the city has still not recovered.
I blush now to admit that I never took part in the marches or other public protests that marked these tradition-shattering developments. Although I was a trailblazer for feminist goals in the conduct of my own life and career, I never tried to advance feminists' political aims, or those of the civil rights movement, through public declarations or actions. In later years, I came to regret this passivity, wishing that I had spoken out more forcefully against the wrongs these movements were committed to righting. I came to recognize that being the mother of two small children (Viola Liuzzo had five), preoccupied with work and family, was not an adequate excuse.
It was years before I fully acknowledged how much the political and cultural changes stimulated by the women's movement had spurred my own professional advancement. And throughout my life I have exerted pressures for reform by working inside established institutions rather than protesting against their failings from the outside. I genuinely believe that both kinds of behavior are essential for change, but I can't deny that my desire to be liked rather than reviled, included rather than excluded, shaped my own choices.
There was no escaping, though, the impact of the Vietnam War and the escalating protests it engendered. American troops were first sent as combatants to Vietnam in the summer of 1965, and by 1966 teach-ins, sit-ins, and more violent forms of protest were erupting on college campuses all over the country. In many cases, protests against the war melded with black students' grievances. On my own undergraduate campus, a black Harvard student named Franklin Raines called for revolution from the steps of Widener Library, and at Bob's alma mater, Cornell University, a black student named Tom Jones, leader of a group occupying Willard Straight Hall, was photographed on the building's steps, a rifle over his shoulder and a cartridge belt filled with bullets across his chest. No one could have foreseen that, in their middle years, both these men would become pillars of the establishment as top executives of major financial institutions, nor that Frank Raines would chair the Harvard Board of Overseers.
The storm of violence at our leading universities became minor ripples when they reached the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt students, many of them the first in their families to go to college, were more interested in joining the establishment than tearing it down. But there were noticeable reverberations in our university environment. I wasn't particularly shocked by the eruption of four-letter words in students' everyday conversation (my mother had been expert in the use of profanity, after all), but I was taken aback by the fact that they didn't seem to have any other vocabulary at all. There were also more serious pressures on the faculty. Male students had to maintain a certain grade-point average to avoid losing their student draft deferments, and more than one student informed me ominously that the C grade I had just given him could be signing his death warrant. Thus grade inflation was born, and, though I tried to resist it, I soon found myself giving more As and fewer Cs and Ds than ever before.
Several of my colleagues in the economics department, along with some of the graduate students, joined the Union of Radical Political Economists, better known as URPE. Their rebellion was cultural, as well as political, and faculty-student pot parties became regular events. My husband, God bless him, showed himself deserving of a medal for squareness; at one such party, he mentioned to me that it smelled as if dinner was burning. I explained to him that the sweetish odor came from burning marijuana.
At one point a group of URPE members, joined by like-thinking colleagues from other departments, went downtown to picket the Duquesne Club, the city's dining club for the all-white, all-male business leaders of the community and their families. The picketers were humiliatingly driven off by members of the service staff brandishing dishtowels and other household implements. But, to simplify security measures, the club decided to close permanently the side door through which visiting women had to enter. After it was all over, I teased my colleagues who had been involved, “The net result of your picketing has been to allow me through the front door of the Duquesne Club.”
With the rapid-fire disasters of 1968, the ugliness of the turmoil in the world outside broke with full force into the relative calm of our own environment. Jerry Wells and I had just brought our seminar students back to my house on the evening of April 4 for an informal pizza party to celebrate the end of the winter term. His wife, Nancy, who had been setting out food and drink, met us at the door, looking even paler than usual, to tell us that Martin Luther King had just been fatally shot. Our celebration rapidly turned into a wake. Riots broke out all over again in a number of cities as their black residents reacted to the wanton murder of their leader in the struggle for full recognition as human beings and citizens. Barely two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother and his attorney general, was gunned down in a passageway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Lyndon Johnson, reviled by some for his support of the civil rights movement and by others for the escalation of the Vietnam War, had announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not run again, putting the nomination of a Democratic presidential candidate up for grabs. At the party's August convention in Chicago, the public fury that had been building on both sides of the Vietnam War issue erupted into terror when police responded to antiwar demonstrations by using billy clubs, tear gas, and Mace on just about everyone in sight, resulting in numerous injuries but, fortunately, no deaths.8 Even inside the convention hall, surrounded by barbed wire, journalists were roughed up by security forces. The battle for the nomination between the strongly antiwar Eugene McCarthy and the more moderate Hubert Humphrey was virtually submerged by the spectacle of a nation tearing itself apart.
Bob and I, like almost everyone we knew, viewed these events through the lens of our black-and-white TV set, the horror of the images in no way mitigated by their small size and fuzzy resolution. What was happening to our country, one of whose proudest hallmarks for more than a hundred years, since the end of the Civil War, had been its ability to effect orderly political transitions? I never dreamed that I would soon be observing antiwar protests not on a television screen but from the windows of a large stone building next door to the White House.