----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Women students were allowed into Harvard classrooms for the first time in... 1943! But, even after that, the diploma for women was from Radcliffe College, nicknamed "The Harvard Annex", until 1963! In the 50s, Barbara Bergmann says that the doctorate classes she attended were identical for men and women, but the Ph D for women was officially from Radcliffe. She notes that it must have been too expensive to maintain separate classes for men and women at the graduate level even at the time of Elisabeth Boody Schumpeter and Elisabeth W Gilboy. (The Radcliffe website says that in 1963 "Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is opened to women and Radcliffe Graduate School closes"; but I dont know what exactly this means, when contrasted with first-hand information from Barbara Bergmann) Barbara Bergmann was appointed Instructor at Harvard Economics Department, after completing her Ph D in 1958. (In 1952, when she arrived, women were not allowed to be teaching fellows). She thinks that she was not the first to get such a degree: Alice Rivlin and Soo Chaung Kahn may have got their Ph D degree before her. Anne Carter was the first woman assistant professor of economics at Harvard in the late sixties. (She was by then senior enough for a higher post: she was a Senior Research Associate, Director of Research of the Harvard Economic Research Project, established by Wassily Leontief; and had a rather respectable CV, so it was impossible for John Dunlop, then Professor of economics, to claim, as he usually did, that there were no suitable women to appoint). The first tenured female professor was... appointed much later; probably Claudia Goldin, in the late eighties. I find all this rather shocking. Allen's affirmation "Harvard was not very broad-minded about hiring women" (_Opening Doors_, vol. II, p. 30), talking about Elisabeth Boody (later E. B. Schumpeter) in 1934, clearly fell short. The same struggle took place in England half a century before. Even in Francoist Spain, conservative women were proud of attending to University classes in the 40s. So, my question is, is this a Harvard or Boston peculiarity, or were most Universities at United States similar in their policy about hiring women? Thanks to Anne Carter and Barbara Bergmann for their invaluable first-hand information, and to Robert Dimand, Johanna Bockman and John Reeder for their kind and useful information. ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]