The relation of Harvard to its women is similar to that of the missionary to his heathen. And your feelings, if you’re a woman who has made it to America’s loftiest and oldest bastion of intellect and the ruling class, are often similar to those of the heathen imported for cultural development to imperialist shores – a mixture of gratitude, awe, doubt that you’re worth the honor, and sometimes, dimly or blazingly, resentment that you’re considered inferior. Everywhere around you, whether you’re a student or an employee, are subtle testimonies to your biological obtrusiveness. Those sober suited gentlemen who, with scholarly purpose and carefully averted eyes, sidestep you in the shadowy corridors of the Widener stacks, those men younger and older who, as you enter the Widener reading room, inspect your legs as you pass to your seat; or who, in Holyoke offices, inspect your legs as you pass to your desk; all of the masculine Worthies on the conglomerate Harvard faculties, with their mild manners, their green bookbags, their after-dinner-sherry gentility and their government affiliations, overwhelm you with the sense that your womanhood is never neutral, but always provocative – of intellectual opprobrium, of patronage humorous or curt, of sexual appraisal, of sexual advance. so that your sexuality at Harvard, as in society at large, is made for you an ever-present, a gnawing thing, to be dealt with in whatever way you can. Few people realize that some women at Harvard live in the fear that it may some day be discovered that they women; that the human fact of their biological makeup even exists! In fact all women students and faculty are forced by the structure of the curriculum and by the content of scholarship to neuter their minds and their work. Other ‘options’ besides the ‘option’ of passing are equally oppressive: women students may try for the ultimate combo, a smiling and sexy exterior and an atom-split ting mind. For women employees there is only one option – to sail through work with a smiling exterior (and a sexy one if she’s under forty-five) and a mind blissful in the knowledge that she’s at Harvard – ‘a GREAT place to work,’ as an ad that confronts you at the Park St. MTA stop puts it. In any event there’s no forgetting the issue. To enter the Harvard Faculty Club, say, or a Common Room; worse yet, to set foot in that villa of the mind created for the cream of the future ruling crop, the Society of Fellows, is somehow to commit an act faintly indecent. You feel as if you’ve trailed the world of feminine effluvia into the world of the mind.
To work at Harvard – as a file clerk or as a student – is to work for the Man. Departments and administrative offices, chaired and headed by men, and staffed by men at the higher levels of command, are nearly universally staffed by women at the lower levels of obedience and service. So that within the onerous relationship -of wage-labor personnel to management there enters the additional burden of sexism, which demands a pleasing appearance (and often enough encourages a sexually provocative one; puts a little pzazz into the routine…); the willingness to serve cheerfully as the woman behind the Man – or, to use the common term, the ‘girl’ behind the Man. (As in: ‘I’ll send my girl down with coffee.’) Sexism in the Harvard bureaucracy has its subtle permutations. A widely-acknowledged rumor, for example, is that your pay goes up in accordance with the status of the Man you’re working for. Professor X, with his joint-departmental appointment and his spin-off think tank work in Washington, can, for example, command a higher salary for his pretty menial than, say, Assistant Professor Y can, or lower-level administrator Mr. z. To be at the lowest level in the hierarchy of intellectual workers – to be a student – is, for a woman, to be expected as a matter of course to accept the masculine bias of virtually all scholarship. This needn’t be the so-called ‘scholarship’ as blatantly male-supremacist as Erik Erikson’s famous blather about psychological ‘inner’ and ‘outer space.’** It may in here more subtly in the simple acceptance by one’s professors and by the books 9ne reads that male supremacy and female inferiority (tr. ‘nurturance,’ ‘passivity,’ etc.) are physiologically determined and hence unquestionable. All the way down the line, as this pamphlet’s section on curriculum points out, coursework and scholarship are loaded; they demand that women, in order to learn, unsex their minds even as their male col leagues further nourish the sexual bias of their own.
Women are thus forced daily to undergo a kind of intellectual lobotomy, while their more real selves, deprecated or ignored in the classroom, go on in the daily paths of their living – in the street, in dorms in apartments. They have dates, go to bed with men, sometimes become pregnant and get blamed for that — and prepare for marriage. A large truth about the Harvard curriculum is that the dogma it fosters undercuts the very reason for the presence of women on campus.
Learning for women is paradoxical: at the same time as it lends credence to male-supremacist norms that regulate women’s social and economic roles in the society, it pretends to be a professional preparation for all, equally.
According to the structure of Harvard courses, undergraduates are graduate students in training; graduate students are in training for jobs; women graduates and undergraduates are then also in training, and presumably they’ll get the jobs they’re in training for. (Q.E.D ) Such, however, is not the case.
Never were the economics of all women’s oppression so succinctly put as when Dean of Harvard freshmen F. Skiddy Von Stade (sic) commented on the role of Radcliffe women in the Harvard strike, 1969: ‘They were so insolent, the worst of the bunch. At least you have to respect the boys just a little since they have something real riding on this. The thing is Vietnam for many of them, and if they get chucked out for this their chances of being sent there are far greater. But if the girls get heaved, they’ll just go off to secretarial school.’ (Bos. Sun. Globe, Oct. 12, 1969) Apparently Skiddy doesn’t understand the real facts about social channeling, and having drawn no relationship between the reason ‘boys’ are sent to Vietnam while ‘girls’ are sent to secretarial school, neither does he go very far in his conjectures about the latter. In fact a ‘girl’ with a Radcliffe .A. can, often enough, get only a secretarial or a lower-level technical job. In this the kinship of ‘educated women with ‘uneducated’ ones is clear – they are all included in the basic definition of women’s role in the political economy: they serve as unpaid household labor, that is, as ‘wives and mothers. Any other job you take, if you’re a woman, is culturally, in so far as the world judges you; psychologically, insofar as you judge yourself and economically, inasmuch as you’re paid less, relative to that primary role-definition. This holds as true for a Radcliffe woman as it does for her sister at North Shore community College, not to mention her sister with no college education at all. Malcolm X said to the Black professor: ‘You know what you call Black man with a PhD? You call him nigger. And a woman with an education is still a chick, a broad, a skirt, a piece of ass, a “girl”. As Robin Morgan recently wrote in an article in RAT, in the dark, we’re all the same–and we’re ALL in the dark….