progress in all aspects of public life. While women's participation in the political process proved less vigorous than many supporters had hoped, a product of the changing national political climate as well as women's own interests, there is no doubt that the entitlement to vote ushered in a greatly expanded sense of w men's possibilities. But if the next decades marked a symbolic and actual triumph of women's political options, the record of their intellectual progress is less propitious. In certain respects, the 1920s witnessed a critical advance in the educated woman's prospects. As Patricia Graham points out, in the 1920s women achieved their highest proportion of the undergraduate population, doctoral recipients; and faculty members, reaching a peak not again equaled until the 1970s. Nevertheless, widespread sex discrimination in academic hiring, promotions, and salary denied educated women economic and occupational security and reduced their opportunities for intellectual productivity. These circumstances continued for the next half century. Discrimination was only partially considered in the slew of popular and scholarly articles at the time that criticized women's intellectual achievements and raised the question of whether, indeed, women possessed the highest attributes of mind. Although the empirical investigations more than two decades earlier of social scientists like Helen Thomas Woolley and Leta HollingJoyce Antler teaches American studies at Brandeis University, where she formerly directed the Women s Studies Program. She was a founder and cochair of the Graduate Consortium in Women s Studies at Radcliffe College.