“It Is Hardly News that Women Are Oppressed”: Sexism, Activism, and Charlie

Abstract

I first met Charlie in 1961 when I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was a rather odd position for me because I was in my second year of graduate school in the department of experimental psychology at Harvard. This arrangement, however, illustrates the kind of discrimination against women in experimental psychology during the early 1960s (as well as earlier and later). I will briefly outline why I was working at MIT to contrast the attitudes and behaviors of the Harvard faculty with Charlieʼs kindness and support of women. Sexism was particularly virulent at Harvard. There were, of course, no female faculty members and only two female postdoctoral fellows during the six years I studied there. The first week I arrived, Richard Herrnstein, the director of the graduate program, called a meeting of the first-year graduate students and announced that only one in two men were expected to obtain their PhD and only one of four women. I do not know if the percentages were correct. However, in an examination of PhD recipients during the time the program existed as a separate department (1951–1973), 99 men received their PhD and only 14 women. These figures might help explain why I was supervising a very large class in introductory psychology at MIT. The Harvard department had been founded by E. G. Boring, who, like his mentor Titchener, did not believe that women should be experimental psychologists (Furumoto, 1988). Boring did not believe that women could survive the grueling 80-hr week prescribed for scholarly success at Harvard. Men who survived the very difficult first-year curriculum were routinely offered research assistantships with one or another of the faculty members. Because they did not believe that women would go on to do productive scholarship and enhance their mentorsʼ reputations, women were not offered research positions. When I passed my first yearʼs classes and requested financial aid, they “solved” the problem by making an arrangement with Hans-Lukas Teuber who was starting a neurosciencefocused psychology program at MIT and did not yet have enough graduate students to help with the undergraduate program. I still do not know who paid for this, but I got my tuition and a stipend as well. It proved to be an opportunity to get to know and work with Charlie. Professor Teuber was very supportive when I told him I was interested in physiological psychology and introduced me to Charlie and Steve Chorover, who were studying the frontal cortex of monkeys at that time. They allowed me to assist in operations and taught me how to use stereotaxic devices. When I decided to do some research in a related area, the only animals available in the Harvard laboratory were pigeons and rats. Charlie and Steve believed that the caudate nucleus of lower mammals had some of the functions of the frontal cortex in primates so I began to examine the effect of caudate nucleus lesions on the ability of rats to make rapid temporal and spatial shifts. This allowed me to use sophisticated operant conditioning techniques available in Skinnerʼs lab. Harvard did not have any objection to this combination of physiological psych and operant conditioning, and Charlie became my more or less official advisor. The transition to official thesis advisor was made easy because Charlie joined the Harvard experimental psychology program as an assistant professor in 1964. I tried to convince him not to do so because I believed he would be incompatible with its sexist and politically conservative faculty. By the time I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation in 1966, Charlie and Dick Herrnstein (another member of my doctoral committee because of the operant techniques I used) were barely on speaking terms. Some of you may remember Herrnstein as the coauthor of The Bell Curve, which argued that intelligence was genetically determined and underlay social class as well as racial differences (Herrnstein & Murray, 1973, 1994). Charlie was very opposed to such social Darwinist theories and later opposed Herrnsteinʼs giving a lecture at Princeton. On the basis of the autobiography that Charlie wrote for the American Psychologist when he received APAʼs gold medal for achievement in science (Gross, 2005), some might argue that Charlieʼs progressive beliefs were related to his fatherʼs progressive politics. Ironically, Herrnstein came from a very similar background. He Brandeis University