Yale Needs Women by Anne Gardiner Perkins

Author:Anne Gardiner Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: EDU016000 Education / History, HIS037070 History / Modern / 20th Century, HIS058000 History / Women
Publisher: Sourcebooks

TEN

Reinforcements

As the Yale Corporation met in New Haven that December and decided once again to leave Yale’s gender quotas unchanged, a fundamental shift was occurring in Washington, DC. For the first time, the federal government halted payment on a university contract because of sex discrimination.1 Unless the University of Michigan stopped blocking women from applying for jobs reserved for men, stopped underpaying their women employees, and stopped the discrimination that kept women to just 4 percent of its full professors, Michigan would lose $4 million in federal funding.

The day after the Michigan news hit the press, Yale assistant professor Charlotte Morse bumped into her colleague Bart Giamatti in a New Haven coffee shop. “What the hell difference would it make to Yale if the feds cut off our funding?” she asked. Giamatti looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “About 33 percent of the annual operating budget.”2

No laws yet barred colleges and universities from discriminating against women. Instead, an executive order signed by former president Lyndon Johnson had blocked Michigan’s money. Executive Order 11246 had been on the books since 1965, but its use to fight gender discrimination was new.3 The order had initially barred discrimination by federal contractors on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin—but not gender. Johnson amended it in 1967 to add women, but even then the order sat unused for that purpose until Bernice Sandler read about it in 1969.4

Sandler held a PhD from the University of Maryland and had been told a few months earlier that she was unsuited for any of the seven open positions in her department because she “came on too strong for a woman.”5 After two more job rejections—the first because the interviewer said he never hired women, the second because Sandler was “not really a professional” but “just a housewife”—Sandler began researching to see what the law had to say about how she was treated.6 Not much, it turned out, but one afternoon, while reading about the efforts of black Americans to end public school segregation, Sandler came across Executive Order 11246 in a footnote and shrieked out loud at the discovery. Here was the tool that women could use to gain equity in U.S. colleges.

By December 1970, when the University of Michigan penalty was announced, Sandler had used Executive Order 11246 to help women file sex discrimination complaints at more than two hundred U.S. campuses.7 Yale was not yet on the list, but that was about to change. On January 29, 1971, U.S. secretary of labor James Hodgson received two letters from Yale, one from women clerical workers and the other from women faculty and administrators.8 Both letters alleged rampant gender discrimination and requested an immediate federal investigation. Two days later, Hodgson was copied on a third complaint against Yale, this one from Sandler herself.

Kingman Brewster may have delayed Wasserman’s coeducation report long enough the previous year that its challenge to Yale’s thousand-man quota was ignored, but the report also contained a dozen pages of data on the status of women at Yale, and Bernice Sandler had a copy.

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