{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/4t6f18t220/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Gersick, Connie Goldman, 2009 June 5"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Gersick, Connie Goldman, 2009 June 5. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.\n\n https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559."]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801884"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-A-042_gersick_connie_goldman_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2009 June 5 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Connie Goldman Gersick was born in 1948 in Davenport, Iowa, and was raised in Rock Island, Illinois, where her father ran the family furniture store.  She began her undergraduate education at the University of Michigan but transferred to Brandeis University at the end of her sophomore year to be closer to her boyfriend who was an undergraduate at Yale.  They had grown up in the same small Jewish community and known each other since 6th grade.   They married in June 1969 and Gersick dropped out of college to go live with her husband in New Haven.   Whilst he completed his senior year at Yale, she got a job as secretary and assistant to Elga Wasserman, who had been hired by President Kingman Brewster to oversee the implementation of coeducation at Yale.  \n\nKelin Gersick graduated in 1970 and was admitted to Harvard graduate school; Connie Gersick returned to Brandeis, graduating magna cum laude in 1971.  In her final year at Brandeis she was actively involved in the women’s movement and, inspired by working for Elga Wasserman, chose a career in university administration, specializing in working with women. In 1972 she gained a M.Ed. in College and Adult Counseling at Boston University School of Education.  From 1972-1975 she was Admissions Officer and Special Programs Officer at Radcliffe College, appointed by Matina Horner who had recently become the college president.  During this time, Gersick had her first child, but continued in the post half-time.  \n\nIn 1975, Kelin Gersick finished his Ph.D. at Harvard and took a junior faculty position at Yale just as the Directorship of the Office on the Education of Women came vacant.  At the age of 26, Connie Gersick was appointed its Director.  She held the post for two years but then decided to return to graduate school as she believed a Ph.D. would enable her to progress more successfully in higher education administration.  She gained a doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Yale in 1984, and during this time she had her second child.  The family decided that the next move would be to further Connie Gersick’s career, so they moved to California when she was appointed Assistant Professor of Management, and then Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, where she remained until 2001.  Whilst at UCLA she spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School (1996-1997) and was Co-Area Chair, Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson School (1997-1999).  From 2001-2007 she was Associated Faculty at the Simmons School of Management.  She was the founding director of the Women’s Leadership Institute, an executive education workshop at UCLA.  She is also a Research Associate at Lansberg, Gersick and Associates, and Visiting Scholar, Yale School of Management.  \n\nConnie Gersick’s work focuses on quantitative research in adult development; individual, group and organizational change and adaptation; and the effects of time and deadlines on work and learning. She is the author of many articles in this field and she has won a number of national awards for her research publications on group work and change processes.  At time of writing she is researching a book called Journeys Into Womanhood: Life Lessons from a Pathbreaking Generation. (Bioghist)","After touching briefly on her background, Connie Gersick talks at length about the male undergraduate culture she encountered at Yale in the late 1960s and how many aspects of it prevailed even after coeducation began in 1969.  In particular she describes what it was like to negotiate the social and sexual politics of the “mixer” culture.  An account is given of how Sixties countercultural values began to infiltrate campus life when the admissions policy reforms begun in 1965 by the then Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Insley “Inky” Clarke, opened up Yale to a broader spectrum of undergraduates. Her decision to drop out of college to get married is discussed, along with her first encounter with second wave feminism.  She recalls the moment when she discovered Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and how it impacted on her recent marriage.  \n\nGersick discusses the work of the Yale for the Coeducation of Women and the issues surrounding coeducation, especially the pressures on the first cohort of women undergraduates.  She recalls her return to Brandeis, her growing involvement in women’s issues, and her first encounter with some of the major figures in second wave feminism, especially Alice Walker.  \n\nHer work as Admissions Officer and Special Programs Officer at Radcliffe College is briefly described.  Then Gersick talks at length about the political and personal challenges of the job as Director of the Yale Office on the Education of Women, in particular her interactions with feminist groups on campus and the Provost’s Office. She pays tribute to a number of women in the Yale administration like Etta Onat, Betty Trachtenberg and Judy Hackman.  \n\nLastly Gersick talks about the experience of bringing up two children and the egalitarianism which she considers a hallmark of her marriage in the context of women’s careers, and how these personal experiences have inspired her academic research into the culture of organizations and the challenge of changing institutional culture to enable women to flourish in the workplace. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;b2275cb9-c7d5-4644-a80d-355902089705 (Other Finding Aid Note)","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software. (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["The materials are open for research.","Connie Goldman Gersick was born in 1948 in Davenport, Iowa, and was raised in Rock Island, Illinois, where her father ran the family furniture store.  She began her undergraduate education at the University of Michigan but transferred to Brandeis University at the end of her sophomore year to be closer to her boyfriend who was an undergraduate at Yale.  They had grown up in the same small Jewish community and known each other since 6th grade.   They married in June 1969 and Gersick dropped out of college to go live with her husband in New Haven.   Whilst he completed his senior year at Yale, she got a job as secretary and assistant to Elga Wasserman, who had been hired by President Kingman Brewster to oversee the implementation of coeducation at Yale.  \n\nKelin Gersick graduated in 1970 and was admitted to Harvard graduate school; Connie Gersick returned to Brandeis, graduating magna cum laude in 1971.  In her final year at Brandeis she was actively involved in the women’s movement and, inspired by working for Elga Wasserman, chose a career in university administration, specializing in working with women. In 1972 she gained a M.Ed. in College and Adult Counseling at Boston University School of Education.  From 1972-1975 she was Admissions Officer and Special Programs Officer at Radcliffe College, appointed by Matina Horner who had recently become the college president.  During this time, Gersick had her first child, but continued in the post half-time.  \n\nIn 1975, Kelin Gersick finished his Ph.D. at Harvard and took a junior faculty position at Yale just as the Directorship of the Office on the Education of Women came vacant.  At the age of 26, Connie Gersick was appointed its Director.  She held the post for two years but then decided to return to graduate school as she believed a Ph.D. would enable her to progress more successfully in higher education administration.  She gained a doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Yale in 1984, and during this time she had her second child.  The family decided that the next move would be to further Connie Gersick’s career, so they moved to California when she was appointed Assistant Professor of Management, and then Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, where she remained until 2001.  Whilst at UCLA she spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School (1996-1997) and was Co-Area Chair, Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson School (1997-1999).  From 2001-2007 she was Associated Faculty at the Simmons School of Management.  She was the founding director of the Women’s Leadership Institute, an executive education workshop at UCLA.  She is also a Research Associate at Lansberg, Gersick and Associates, and Visiting Scholar, Yale School of Management.  \n\nConnie Gersick’s work focuses on quantitative research in adult development; individual, group and organizational change and adaptation; and the effects of time and deadlines on work and learning. She is the author of many articles in this field and she has won a number of national awards for her research publications on group work and change processes.  At time of writing she is researching a book called \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eJourneys Into Womanhood: Life Lessons from a Pathbreaking Generation\u003c/title\u003e.","After touching briefly on her background, Connie Gersick talks at length about the male undergraduate culture she encountered at Yale in the late 1960s and how many aspects of it prevailed even after coeducation began in 1969.  In particular she describes what it was like to negotiate the social and sexual politics of the “mixer” culture.  An account is given of how Sixties countercultural values began to infiltrate campus life when the admissions policy reforms begun in 1965 by the then Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Insley “Inky” Clarke, opened up Yale to a broader spectrum of undergraduates. Her decision to drop out of college to get married is discussed, along with her first encounter with second wave feminism.  She recalls the moment when she discovered Betty Friedan’s \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eFeminine Mystique\u003c/title\u003e and how it impacted on her recent marriage.  \n\nGersick discusses the work of the Yale for the Coeducation of Women and the issues surrounding coeducation, especially the pressures on the first cohort of women undergraduates.  She recalls her return to Brandeis, her growing involvement in women’s issues, and her first encounter with some of the major figures in second wave feminism, especially Alice Walker.  \n\nHer work as Admissions Officer and Special Programs Officer at Radcliffe College is briefly described.  Then Gersick talks at length about the political and personal challenges of the job as Director of the Yale Office on the Education of Women, in particular her interactions with feminist groups on campus and the Provost’s Office. She pays tribute to a number of women in the Yale administration like Etta Onat, Betty Trachtenberg and Judy Hackman.  \n\nLastly Gersick talks about the experience of bringing up two children and the egalitarianism which she considers a hallmark of her marriage in the context of women’s careers, and how these personal experiences have inspired her academic research into the culture of organizations and the challenge of changing institutional culture to enable women to flourish in the workplace.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026b2275cb9-c7d5-4644-a80d-355902089705","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software."]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-1ipfaum.mpga"]},"duration":7702.96163,"width":640,"height":40,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/267/original/open-uri20210827-32762-1ipfaum.mpga?1630069629","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":7702.96163,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-042_gersick_connie_goldman_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=0.0,0.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tOK, um, I think that seems to be recording OK.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tDo you want to play back and see if it’s working?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, no, it’s, it’s fine.  I’m just going to put it there, I think, because you’ve got quite a quiet voice.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd these (inaudible).  I’ll mark it and (clears throat) excuse me.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tDo you want some more tea?  I think there’s -- I can reheat the water.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, (inaudible).  Um, I’m with, um, Connie Gersick, uh, at her home on Autumn Ridge in Hamden, Connecticut.  It’s the fifth of June, and, uh, Connie’s, uh, agreed to do an interview for the Yale Women’s Oral History Project.  OK, Connie, um, we have talked, uh -- (phone rings)\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI think my husband will get the phone.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWill he get it?  Yes, he has, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt’s probably my son.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUm, one of the things that I’m discovering during this, uh, this project that, uh, I have become very interested in, um, not just people’s Yale experience but how that Yale experience, um, is put in the context of the whole life.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo I, I’ve, I have asked everyone to talk a little bit about their own background, where they come from --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh!\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- where they were born and brought up, their family, family aspirations especially in terms of women’s education, uh, and, uh, careers.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo I was wondering if you’d like to kind of sketch, do a little sketch of your background before we get to the main game.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh, OK, yes.  Um, I was born in 1948, born in Davenport, Iowa, but raised in Rock Island, Illinois, which is right across the Mississippi River.  My father worked in his dad’s furniture store, um, and then later took over the furniture store, so I grew up in a business family.  Um, I was one of the smart kids in school but I was also one of the Jewish kids in school, which is, in the Midwest, there were like 200 families in the Jewish community so that was a big part of your identity, because if, you know, there was a big deal about -- what did they call it?  Dating across religion.  Interfaith dating was kind of frowned upon, so that was a big part of our identity and my parents were kind of paranoid -- rightfully so, I’m sorry to say.  (laughter) But anyway, so that was kind of part of the identity.  Being smart and being Jewish was meant to be kind of in a category.  My boyfriend, whom I, boyfriend -- I met my husband when he was 11 and I was 12.  He skipped a grade, so luckily he was not too young for me.  Um, we met at a Sunday School dance the summer before seventh grade.  Um, I should have met him earlier because the Jewish community was so small.  But anyway, I didn’t.  I met him them, and came home after that dance and said, “I met the little Gersick boy!” which is so uncharacteristic. I mean, I would never have said anything like that.  But the reason that I’m emphasizing my relationship with him is that he was -- because he was one of Inky’s boys, he would not have gone to Yale if it hadn’t been for that change, because being from Rock Island, Illinois, I mean, he’s very smart.  Um, very talented.  But you know, Rock Island, Illinois Jewish kid’s not going to get into Yale except for Inky Clark.  Anyway, the reason that I got to Yale is because my husband got to Yale and I was, became his girl, you know, we were sort of off again, on again through when we were little kids.  Um, but I went to visit him freshman year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you -- but you must have gone to college yourself?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI did.  I went to University of Michigan.  Um, went to visit him freshman year.  Yale was not coeducated then I’m happy to say, because he didn’t have any -- I didn’t have any competition.  (laughter)  So anyway.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was it like visiting, visiting your boyfriend -- he was your boyfriend obviously --- when he first went to Yale, what was it like to visit him as a -- so you weren’t part of the kind of, the, the, the, the Five Sisters, uh, uh, um --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThat’s right.  Which was good.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat are they called?  Mixing.  Mixer, mixer culture.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I, yeah, one of my, one of the few memories I have is of, does have to do with mixers, but I remember coming to his room on Old Campus and, you know, there’s all these men, young men, friends of his, and they all came in to meet me.  And luckily I wasn’t, I think it was good that I wasn’t from one of the Five Sisters and I did know him quite well obviously, because since we had grown up together.  So I didn’t have that, as much of the on-stage feeling and as much of the artificiality \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of the relationships between men and women of Yale and the colleges of the women who came for mixers.  And I met everybody and they were all kind of very interested and shy, and they were very nice.  And I was already Kelin’s girlfriend, so there wasn’t an issue of, you know, they weren’t trying to impress me in the way that the might have been or they, you know.  A lot of the tension wasn’t there.  They were just really nice.  And they were all very interesting and sort of glamorous, because here I was at Yale which, from Rock Island, Illinois, Yale was amazingly, well, glamorous is, is really the word.  And also, since I was an intellectual kid, um, you know, I just thought that this was Eden or something to be with all these smart people doing all these amazing things.  Um, so it was really fun.  It was, it was really a lot of fun to visit.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was the general culture, though, of Yale when you first encountered it?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it was a very, it was definitely very much a men’s school, but you know, I think the counter culture was the key thing besides the fact that it was a men’s school, because that was really the beginning, there was a lot of stuff going on then.  Um, Timothy Leary (sp?), you know, “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”  People were trying drugs with the romantic notion of that they were going to sort of discover whole new states of consciousness and, you know, that it was an issue of discovery.  It wasn’t so much an escape; it was a going toward and it was an adventure.  And the political issues of the Vietnam War, you know, civil rights, so there were, it was a very, very exciting time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was really impinging on the traditional, as it were, culture of, of Yale?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I think it was.  And I think, I think that, that Inky’s boys whole deal -- you know, the freshmen were the different class, as opposed to the older, you know, all the upperclassmen who had been brought in under the old rubric.  So I think that maybe the older students were a little more conservative.  But it was a very exciting time and it was a lot of fun, and you know, they, they would talk about their classes and what they were learning and, you know, um, Vincent Scully was doing these lectures in art history.  I don't know if anybody told you about Scully, but -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh yeah, I know who he is, yes.  Mm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, so you know, there was, it was just very exciting and it was fun to be sort of a -- not only was I madly in love with my boyfriend, later husband, but it was fun to be kind of a sweetheart in a safe, sweet way --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- of all these guys who were so incredibly witty.  You know, they would, they would tell joke after joke and we would have, you know, we did the whole range from serious conversations to, to them just almost doing standup comedy.  Um, so -- it was really fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you, I mean, I’m interested to hear you say that because, of course, later on when you were a graduate student at Yale, you wrote an essay about in groups and out groups and how that concept affected how coeducation actually --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- came about.  I just wonder, because you weren’t the obvious out group, which was the girls from Vassar and Smith and all the rest, nor were you the in group.  You were sort of a -- just kind of an interesting, almost [luminal] figure in all of this.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I just wondered what, what that felt like.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I kind of had an inside, inside track, and you’re right.  You’re defining it correctly.  I was almost like the sister that they did know instead of this foreign creature that they were afraid of and attracted to.  Um, the little anecdote about the mixer that I remember, it’s just this vignette of, um, my husband was in Branford College and, and when -- the girls came in buses for mixers and they had to come in through the junior common room.  And there was a, sort of a half wall, there was like a corridor that they had to go through.  And I remember standing with my then boyfriend and some other guys on one side of this sort of corridor, and the women were walking through.  And one of the boys made this noise when the women, girls came in.  He mooed, and then he, he sort of made a loud moo and then he kind of mock fell over backwards.  And I remember thinking, what, you creep!  Not in those polite terms.  This is horrendous!  I mean, they’re, it’s a cattle show and you’re making it explicit.  What’s wrong with you?  You know, you’re just, you’re a complete idiot.  I’m so glad I’m not, I’m not -- you know, and also, I also remember the beer smell after, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"after a mixer.  I mean, the next morning the whole place smelled like beer.  And I wasn’t, I, I still don’t really like alcohol, I mean, so I don’t drink very much just because I just don’t like it.  Um, but you know, it was sort of a drunken, you know, it had aspects of the, of the brawl.  And I don't know how I remember this or whether I remember this from an article.  There was some raunchy thoughts going on, you know, like girls in the bathroom saying -- oh, I can’t even repeat it.  (laughter) Anyway, I mean, people were, people were very interested in sex and the sexual revolution was going on, and so everybody was on the make.  But you, you know, there was a big danger in being exploited.  Oh, I also remember, you know, the kind of, the kind of classic tale of the blind date, where, you know, as soon as the guy saw the girl and she wasn’t pretty enough, he would, you know, he would then start sulking.  You know?  Or the tale, the description afterwards of when somebody starts saying, “Oh, I know you like her, she has a great sense of humor and she makes her own clothes,” you know, that was the, that was the code for, “She’s not pretty.”  So it was pretty brutal, I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCertainly, um, the photographs I’ve seen in the yearbooks from that period would, would, would suggest that what you’re saying is, is correct.  Um, I mean, there’s some pretty raunchy photographs in the yearbooks at that time, because I’ve gone through them.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh!  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd, uh, uh, and, uh, often with very strong kind of sexual overtones.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I mean, this thing that they did with putting on the [Russ Meyer] Film Festival, and then there was the other one that was, the other film festival that was the [Abe Fortiss] Film Festival.  It’s really -- it’s really disgusting.  It’s actually hard to believe how dehumanized, how much the men dehumanized women.  It’s almost hard to believe, from our point of view now.  But, you know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThey were, they were the other, weren’t they?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And at the same time, see, I think it was the, I think it was the culture that, that, that pushed that to extremes.  Because like I said, when I got to know the, the guys, of course again, you know, the guys that I got to know were freshmen who were Inky’s boys who were, who were there under a whole different understanding.  They weren’t these privileged people who assumed -- I think they were much less entitled.  I think they felt much less entitled.  Um, anyway, I mean, the guys that I got to know and in the situation, setting that I got to know were really wonderful people, most of them.  I mean, not everybody.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you and Kelin decided to get married?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBefore you, before you’d finished your, your, your undergraduate degree?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Well, those were the days when you, you know, you’ll ruin your life.  So my parents were quite worried about that.  And I really --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo your parents were actually quite glad you were getting married?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThey were glad.  Also, I had transferred to Brandeis.  I had transferred from the University of Michigan to Brandeis, um, after sophomore year because it was just too far and it was too depressing to not be close to him.  And then I had to -- so then I was visiting him every weekend, and that was also, you know, Sunday -- Fridays, I was really happy, and then Sunday, Sunday evenings were really, eh, this long ride back in the dark on a bus to, back to Brandeis, which I didn’t really like that much.  Um, so we, and people were taking a year off, so -- and I knew I would finish school.  There wasn’t really much question about that.  So, um, it was actually, it was very nice to have that year off and to be, not have to wait the extra time to get married.  And, um, one interesting thing is that I bought this book to read on the plane trip back after the wedding because I wanted something to read on the plane.  We got married in, back in Rock Island.  Traditional wedding, it was really beautiful.  The book that I bought, I picked it because I thought it was going to be something really on how to be a sexy wife and how to be really feminine and be a great wife.  I only picked it by the title.  The title of the book was The Feminine Mystique.  (laughter) So when I got on the plane I was this bride, and when I got off the plane I was this, you know, radicalized feminist.  I mean, literally.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, so that would have -- what date was that?  ’69?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt was in June 1969.  I didn’t know who Betty Friedan was.  But really, I got off the plane and I was like, “Hey!”  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"You know?  And it really --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt must have startled your new husband.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt did.  I mean, I was saying things like, “Listen, buster!”  You know?  Not quite.  I mean, he’s, he’s quite a feminist himself.  But, you know, I said, “I don't know how to cook, and you don’t know how to cook either.  Why should it be only me who learns how to cook?  You know, you have to cook too!  You know, you’re in school, I’m working.  Um, you’re not going to come home and say, Hey honey, what’s for dinner?  We both need to learn to do these things, and we’re going to do, you know, we have to share the housework.”  And so it really, um, made a significant difference at a key time.  So -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, so you established new, the ground rules pretty early on?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes!\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI mean, literally, the first day we were married was the day that I --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s, that’s, that’s really funny actually.  (laughter)\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Well did, um, but you couldn’t have moved into college with him.  Did you --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas there, were there many graduates, were there many married undergraduates?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo, there were not.  There was married student housing, though.  There were enough that there was married student housing, so we lived in a little apartment on Crown Street, um, and there were two of Kelin’s friends from Branford College were also in the same -- one was across the hall and one was upstairs.  Um, and their wives were there.  So -- and I think both of their wives -- Elaine Shobin (sp?), who lives across the hall, may have been going back to school, may have attended classes for credit at her college.  I think she was a student at Barnard, so she, I think they had some arrangement by which a, a, a student’s wife could get college credit by going to Yale classes, but there was no, she wasn’t enrolled in Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, so there was -- and you didn’t think of doing that, did you?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI don’t -- I didn’t even consider that.  I mean, I didn’t even, it didn’t even occur to me to consider that.  I don't know why.  Oh, I know!  I couldn’t because I had already transferred.  I had already transferred from Michigan to Brandeis, and so I, I kind of assumed that Brandeis would not take kindly to me getting a Brandeis degree having taken only one year at Brandeis, so I didn’t even try.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.  So you, so you opted to, to try to get a job?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  So that’s when I got the job as the secretary to Elga Wasserman the first year of coeducation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, so how did all of that happen?  How did you get the job?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tHow did I get that job?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCan you remember?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI think I probably just, I probably just was talking to somebody.  I know that we had an influential friend named Dan Levinson who was wonderful.  Um, he wrote a book called The Seasons of a Man’s Life.  He’s just a wonderful -- I’m saying it as if he’s still living.  But he’s, he was absolutely wonderful.  He might have helped me get that job.  Just a guess, because I can’t remember.  Um, but you know, I mean, it was -- I don’t think I realized -- I viewed it as a secretarial job and I knew that I’d be good because I had worked for my dad, so I wasn’t too worried about that.  But I don’t think I realized what a special, historically special spot I was in.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was your, um, uh, first impressions of Elga?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI was a little scared of her.  I remember, um, negotiating for salary and, and I remember her, she said something about -- see, I think consciousness raising was a big issue then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHad it actually started, do you think?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo, it hadn’t.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo feminism really wasn’t an issue at that point?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt wasn’t.  Not, not really, it really wasn’t very much.  It was -- I’m saying that as preface because I remember sort of planning to negotiate for my salary, and Elga saying something like, “Well, you’re married.  You don’t need as much,” or something.  Which was, she would never have -- you know, five years later, I know that she would --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, she would not have said that, I’m sure.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tShe wouldn’t have said it.  She wouldn’t have even -- I don’t think she would have thought it, or it might have occurred to her and she might have said, “Oh Elga, why, don’t think that.”  But, um, like I think my salary was, like, $12,000 a year.  (laughter) No, it was, whatever it was, it was certainly worth its weight in gold, um, because of the, you know, how interesting the experience was.  She went on vacation soon after I started and -- which kind of gave me a chance to settle in and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.  So that was, when did you actually start the job?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI started in -- I didn’t take, we didn’t take a honeymoon because I was, I didn’t want to delay starting the job, and we got married on June 15.  So I must have started three days later.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and that was, that was sixty -- \r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t’69.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo that was the summer before coeducation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tBut at first, I was very nervous because I remember her asking me to Xerox something with two pages and I made two copies of the first page an forgot to Xerox -- I mean, this is such a trivial thing, but I was so nervous that I wasn’t even competent at Xeroxing because I was scared of making a mistake.  But, you know, I got over that.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I, I think it’s safe to say that I was, I was good at my job.  But, um, yeah, she would get calls for everything.  One, one of the things that struck me was she got call.  There weren’t enough toilets for the women.  There weren’t enough women’s bathrooms, and I think she got a call once that the toilet was broken in some building and I remember thinking, “Gee, you’re calling her because, for this?”  But, you know, she’s in charge of women, so -- and I also remember there was this woman named Betsey something or other who came in and was all earnestly, you know, in a flutter because she was convinced that women, you know, somebody had told her that women need to take baths because they have to.  In order to get really clean, they have to be sitting immersed in water.  Um, so there was this big concern that there weren’t bathtubs.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, I certainly remember that the bathtub was, was an issue, and how are they going to, uh, sort out the bathrooms as a result?  Because I think the men only had showers, didn’t they?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, they had showers.  But women, I don’t have any information that says women have to take a bath.  But, you know, there were these silly concerns, and actually the lack of women’s rooms is not silly at all.  But, um, the buildings were just the whole institution in brick and mortar and stone and everything else was men’s, was made for men.  So yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow much did, did Elga actually share the difficulties that she was encountering with you?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNot very much.  She had a friend that she would have lunch with.  I can’t remember the woman’s name.  I think, I think I remember that her friend’s husband was something in the Kennedy Administration.  Anyway, I remember her, um, I remember making appointments for her to have lunch with this, with this woman, so I think that she did have friends that she -- but she was a chemistry professor, I believe.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, she was a -- yeah, she, she, she had a PhD in chemistry.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, she was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut she never taught.  She never taught at Yale.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo she -- OK.  But she was a chemist.  I mean, she wasn’t -- you know you’re a female.  You must know about women.  Um, I don’t really know how she got herself into that job, but I did find her impressive.  And much later, I was at a -- like within the past few years -- I was at an event that was arranged by the women’s -- I guess it was a student group, and they had invited, it was some anniversary of coeducation or something.  Anyway, they invited some past directors of the, the, that office to come and talk with them, and I remember Elga saying that, at that event, that what really turned it around, what made coeducation work was the fact it was the Panther trial.  Did she tell you about that?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe talked about the Panther trial.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, but she said that, she said at this event that the women were such a novelty and there was so much emotion about them and so much mixed feelings about them that they were, they were the center of attention in a way that wasn’t helpful.  But when the Panther trial came up and everybody was working together and concentrating on that, they became students.  You know, that made them part of the community and not this curiosity.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd I think she was really right about that.  I don't know if -- I certainly didn’t realize it at the time.  I don't know if she did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s probably very difficult to see that sort of thing when you’re in the middle of it.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yeah, I think that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo, um, no, I don’t think -- I was more than a secretary because I was doing, I had more responsibilities and I was arranging things and helping with things.  But -- and I was so much younger than -- I don’t really know how old she was.  But I was pretty young.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, you’d have been young enough to be her daughter, certainly.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Well, actually, I babysat for their -- my husband and I babysat for her kids once, um, so she probably wasn’t old enough to be my mother but she was certainly in a different generation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYou know, I was the assistant, so -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.  Did you, uh, in that, uh, year that you were Elga’s secretary, did you form any views about how positive or not, uh, the administrative was towards actually making coeducation work?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo.  I don’t think -- I think that it was all like swimming in a white water stream and I, so I think that they were trying to cope with logistical issues.  In retrospect, I think -- you know, in the paper that I did -- there’s not much question that they took the women for the men, and to make sure that Yale was still, you know, that their admissions yield would still be high and that they would still be a desirable place and they would get the best students.  They didn’t take the women for women.  They took them, they took the women for me.  (laughter) I think.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But I just think, I, I don’t think they knew any better.  I mean, that’s just the way it was framed from the start, and their view of women was so, um, strange and skewed that I don't know whether we could have expected much more from them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOf course Yale was, um, very, very, uh, sensitive to this whole kind of leadership --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- that Yale was a place where leaders are formed --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- and created, and women were never seen as leaders at that particular point.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, so -- \r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn that way, they were anomalous.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And there was this big thing about the -- wasn’t Yale the one that was the 1,000 male leaders?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd, you know, there was also a big issue about, we’re not going to go to our, we’re not going to tap our traditional sources, fundraising sources, because we don’t want to take away any, we don’t want to take anything away from the men.  So we’ll have to do, have different sources for the women.  And then, um, part of that, I think, Kingman Brewster -- I mean, I shouldn’t call, I don't know if I should call him Kingman.  I certainly never called him that to his face.  But, um, you know, he had an alumni problem potentially.  He had a political problem because he had made that statement about he didn’t know if a black man could get a fair trial and a lot of alums were real upset about that, these conservative people who didn’t, weren’t in touch with reality.  But, so I think part of it as that.  And that was also, in the Yale faculty meetings that I remember, if you were going to do anything new, you always had to present it as though you were not doing anything new.  (laughter) You always had to say, “This program isn’t really new.  We’ve been doing this for years.  It’s, we’re just, uh, you know, giving it an official recognition.  It’s nothing new.”  So I think part, part of the we’re not going to disturb any of the resources of the men was part of that, you know, strategy for being able to do something new, was saying you’re not going to disturb anything old.  So that was kind of just the way that things got done, I think.  But, but looking at -- having looked over my report that I wrote on the, as the Director of the Office on the Education of Women, I really think there was very -- I just don’t think they were ready to think seriously about how can we as an institution really make a difference in changing, you know, opening opportunity to women in a very real and serious and important way.  We, we have tremendous potential to do that.  How can we do it?  I don’t think they thought that way.  I think they thought, you know, “We’re letting women in.  They’re going to be thrilled and we’re going to, you know -- ”\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCarry on as ever?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI think that’s --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, so it was about women coming in and women, uh, fitting into the mold as opposed to changing the mold?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, absolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI think that’s true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAlso, I think it’s interesting that not just at Yale but the Harvard president recently saying, you know, his statements about Larry Summers.  The emphasis for example on, on how women’s math scores are lower than men’s, that’s always what’s emphasized.  It’s never emphasized that’s women’s verbal scores are higher than men’s.  Or putting it in a different way, men just can’t cut it, you know, men just don’t, don’t come up to women’s abilities in the verbal scores.  Why is it the emphasis always on, you know, that women don’t have the math scores?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, it’s because the male is the norm, isn’t it?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tExactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, it goes right back to Aristotle.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  So, but in terms of your saying, you know, we educate 1,000 male leaders and the emphasis is on protecting this, the stature of this institution as a, you know, producer of male leaders and we’re not going to disturb that, and the women are sort of an extra.  You know, I don’t think they were thinking in terms of, “We’re producing this many leaders, men and women.”  So yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and, and opening it up to women was, as you say, a way of improving Yale’s position --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- in, in, in the national/international hierarchy.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know, that it, it would be more likely that Yale would produce even more leaders because it was a meritocracy.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd so you had to have the best.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThat’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd also, I think the yield, for example, the admissions yield for me wasn’t as high as admissions yield for women.  Well, I think Yale had some serious competitors.  Harvard was a very serious competitor.  If somebody’s accepted at Harvard and Princeton and Columbia or something, as well as Yale, they might not pick Yale, the men.  So they did have to compete.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I know that, uh, several people have said to me, uh, that, uh, one of the real concerns was that \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"as more and more institutions were going coed, that it was going to affect boys’ decisions about where they were going to be --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- going to college.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd so it was, it was a very pragmatic decision.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yes, oh, and also, here’s another little anecdote about the, the decision, timing of the decision, because things were changing very rapidly.  I think it was after coeducation week -- and I know this because this is what Kelin, my husband, told me -- there was a rally on Kingman Brewster’s lawn, on his front yard.  I think it was the very end of coeducation week.  And Kingman Brewster said something about how, you know, the corporate -- you know, we’re really going to -- I don't know exactly what he said, but the gist of what he said was we’re going to consider coeducation very seriously for some date in the, in the future.  And my husband said, “Next year!”  And the crowd took up that call, but it was my husband who was the one who said it.  So they, the crowd was chanting, “Next year, next year!”  And then it was, they did do it that, that very next year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo the undergraduates were very keen on the idea?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yes, absolutely.  And the timing was moved up partly because of that.  I don't know whether they would have changed their minds anyway.  They, you know, they might have thought, “How can we possibly do this so quickly?”  But they did end up doing it very quickly.  I don't know really exactly what the timing was, but it was fast.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, it was.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt was fast.  It was, it was faster than academics normally move.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.  Yeah, and I think, uh, there were, I think, a lot of the faculty who were concerned about the, uh, the coming of the women because they thought it was going to be mixer, mixer weekends --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- all week long and the boys would not work.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn fact, they were proved completely wrong.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Well they were also, at the same time, worried that the women would be smarter than the men.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWhich of course they were much more selective with the women than they were with the men, so -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Did you get, uh, any insight when you were doing, uh, your job, um, about the, uh, the selection process as far as the women were concerned?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo, I don’t think I did.  You know that I -- from my coeducation paper, that I, there were articles in the paper about this issue of the influence of the looks, women’s looks.  I don’t really know anything about the selection process.  I would be, it would be interesting to know.  I don't know if you talked to anybody who was in the admissions office at that time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI have talked to one or two, yeah.  Um, and certainly there was a, um, I think a very strong, uh, view to try to pick -- which is why they didn’t go for freshmen.  They, uh, they, um, they went for, uh, for -- I always get these muddled up because I’m a Brit.  Um, but they, the first group were transfer students.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, they actually had women in the freshman class the first year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, did they?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, yeah, I didn’t know that.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, the first, the first, um, the freshmen class of 1969, ‘70, that entered in the fall of ‘69, that freshmen class was integrated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, right.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And they were, you know, there were, there were housing issues about how they were going to do it and about the entryways that would have women, and you know, there was a lot of thinking about that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I mean, I think certainly, obviously they were looking for, for, for women who were smart young women, but I think, uh, also they were looking for women who would be perhaps psychologically robust, who would be able to take the strain of being a, a minority in a male institution.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI hope they were.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI mean, because you asked, you asked, you said earlier that you were interested in how people felt about it, and I think that it was quite a strain because the men thought that they were going to get their turn.  You know, that now they were going to get women, because that was really, you know, a big part of the whole paradigm under which women were brought, as we’ve been discussing.  So I think that they were resentful and angry when they didn’t find that they now had a girlfriend.  So I think that, you know, I have a vague memory of, of some of the women students describing this, these scenarios of men coming up to them in the dining hall and, you know, sort of being angry that you didn’t, you, “How come you were sitting by yourselves?”  And, you know, (laughter) these desperate, disappointed, angry guys.  I mean, not, certainly not everybody.  But it was frustrating because the men had thought things were going to, were going to change a lot more than they did.  There weren’t that many women brought in, so, so I think the women felt \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"kind of beleaguered and on -- they certainly were on-stage.  Um, at the same time, you know, being on stage has pluses and minuses, and Rosabeth Kanter has written about, she wrote this book called Men and Women in the Corporation and talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages of being a token.  And everything that you do -- I don't know if you’ve seen the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, I know the book, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, so you know, I mean, the spotlight is on you so if you -- so in some sense, you can get things -- things can come to you, you can ask for things and be granted things that you ordinarily maybe wouldn’t have an opportunity to have, as well as all your mistakes will be magnified.  And if you talk in class, you’re speaking for a whole, you know, gender --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- not just answering a question.  But one of the things I remember from being the Director of the Office on the Education of Women five years later, which isn’t that much later, is inviting these women to come, speakers, and it was, “Wow!”  I mean, the best speakers who came, the most exciting, were the ones that I invited with the African-American Cultural Center.  I mean, Toni Morrison, June Jordan -- who wasn’t as famous.  She was a poet.  Um, she died relatively young.  But Alice Walker.  I mean, Alice Walker is the one I remember the most because I picked her up at the train station and I got lost and I, so we drove past the projects, these projects.  And New Haven is sort of famous for having architects who have designed housing projects, and these projects were just awful.  They had really declined.  And I remember Alice Walker saying, “Why does America hate poor people so much?”  And I really got, got a chance to talk with her, and she was just a lovable person, just, even from just a short time being with her.  But the point being that, you know, Vivian Gordon, you could just invite these people and they would come!  So part of it was Yale and part of it was the times.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tUm, but there were a lot of -- I think there was a sense of -- which could be both encouraging and exciting and also oppressive -- but this sense of potential.  You know, of how these people, these women are going to be destined for great things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm.  Which is, of course, a terrible pressure on you.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it is.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat you have to -- everybody has to be (inaudible).\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I mean it’s, yeah, it’s kind of a mix.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid, um, did, uh, female undergraduates come to the office, uh, when, uh, Elga was there, looking for advice, looking for help?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNot really, not that I remember.  I do remember that we would go out to the colleges and, and, you know, Elga, I think, went, was very, um, well, conscientious is one word.  I, I think that she was thoughtful and she wanted to go out and meet the students.  I think, I think -- see, another part of that time was the don’t trust anybody over 30, so I think there may have been some gap to be bridged between her and the, and the students.  But, but she certainly was, was outgoing.  But if I had a different kind of memory, you’d probably be getting a lot better stories.  But, you know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, that’s, I mean, that’s a very interesting point that you made.  Nobody else has made that, the don’t trust anyone over 30, um, that must have made negotiation right across the campus very, very difficult when you look at the age profile of the, of the faculty.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yes.  I think that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the administration, for that matter, yeah.  And, uh, yeah, it’s, I think it’s a good point to make.  You did that job for a year, was it, thereabouts?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI was Elga’s secretary for one year, and then I was the Director of the Office for two years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, but that was later.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo I’m, I’m trying to, trying to just get the chronology right.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh, right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you did the, you did the year as Elga’s secretary and assistant, and then Kelin was ready to graduate?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tHe graduated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd it was understood that I was going to go back and finish at Brandeis.  He applied to Harvard and Stanford, and he also wanted to teach, he also wanted, thought he might like to teach in a public school.  But because of the Vietnam War, he couldn’t get any teaching jobs.  So luckily, he got into Harvard.  He got into Stanford too, but, but luckily he got into Harvard so -- which is, you know, so we could live in Boston and I could go to Brandeis.  And, um, so that worked out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and so you, you, you, you completed your undergraduate --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- studies at Brandeis, so in sort of ‘70, ‘71?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou graduated?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.  I graduated \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in ‘71 and I, um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut you were going to be obviously in Boston for, for four years at least because, uh, of Kelin’s PhD program?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I, I -- having worked with Elga, incidentally another thing that happened during the coeducation year, it was the first -- the first year of coeducation was also the first year of Ms. Magazine, which, you know, the whole idea that there was an option for women to, to have the, whatever that term is called, the honorarium, or the honor, the, the title, Mr. and Mrs., Dr., whatever it is that comes before your name, that with a woman your only choice was Mrs. or Miss, or if you were a doctor, but that was unlikely.  Um, Ms. was this invention.  I don't know what part Gloria Steinem played in it, but this invention that said, “Why do you have to know a woman’s marital status?  You don’t know a, a man’s marital status.  I mean, it shouldn’t be such a defining feature.  We want to have a term that leaves it out of the, out of the picture.”  So nobody knew how to pronounce it.  You know, it was sort of, M-S?  We didn’t know.  But, um, that was another -- but I remember that that was the start of that magazine and it was the start of the term, that, that whole word and the start of the idea that marital status.  A woman should be regarded as an individual, not as either available or taken.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you, uh, did you opt to use Ms.?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI was, I remember Horace Taft calling me Mrs. Gersick and thinking that that sounded so grown up, because I was only, you know, 19!  And that was before Ms.  But then, then later, yes I did.  But I think I’m, I’m not giving you a very good chronology.  But anyway, so OK.  So after that year, I went back, I finished college.  My senior thesis -- oh, I know where I was on the way to.  I was on the way of saying that having worked in Elga’s office, I was very inspired to do something to work for, as a, in higher education administration, something to do with women.  I did my senior thesis on the role of women in the Israeli kibbutzim because they were part of the ethos of -- when the kibbutzim were started in Israeli was that they were supposed, they were socialist and Zionist and they were supposed to be very, very egalitarian, and the early idea was that they would, you know, men and women would be no different.  And they, as symbolic of that, they threw all the laundry and did it all, and you know, you just came and whatever you picked off the top of the pile you wore, whether it fit you or not, because they weren’t going to distinguish between men and women.  And they, you know, they were going to shower together.  And both of those things didn’t last very long because they really weren’t, were not good ideas.  But anyway, so I did my senior thesis on that.  Um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you involved by, I suppose, by, by 1970, women’s lib had really begun to take off --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- at that point.  Um -- \r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI was very involved.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were very involved at Brandeis?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI was in -- well, I was very involved for me.  I mean, I was in -- I’m not a big joiner, but I was in a consciousness-raising group.  Actually Rosabeth Kanter was in my little consciousness-raising group.  Um, and we talked a lot about the fact that we would ask the men, we would ask our husbands to do the dishes and they wouldn’t do them.  So (laughter) you know, that’s when I, when I was saying that consciousness raising was very -- consciousness raising, it was all these things that were so much taken for granted that we didn’t even notice them, and we were trying to educate ourselves about what we needed to change.  And the first step in educating ourselves was to even recognize that there was something that needed to change, and this idea of dividing the labor, which is, in fact, a huge issue.  Dividing the labor in the household, dividing the labor of, of, um, breadwinning, you know, dividing the responsibilities and the privileges and who has -- for whom is it legitimate, you know, to take time to work, or to choose where we’re going to move because who has the job offer?  It, it’s not that separable from who does the dishes and who makes dinner and, you know?  Because if you’re, if it’s, if you have the worker and the homemaker, then the homemaker doesn’t get a turn to be the worker and the worker doesn’t have a -- anyway.  So all those things that we were trying to do, those things were all going on.  It was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it at that time you met Matina Horner?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I invited her to, to speak at Brandeis.  She was doing this research on women’s fear of success, and I invited her, um, to speak or I was part of the -- I was working with the administration and I got to meet her, and so, um, and that eventually -- after I decided to get a degree in college and adult \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"counseling, a masters degree because I thought that that would be the root to getting to where I wanted to go.  And then after I got the degree and I sent in all these resumes and nobody, I didn’t get any response.  But when I went to talk to her, um --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas she already at Radcliffe at that point?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, she was new.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because she, I think she was appointed president in ‘72, was it?  Something like that.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI think that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tShe was brand new.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd I went to, I went to talk with her in her office, and I remember that she was taking notes during our conversation and I was so incredibly flattered.  (laughter) Of course.  But I got the job, so -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, so what was the job you got?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThe job was being an admissions officer at Radcliffe and also being an assistant to a person who had not been hired and who was not hired for several months, to -- Matina wanted to establish an office at Radcliffe on the education of women that was, would have been parallel to the office that I had worked in at Yale, and I think that’s part of why I was a good candidate, because I had had that experience.  But I didn’t have any -- I didn’t have a boss except for Matina, and she was way to -- she was so high above me that I almost ever talked to her and I would -- so I was being this assistant and feeling like I was supposed to be doing something but not knowing what it was and not having a real boss.  And I would go to these little talks that Matina would have with students and I would hear Matina tell the students that we’re going, you know, “We have this new office and we’re going to track every Radcliffe student through all her five, you know, her four years here.”  And I said five years because it felt so overwhelming.  But you know, she would make these promises and I would be sitting there thinking, “I am?  I’m going to track every Radcliffe student?  Oh my God!”  So luckily I met another woman that, um, Matina had hired who was working with her in the president’s office and she and I together instituted some programs and, you know, some studies and got stuff going.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what sort of, what sort of programs and studies were you, did you, did you --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause I think, was -- the situation at Radcliffe must have been different from Yale simply because Radcliffe and Harvard had this long relationship which --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUm, and they were gradually getting closer and closer.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tUm, one of the first things that we did was we started this thing that we called the Freshman Core Program, which was we took all the freshmen women and put them into small groups, and we, we searched the campus for resource -- for older women who could be resource people, like faculty, administrators, researchers, and we paired all the freshmen, all these freshmen groups each had a, sort of a woman mentor type person.  And we put them all together and we said, “Okay, you know, go and now you’re going to have role models.”  And we had some events for them to welcome them and we did some research on women’s leadership on campus.  And we found that the only groups that women really were the leaders of were the new groups, sort of the groups that they had almost started themselves.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo pretty well the women’s groups, the women were leaders of women’s groups but nothing else?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, if that -- let’s say that there was a new group in the arts or something.  Women had, the women’s opportunities came in the places where they didn’t have to overturn the old, but where they could star the new.  Whether it was to do with women or not, it was the fact that it was new.  Also, we did a study of prizes and honors on campus and found that women were not getting their proportional share.  And, you know, so it was consciousness raising again.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut it’s interesting that right away, your into consciousness research, to try to put facts and figures --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- to, uh, to impressions.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And I think that, um, that’s very consistent with the kind of research that’s done in my eventual field, um, that people just don’t believe it.  The consciousness raising, I’m coming back to that theme again and again because people just do not believe it.  Until you show them that, you know, the MIT -- for example, at MIT, look, women are getting this fraction of what men are getting for their, for their grants.  You know, women’s office space is this fraction of what men’s office space is.  Or, you know, you’re promoting -- you have this many women and this many men, and here’s where -- until you show them numbers, they just don’t believe it.  Women don’t believe it.  Nobody believes it until you tell them, until you show them that, you know what?  We had this dossier put together, um, Pat, Patrick and Patricia, the same dossier.  When it was Patrick, “Oh, let’s hire him.”  When it was Patricia, “We don’t think she’s good enough.”  It’s the same, it’s all the same except for the name on it.  Until you show that to people over and over again -- and there’ve just been years and years \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of research on that -- until you show people that, you know, men did this many minutes of housework and women did this many hours of housework, people don’t see it.  So there was a lot of that consciousness raising type stuff that we were doing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo had you really then, by that time, decided that, uh, whatever, irrespective of what Kelin was going to do, where he was going to be working, that you did want to go into some kind of academic administration?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  That’s what I thought.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, you had actually formulated that as a game plan?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAs -- I wasn’t, I mean, I wasn’t really all that planful, but I kind of assumed that I would be doing, working in higher education and doing academic administration.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And of course, you know, when you think about it, it was also very portable, wasn’t it?  Particularly at that time.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And also, I loved the admissions office stuff.  I loved interviewing the girls.  Because they were girls, they were high school kids.  Um, that was really fun, even though it was, it felt like a terrible responsibility to pick who got in and who didn’t get in.  But I liked students and I liked being an administrator.  I thought -- I’m not sure I thought about being a faculty person, but I thought administration would be good because it would, you know, you could do something on a sort of policy level.  You could -- hopefully, you could affect their educational experience in a positive way.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the Ivy Leagues were needing women who had, who, who had, um, some kind of vision of what women could be in that environment, because they wouldn’t have -- that wouldn’t have been around even five years before.  You’re right at, at the beginning of something.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.  Yeah, I think that’s true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know, so there were opportunities there.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  So, um, so I was working at Radcliffe when I had my, my first child.  I went, dropped down to half time, which was fine, with then.  And then when he graduated, he, uh, got an opportunity to come back to Yale.  So we had, we had sort of taken turns because, you know, he came to Boston for me when I had to finish at Brandeis, and then it was his turn so we went to Yale for him.  And I was looking for a job in the admissions office but there wasn’t one, and so the admissions director said, “Well, why don’t you, um,” they said, “Rachel,” was it Rachel Weisner (sp?)?  I think Rachel Weisner.  It was, “I think Rachel Weisner’s leaving.  Why don’t you see if there’s a job over there?”\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you glad to be back in New Haven?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yeah, I like New Haven.  I love Connecticut, I like New Haven.  Boston’s exciting, but the sidewalks are crowded and there’s a lot of dog poop.  It’s dirty, and if you’re wheeling a carriage especially, you know, with the stroller and the -- I was happy to get back to New Haven.  I liked it.  So, so I applied for the, for the job that Rachel Weisner was vacating.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Was there, was there, um, was it formally advertised or was it something that you, you, you heard of on the old girl network?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it was the admissions -- when I went to talk to the admissions office and they said, “We don’t really have anything, but you should talk to, uh, you should go over to the Dean’s Office because Rachel Weisner’s leaving.”  That was really, um, a problem.  They -- I don’t think they did advertise that job, and so I got, I was hired under a shadow because Horace Taft, this was also a bigger, a bigger problem in how they were treating that office.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause I mean, because I mean, already affirmative action, I mean, the (inaudible) regulations were already in place from ‘72, um, so it, again, how was Yale responding to that when you were still -- when obviously jobs were going on the quiet?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I don’t --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt wasn’t transparent, was it?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNo, it wasn’t.  See, I don’t really know -- I shouldn’t say that they didn’t advertise.  I don't know whether they advertised it or not.  I simply do not know.  I know how I heard about it and I know that I got hired relatively quickly.  I think, in fact, I was young but -- I was 26 -- but I was well-qualified for the job, because since I had been there and I did have a masters in college and adult counseling and, you know, I’d done my senior thesis on, you know, relevant things.  However, because -- I wasn’t aware of there, I mean, I just simply wasn’t aware of other candidates or what kind of search they were doing.  I went over there and talked to them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo there was a shadow, you said?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThere was a shadow because there was this small, radical women’s group on campus.  I remember one of the women’s names, um, but I, I won’t, I won’t mention the name because it’s actually not that relevant.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"The issue was that there was a small and very radical group of women on campus, and when I think, it was really small.  I mean, I don't know if there were ten women in this group, or five.  Um, they were very angry.  They heard that --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas this the Women’s Corpus, by any chance?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt might have been the Yale Women’s -- I don't know what they called, I don’t remember what they called themselves.  I did a bunch of stuff with them.  We invited speakers together and, you know, they should have been happy.  But, but they weren’t -- they weren’t happy to have -- not been consulted, and I was informed that I needed to come to New Haven and, and be interviewed by them because they were upset that they hadn’t been consulted before hand.  And on the train on the way there, I remember that I had been thinking philosophically about how do we change the world, and I came to this realization that you can’t just talk to women.  You have to talk to men.  It just simply won’t work otherwise.  You’re not going to change things for women if you don’t talk to men too.  So I was thinking, it was my big revelation on the train, I was thinking, “Yeah, I’m a feminist, but I’m also a humanist because we, we’re all in this together.”  So when these women interviewed me, they asked me if I was a feminist and I gave them my new philosophical insight, which they didn’t like at all.  And they also didn’t like the fact that I knew that one of them was the head of the African American Women’s something or other, so one of the women was African American.  So I said, “Oh, you must be,” whatever her name was.  She found that insulting because she thought that I assumed, thought, I, I just jumped to the conclusion that she must be the African American Center person because she was the one who was African American.  (laughter) I mean, in a way I can empathize with her because she wanted to be viewed as an individual and I’m sure that she was having a hard time being viewed as an individual since she was such a minority, a double minority at Yale.  But you know, so they weren’t happy.  I don’t think they would have been happy anyway because they didn’t pick me.  So it was sort of understood from the time that I was hired that they were going to have a search for somebody, they were going to have a big search for somebody to replace me as soon as I was hired.  So it was a big, you know, it put the whole experience under this cloud for me and I was, it was tense the whole time and I was -- I had arranged with them that I was working part-time because I had a one-year-old.  They didn’t like that, the radical women didn’t like that because they felt that it didn’t -- it trivialized the office.  Now, in retrospect, again I think that the fact that they hired me so easily and so quickly, and also the fact that Horace Taft was so cowed by these, this tiny group of women, neither of those things is a good thing.  Both of those things say that we have this office as window dressing, and if we have any complaints from the women we’ll just throw them this office.  We won’t -- you know, which really, which means that they don’t really have to do anything very seriously.  They just have this office as a [sop?].  So having said that, I mean, it was -- being director of that office was a combination of a lot of fun and glamorous and, you know --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHad you stayed in touch with Elga in the, in the years that you’d been up in Boston?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tNot really.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.  So it was -- I was just wondering, when you took over the office, um, what did you see, um, um, that the major achievements had been, but also what maybe the major frustrations might be.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYou know, I did so little.  Rachel Weisner, who was leaving, I didn’t have a real good impression of what, of -- I really don’t know what she did, but the impression that I got was she seemed very amateurish to me, just from talking to her not very much.  But that’s probably something that shouldn’t, that maybe you should leave out.  But I didn’t, I didn’t have a sense that was a, um, serious, important undertaking, whereas Elga had gravitas.  And Elga was clearly very intelligent and she was a big responsibility and she was doing everything she could to, to handle this huge deal.  You know?  I didn’t have that feeling from my predecessor.  She seemed kind of, well, like I said, amateurish.  So, um, I really was -- for some reason, I behaved as if I were starting from scratch.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  So what did you decide that your priorities had to be?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I felt, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"um, looking at my report, I see that I did a lot of really good things.  Um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were very busy, if it was a half-time job.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, I mean, I really did a lot in the two years, especially because the second year, the science conference was so huge that it took up almost all the time.  But, you know, we had done -- I had, I had had the time at Radcliffe, so, so I did mentoring program.  I mean, I wanted, I wanted to -- I think that to some extent, Yale’s idea of the office was -- to the extent that they thought about it at all -- had something to do with, well, if the women have complaints, you know, we’ll refer those complaints to this office and they’ll handle the complaints.  I really saw it more as what is the quality of women’s education?  How is Yale helping women live up to their, live up to this opportunity or make the most of this opportunity or really seize, you know, the -- the potential is, is tremendous, but there’s a big gap between where we are and what the potential could be, so how can we start realizing that potential and how can we become aware of what it is that we need to do and where we’re falling short?  So these things like, you know, where are women majoring and where are they not majoring?  And the women weren’t going into the sciences, and what’s that about?  And, you know, the issue of math as a bottleneck was a huge thing that, that’s very appropriate for a university like Yale to be dealing with.  And to discover, for example, that Yale didn’t have any precalculus courses and a lot of the women were coming without calculus, just absolutely put a stop to, just closed the door to a lot of science education for women who couldn’t bridge that gap because they didn’t have precalculus, they couldn’t take calculus.  And so if calculus was a prerequisite for science courses, they were just eliminated.  So that’s an example of some of the kinds of educational things that I really thought women, you know, Yale needed to address and would be a wonderful contribution, important, necessary change that Yale should make.  I also felt very strongly that, um, in my 26-year-old way, you know, I had this catchphrase, “Operation Mainstream,” that I felt that it wasn’t that much an advocate of women’s studies as a permanent idea, because I feel that women are half the human race and that we shouldn’t -- it shouldn’t be off in a corner that only specialists look at, um, you know, or studying anything to do with women.  I really felt that women, issues about women, should be fully integrated into the mainstream.  And there are things that people don’t realize, like for example when studies are done with only male subjects because we don’t want to get too complicated, the findings don’t necessarily apply to women, even if you’re talking about health and biology and all kinds of things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, well, I mean, actually one of the women that had been interviewed for this is somebody who, who, uh, who did that for the sciences.  Uh, she’s a medic and, uh, one of her big things was changing how, um, medical trials are done.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Because it’s, it’s absolutely essential.  And if you treat men as humans and women as sort of a, you know, a special case off to the side that you don’t really look at because it’s inconvenient, I just thought that was very wrong.  So you know, I did some talking to people, to the different academic departments.  I mean, given my position, of course, see, nobody has any -- changing academia is really, really hard because every professor is in charge in his or her own classroom and you don’t tell people what to teach.  You don’t tell them what to do.  You don’t even know what they’re doing.  So, so, but, um -- and I wanted to bring a lot of women, inspiring women, to campus as -- you know, I had said earlier like with Alice Walker and June Jordan and Toni Morrison and Vivian Gornick and, you know, a lot of people that we invited.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBy the time you came, was, um, what women’s studies going on, was it mostly in the college seminars or was it also in the --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThe regular classes?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- in the regular classes?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt was main -- I think it was mainly college seminars.  And also, I think as I was leaving, a women’s studies program -- which I only remember, I don’t really remember it but I know because I reviewed the report that I read, that I wrote, that women’s studies was just getting its little start after this huge committee report, and you know, huge effort that the very beginning of women’s studies was just getting launched as I was leaving.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because the women’s studies was set -- program was actually set up, I think, in ‘78, 1978, so it was --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  But it obviously took a while to get it to that.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd then there was the issue of, um, older students, you know, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that women who had not been able to go to college or had had their college interrupted.  I mean, there were just a lot of things that Yale had the potential to do that required a change -- that required realizing that this was a need and realizing that this was a good thing to do.  Um, allowing people to go part-time if they couldn’t go to school otherwise because they had, you know, their chances had been cut off for some reason.  Um --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you meet a lot of resistance amongst the faculty on those sorts of issues?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, the most remarkable resistance that I met was I had this big campaign that I wanted Yale to take older women and I wanted them to be allowed to, to live off campus and to go part-time, with the idea that they were just absolutely, everybody’s deserving of a college education as anybody else.  And plus, it would be good for the students and especially good for the women who didn’t have very many role models to have some older women there.  It would be win/win all around, you can’t lose.  So I had this meeting in the Yale College Dean’s Office to talk about it, and I had tried to prepare for what I thought would be objections.  And there was this Associate Dean named Martin somebody or other.  I’ve forgot his last name.  And I started talking to him about this, and he said -- his objection was that we can’t take older students or part-time students because the whole Yale experience would be (inaudible)!  He made this gesture!  It would be (inaudible)!\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCompletely upturned?  (laughter)\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI said, “What?”  I mean, I just was floored by that.  I had, I had, I was speechless.  I had no -- his objection was, “I don’t want to do that.  No.”  I mean it, there was nothing -- so I remember leaving and feeling just that I hadn’t prepared adequately because I didn’t know what to say.  But yeah, OK, so it -- you know it might be a little different.  It’s not going to be (inaudible).  But, um, you know, I just, uh, couldn’t believe it.  Betty Trachtenberg picked up on the older students and the part-time students, and I really don’t know what the status of that is today.  I think it’s less, probably less of -- at that time, really there were a population of women who had left school and interrupted their educations for their husbands, and for whom it would have been really, you know, a wonderful thing.  And I don't know whether that’s so much the case now because I think people marry later and birth control is more easily accessible, so I think maybe the need is probably less than it was then.  But, um, just -- I mean, I was really working on a lot of different fronts.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Which in some ways is very stimulating, but also it means that you’re dissipating your energies.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, yeah.  I think the big mistake that I made, which I didn’t realize until this morning (laughter) --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSorry about that.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- is that I didn’t, I was too young to understand that you don’t just write this wonderfully convincing report and just hand it over and say, you know, “Here’s the fact, you know, here’s the argument.  It’s compelling.  Do it.  You should do this,” and then somebody was going to read it and say, “Oh yes, you’re right, this is a compelling argument.  OK, let’s do this.”  I didn’t know that you had to make a whole -- if you want to change an institution, a lot of the work, I mean, probably more than half of the work is, is in the, you know, lobbying and finding, making coalition and all that stuff.  I just didn’t realize it, so I don't know how much of an -- I do think I, I do think that at least some people had issues brought to their attention which they wouldn’t have otherwise as a result of stuff that I did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was your relationship with the Affirmative Action Office like?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI don’t even remember a relationship.  I know that Horace Taft put me in charge of doing the Affirmative Action Report, but I seem to remember it as a matter of, ugh, I have to make some phone calls and dig up some numbers.  But I don’t think I really had much of a relationship.  I mean, I had, I had my office, I had my budget, I had, you know, I could call anybody and invite them and they would come.  Um, so I, I really operated as this sort of individual, and I had a lot of -- I, I was outgoing in terms of meeting other women in the administration like Judy Hackman and Benny Trachtenberg are the two that stand out that I remember.  And, uh, Etta Onette (sp?).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tUm, so I definitely met other women, but --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you, did you have any contact, for example, with, with, uh, Hannah Grey?  Because she would have been provost, would she?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAround the time that you were there?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.  Hannah Grey was acting president, um, also for a year.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I had two interactions with Hannah Grey.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat does that mean?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOne, one I invited her to be on this panel of, you know, you’d have panels all the time.  We still have panels.  We’re still having panels for women to have role models and women to talk about their lives and how did you do it?  So Hannah Grey was on this panel, and what was most memorable about Hannah Gray was that while everybody else -- the whole idea was you were supposed to reach out to the women and be accessible and, and make it -- instead -- you don’t want to -- you want to decrease the distance.  You want to decrease the distance between you and the women so that they’ll have the sense of, that this is doable, you know?  It’s not impossible.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tPossible for them, mm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd Hannah Grey referred to herself as one, and she referred to herself in the third person throughout this panel.  And it was, it was very -- it came across as very bizarre because everybody else is talking really personally, and Hannah is saying, “Well, when one does this and when one does that,” so she was very, um, she -- and she looked like she was -- her hair had this -- she looked helmeted.  I mean, she, you know, she’s --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell-defended.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThat’s such a perfect word.  Yes.  Two words.  (laughter) She was perfectly well-defended and didn’t want to be personal at all.  My other interaction with her was that, um, there was a point at which the women athletes protested.  They went to Johnnie Barnett (sp?), who was, I think, a very nice woman, to protest because they were very under-resourced.  The women’s athletic program was not up to where, anywhere near where it should have been.  So they went to protest, and they, there was this photograph of them and I’m sure you’ve --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI’ve seen the photographs, yes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- seen it, where they have their clothes off and they’re standing in front of her and they had -- I don't know whether they wrote on their back or I don't know what.  And they wanted help from me.  So I wrote this kind of admittedly probably snotty letter to Hannah Grey.  I don't know whether that was when she was acting president.  It might have been.  I don't know.  But I wrote it to Hannah Grey because I had seen her as this woman who was, you know, up in, uh, on, on Mount Olympus.  That’s how she presented herself and that’s how I saw her, and I didn’t even think to call her.  I wrote her this snotty memo about concern.  That was the language that you use.  You say, “We are concerned.”  And she was really mad and she, I think she called me in and got mad at me and said, “You don’t do this, you know, you talk to people.”  Or, “One doesn’t do this!”  (laughter) So I remember thinking, “Gee, I’m only 26, I’ve only done this before.  Do you have to be so mean?”  (laughter) I did not like her.  I don't know if she’s a good president or not, a good acting president or not, but I really didn’t like her.  You know, now that I’ve studied, you know, the effects of, of this male/female ratios and stuff on women, OK, this is, this is one of the classic things that happen when there aren’t very many women in power, is that one of the ways that they -- one of the ways that this plays out is that they become queen bee or some, there’s some stereotype that women kind of -- or iron maiden, that women kind of --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- fall into because of a lot of, a lot of multiple pressures, and it’s over-determined.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, not a, not a man to match her, in some ways.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, exactly right.  So I didn’t like her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tVery lonely position to be in, I should think.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I mean, I’m, I’m sure that she, there’s -- it would have looked different from her side, and it probably was not very fun to receive this memo from me.  But I think she could have handled it better.  I mean, I could have handled it better, but I was 26 and she was Hannah Grey and she should have, she should have done better with that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there other women in the administration that you had very good relationships with?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yeah.  Um, like I said, Etta Onette, Betty Trachtenberg, Judy Hackman.  Judy Hackman was, at the time, in the Office of Institutional Research, and, um, we would have lunch.  And, you know, we, we worked, we were both colleagues and friends.  And Betty, and I think, you know, Betty Trachtenberg was collaborating with me on the older students issue.  And I don't know exactly what was doing with -- Etta Onette was in the graduate school.  I remember when I got my degree, you know, after I was no longer -- when I left the office after two years and entered grad school, when I got my degree I think Etta, Etta was there on the stage of the graduation ceremony and she was very happy for me, I could tell, and that was really nice.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I, I know that Etta was very involved, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"uh, trying to, um, persuade the university to, um, to have women masters of the colleges.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know, that was one of the things that she was heavily involved in, I know because I’ve seen the letters that went between her and, uh, and, uh, Kingman Brewster in his last years or so as president.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd indeed they were successful in the end, but it did take, I think, quite a while.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause, of course, the problem with, with being a master was the assumption was that you’d be married and you’d have a wife to, to be involved --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- in the whole business of being master.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tUgh.  Yeah, see what -- that, that sort of goes back to that whole division of labor and the homemaker and who’s doing the cooking and serving the tea and, you know, all those things.  I mean, all those things are important.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYou know, I mean, the fact that you didn’t have a wife, a woman wife to do that and you were the woman, and how could that possibly work?  You know?  It was just, um, the, the gender splitting so permeates the culture in such, in such vast ways, from little tiny, insignificant things to big things.  That’s why consciousness raising was so important, because it was just so, so ingrained in us that we, there was a lot that we just didn’t realize that was affecting us.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  You mentioned, uh, that, um, when you were at Radcliffe, one of the things that you looked at was the under-representation of women in leadership roles, undergraduate women in leadership roles.  My memory of reading your report, that was something that you also addressed at Yale --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- wasn’t it?  Yeah.  And, um, what did you -- what, what sort of conclusions did you, um, did you reach about that and was it the same case that they were, if they were taking a leadership role, it tends to be in a new, in a new group?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was exactly the same sort of pattern you were finding there?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, it was exactly the same.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  How was that, how did people respond to that?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I don’t really remember.  I mean, I think it got publicity in the paper.  I think it was in the Yale Daily News and also in the New Haven paper, and -- but, you know, I think I am, my -- who I am is, is much more of a scholar.  I like to do research that is applicable, that has practical applications and that has implications for the real world.  You know, I don’t like to go off in a corner and -- well, my husband and I have a joke because one of our friends who will remain nameless was talking about his research on cognition, and how is it that when people say teapot, they know that you’re not talking about tea and pot.  They know you’re talking about teapot.  Anyway, you know, and we, you know, our reaction to that was, “Well, what good does that do anybody?”  I like to do research that has applications.  But I’m the researcher who says, “Look what I found.  Now I’m handing it over to you.  I’m handing you this knowledge more than I am the, the politician.”\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd I don’t think -- I’m not saying politician in a pejorative way.  I think it’s a very important and difficult task.  But it’s a separate task.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo I think that, um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo in a way, that comes back to perhaps some of the criticisms that the, the undergraduate women’s group had that you were more of, more of a, an analyst --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- uh, rather than an advocate?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I think that’s absolutely right.  I think that as I was winding down and it was clear that I, you know, they were doing this search and I really wasn’t in the search and I was going to go to grad school.  But, um, an issue was coming up about sexual harassment or something like that.  I’m not sure whether that’s the term that was used.  But I remember thinking that I was glad that I was going, because I, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.  I didn’t want to deal with -- I don’t like conflict.  I don’t, you know, it’s just --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDealing with angry people and hurt people?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, and trying to sort out who, you know, what was really true here and having sort of a, um, politicized trial of sorts.  That really was not what I wanted to do, and I think that their, I think that that’s important and I think it’s very worthwhile.  I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done at all.  But I’m not the person to be doing that.  I’m the person, and I -- you know, I’m the person to, to say, “Do you realize that, look what’s happening.  Women are majoring in, in the humanities and they’re avoiding the sciences, and here’s some of the reasons why they’re avoiding the sciences and here’s what you \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"need to do to get them in, to open that door for them,” and, you know, and do a very well-researched and well-reasoned and, you know, I think practical --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- um, kind of exposition of some of these, these educational issue.  And I’m not the person to do some of that other stuff.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  But, but you were also proposing solutions.  In your analysis, you were also proposing solutions.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, from what I’ve --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- understood, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  And I was proposing solutions that were based in a careful analysis of what -- you can’t just throw something that a problem.  You need to diagnose it to, to know what’s causing it before you can propose a good solution in this, you know, like this, this gap of the, of the calculus as an example is something that wasn’t obvious and nobody was particularly talking about, but, but that was the key.  That was one of the keys that you had to fix if you wanted to fix that women in science issue.  So, so that’s where, that’s where my strengths lie; not with the more political, um, more contentious sort of acute issues of stuff like harassment.  So it was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd my understanding of Yale, it’s a very political place?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, and I think that’s very characteristic of academics, academia.  So -- because you can’t -- it’s a, it’s a, it’s both a bureaucracy and a, um, sort of collegial set of colleagues, so you can’t really tell the faculty what to do very much.  So you have to persuade.  You can’t just decide.  (laughter) So it was, yeah, it was, it was a good time for me.  Given what was, what was coming up, um, it was lucky for me that I was already going to, on my way to grad school --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- at that point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that you mentioned in, in, in your final report was, um, job interview workshops, which seems to be a very, very practical thing to do --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- um, right there at the beginning of, of, uh, Affirmative Action.  Uh, was that an, an innovation that you had brought about, or was that something that was already going on in the, um, in the office?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI, I’m sorry to say that I don’t even remember that.  I mean, I remember because I looked over the report.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd when I looked over the report, I thought, “Wow, that’s a good idea.”  (laughter) And, um, one of my students that I supervise at UCLA, her, her dissertation was on women’s salary negotiations, and she actually ended up helping.  Because of her research, she helped design some training for women on how to negotiate for salary which had very definite, in terms of numbers, you know, results.  So eventually, I ended up helping a little bit with that type of thing.  But I don’t even remember it.  But that’s, that’s a really -- that was a good idea and I hope they did it.  But I don’t remember.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there other innovations or things that you instituted during your couple of years in the office that hadn’t been done before?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI don’t really -- I don’t really know.  I mean, I think that, um, trying to -- well, the science conference was something new, but that’s a one-time deal.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So what was that about?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThat was an NSF grant -- what I’m getting to is I think that, I think that when you do certain types of projects that involve a lot of people, because of the project, connections get made which hadn’t existed before.  Those connections, those relationships, um, those people being familiar with other areas and having somebody to call constitute a change that can be, um, very useful and lasting.  It’s not the same as, you know, “I think you should have workshops to help the students with job interviews,” and now they do that.  So that was my, that’s my lead-in and that’s why I’m mentioning the science conference in answer to your question, because the science conference is a one-day and when it’s over, it’s over, except that, in fact, all these people now know each other and have worked together.  They don’t, they didn’t just meet at a, you know, for drinks and make conversation for five minutes.  They actually worked together, so they’re, so I think those are some lasting things.  But there was an NSF grant, call for proposals for helping high school girls get more interested in science.  So as we applied for the grant and won the grant, um -- oh, that door’s open.  And that was a year’s, it was a year’s worth to pull it off, and some of the things that we did -- that I was later told that I couldn’t do, but I had already done them so I didn’t, you know -- was like we had lab, we had the students arrange \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"to have tours of laboratories all over campus.  And that was something that when somebody found out, I can’t remember who it was but they said, “Well, you can’t do that!  The people will never let, let, you know, people come into their lab.”  But they had already agreed to do it because I asked them, and they just, you know.  So I was glad that I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it.  (laughter) Because otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.  You know, and Margaret Meade came and that was pretty exciting.  But a lot of the, you know, people who worked together on that, I think -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou said that you didn’t, as far as you could recall, have much contact with the, um, with the Affirmative Action Office.  I just wondered if despite that, you had a, you formed a view of Yale’s attitude to affirmative action in general?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I think that I was so caught up in my little world, I mean, I certainly was aware of how few women there were on the faculty, and especially for the minority women.  That would have been really a terrible message to get, because you would look up and you would see nobody up there.  And also terrible for the few women, the tiny number of minority women, there were -- I don't know -- two or three?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I mean, I -- that’s been one huge difficulty for me is trying to find a, a -- minority women who were on the faculty.  There were one or two, but you know, they died, actually, rather young unfortunately.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThey probably had high blood -- I mean, you know, black Americans have higher blood pressure than, um, other segments of the population, and then hypothesis is that it’s because of their experience.  It’s not because of genetics, because they have higher blood pressure when they’re older and not younger.  But, um, yeah, so I was certainly aware of it as an issue, but I think that I was caught up in all the other stuff that I was doing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.  That, that does lead me, actually, to something that I know I mentioned to you in an email and I wondered if you’d had any thoughts about it.  And that was in looking through the university archives in an around your time, um, in the office, there seemed to be I think a certain anxiety, if you like, um, around the fact -- or at least it seemed to be that the issues and concerns were kind of dissipated across your office, affirmative action, a number of other places, different committees, and also you had a constituency -- or did you not have a constituency -- which was undergraduates, uh, faculty women, women in general, you know.  Who were you, who were you working for --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh!\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- uh, in all of that?  It seemed to be that yes, there was an office of women.  But it was like a rag bag almost.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, my constituency -- because I was in Yale College, and I was very clear that my constituents -- I’m pausing because was I?  I mean, yeah, I don’t think I even questioned.  I think my, I, I assumed completely from the start that my constituency and my responsibility was to the undergraduate women, and that what I was doing was to, I was, I was working to, to enhance their education and to make things better for, for college, for women in Yale College.  And that to the extent that, you know, that I was interested in women on the faculty, it was because if the undergrads didn’t have any women professors, it -- undergrads, male and female -- if they didn’t have enough women professors, then they were going to assume that a professor is a man, you know, that they, that women can’t be professors.  So I was -- that’s who I was working for.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI mean, that, that’s who my client really was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt was, it was the undergraduate women.  And not just -- not, and not only the specific women who were there but the potential.  You know, Yale College as an institution who had a lot of, who had a responsibility and a potential and a power to really do a lot for, to educate college women.  So yeah, so I didn’t, I didn’t feel that it was, that, that I, that my, that my constituency was all scattered.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  So you weren’t, you weren’t specifically then concerned with issues like, “How do we get more women on the faculty?”  You just knew that it was going to impact on the undergraduates that there weren’t enough women on the faculty as you --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know, as role models and all those other things that you’ve talked about?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s just I want to try to get -- I wasn’t at all clear from, from the materials that are in the archives, what way it was supposed to --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- to work.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tBut, you know, I mean, to, to, to sort of circle back and to your question about the attitude toward affirmative action, I mean, there was one number that was very, that I made a lot of in my report.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Um, it was the 40/60 ratio.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd that, you know, feeling like, “Oh, great, we’re, you know, we’ve accomplished it, we’re there, 40/60!”  And you know, to, to be satisfied and think that you’ve, that you’re great if you’ve got one and a half times as many men as women is not OK.  So, so I did point that out.  But that’s, um -- affirmative action is something that I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and I, and you didn’t ask me a question about affirmative action in general.  But there’s no way that women would have gained -- affirmative action was absolutely essential for women to get access to all kinds of professions and schools and opportunities and jobs.  Without it, they would never, they wouldn’t get it.  They just wouldn’t.  So -- because it wasn’t, it wasn’t a question of the merits.  It was like I told you.  Here’s the same dossier, and when you think it’s Patrick, it’s great.  And when you think it’s Patricia, it’s not good enough.  So unless you legislate that, it simply would not happen.  So, um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s legislation to change minds.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd also, research has shown that, for example in the U.S. military, if you waited for people to change their minds about in terms of African Americans, if you waited for people to change their minds before you integrate, it’s not going to happen.  What you do is you integrate and then people are, because they experience reality and now they know somebody, they see that they were wrong.  So it’s making the change happen, then the minds change.  It’s not -- the reverse doesn’t happen because people don’t have any reason to change their mind.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThey don’t really -- they don’t have the experience.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I think Martin Luther King said something to the same effect.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, you’re probably right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAbout civil rights, yeah.  I seem to remember way back in my dim, distant past.  Um, the other thing that struck me, that there seemed to be quite a number of directors of the office --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- in a very short space of time.  I just wondered what -- was it four, four directors?  Three or four?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tIt was five in nine years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tFive in nine years?  What do you think, what sort of message do you think that gave out?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell actually, in the preface to my, in the introduction to my final report, I talked about that specifically, I thought.  And, and as I said earlier, the office was just like -- I had this metaphor.  There’s a, I think there are certain types of animals that if you, if, if somebody attacks them and pulls on their tail, the tail just breaks off and they grow a new one.  I mean, it was like that.  It was.  You know, it was like, “Oh, you’re unhappy?  Well, here.  Take a bite of this.”  You know, and it breaks off, and then they just grow a new one.  I mean, it was -- they were trying to cope with a logistical, you know, huge challenge starting with not enough bathrooms, you know, and housing, and all kinds of just physical plant issues.  And then there’s all the cultural stuff going on, and the, you know, the alumni and the resources and how do we, we need to keep 1,000 male leaders, and where are we going to put them and how is this going to affect this and that?  So I think that they had a tremendous amount of change to deal with and stuff on their plate, and I, you know, they sort of threw it, threw it into this office, or they appended, they added this appendage that was sort of expandable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo I, yeah, it was, it was not a good sign that they had so many directors.  That was not a good sign.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And I suppose it also means that the people who were actually doing the directing were probably very frustrated.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it’s interesting --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, you know, like I told you, as I was very sort of, I had this undercurrent of anxiety the whole time I was there and, and, and feeling kind of depressed about the fact that I was on trial and they were already looking for somebody new after, you know, right after they hired me, because Horace Taft didn’t defend his decision.  Um, but it was also a really fun, exciting thing to be doing, and especially for this Rock Island, Illinois person.  You know, here I am directing this office at Yale, and I call somebody and, you know, I call, uh, Alice Walker and invite her and she comes.  I mean, you know, that’s just incredibly exciting.  So, so given that I didn’t stay there very long, it’s it was both wonderful and terrible.  I didn’t have enough time to get beaten down because I sort of didn’t know enough.  Um, and I hadn’t been beating my head against the wall for so long.  You know?  And so I think, I think I was being too -- I think I was sort of too narcissistic and thinking about my own little, “Oh, I’m leaving this job,” you know, um, my own problems to be,\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"to really understand and realize and focus on the fact that, “Well, what’s happening to this report?”  Because, you know, I’m leaving and I, I think, I seem to remember -- I don’t really remember having somebody, having people call me up and saying, “Wow, that was a great report, let’s do everything!”  You know?  But then I was already thinking about grad school and I was doing the next thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  And it went into the archives.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  I mean, I think Elga, who later went to law school, I don't know what she said to you but she, she might have had the maturity, you know, and the experience to understand.  But again, you know, she was there the first year, the very first year of coeducation.  So, you know, she did see a tremendous change.  She saw Yale go from being all male in the college to having all these women there.  So she, I don't know whether, how she felt about it.  But I think she went, I think her going to law school was part of her coming to the conclusion that you needed the force of the law behind you if you wanted to get stuff done.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhy did you decide to go, to do a PhD?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, part of the message that I got was, you know, I had still been thinking college administration, and now I know that I, I don’t care what degree you have.  If you’re an administrator, you have limited influence over faculty who, you know, that’s, that’s not what they respect -- unless you’re a dean, unless you’re a remarkable dean.  But, um, part of it was I felt like if -- I need the legitimacy of a PhD if I’m really going to get anything done in higher education.  Plus I am an, I am an intellectual.  I love to study, I love to do research, I love to read, I love to learn, so it really fit who I was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tBut I think the, the ostensible idea was, um, given what I want to accomplish, I need a PhD for legitimacy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd, and you decided to do it management?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, because of the things that would interest me, psychology, social psychology, sociology, organizational behavior -- and I knew Judy Hackman, who was the wife of Richard Hackman who was a, he was my mentor and he was a wonderful faculty member in the organizational behavior department.  But I really wanted something applied.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd I wanted to be able to understand what happens in organizations.  You know, like for example going to a faculty meeting and hearing somebody propose a change and justify it by saying that it wasn’t a change.  You know, that was, I thought that was pretty fascinating.  So organizational behavior really was the right choice for me because it is very applied, and at the same time it’s scholarly.  So it’s, you know, the research is, is, um, I say rigorous.  I’m a little, you know -- that word has a little bit of a, sort of a -- it’s a little bit problematic because sometimes people who are in social sciences thing that they, that rigor means they have to have numbers, which I -- anyway, that’s a side track.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s a loaded word?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  (laughter) Yes, yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDefinitely a loaded word, I think, in an academic context.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUm, so you did your PhD at Yale.  Um, did you think then that you would go into, try to get an academic position rather than pursue and administrative role either at Yale or somewhere else?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I did.  Then I, you know, after being in graduate school, I guess it was about seven years, which is the norm, you know, that was perfectly normal, um, you know, you kind of get socialized into then being an academic and being a faculty person and not an administrator.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that, then, was how you ended up in California?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yeah, because I went on the job market and I, um, I had -- I could have gone to, to McGill or University of Michigan or UCLA, and, and UCLA was, seemed to be the, the best option.  And so -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhere did that leave Kelin in his career?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it, that was also the best for him because he, he -- we were still taking turns and it was my turn, so he followed me to UCLA and there were a lot of opportunities in Los Angeles.  And he ended up, um, starting the organizational psychology program at the California School of Professional Psychology, which was very innovative and, you know, he founded a program that was really, I think, better than our program at UCLA.  (laughter) So although it wasn’t as prestigious, so it was harder for him.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course by that time, you, you had the two children?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI haven’t even asked you about things like childcare and all those other issues that \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"were enormous difficulties in the, in the, in the ‘70s and of course remain so for so many women.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, it was a lot easier for, for me.  First of all, right from the start -- and remember, having read, um, The Feminine Mystique the day I was married, um, we didn’t have kids until I was -- and Kelin was very good at not, about not pressuring me because he wanted to have kids sooner than I did.  But I was worried about that would be the end of life as we know it if I became a mother.  But, um, I said we had to be 50/50 as parents, and he, he was absolutely, you know, agreed with that.  His father is, um, I think his parents are, are very egalitarian, unusually egalitarian for that generation.  Um, so we really raised the kids and took care of them.  Kelly, he’s the cook.  He’s a wonderful, he’s a very creative, wonderful cook.  So we’ve, we always had, were the ones that people would come to dinner and they would always turn to me and say, “That was so delicious!”  And we would say, “Well actually, you know, I, Kelin, Kelin’s the one that made the dinner.”  And then, then that would sort of start a fight among the couple because the wife would be like, “Hey, how come you don’t cook?”  (laughter) So, um, yeah, so we really had that unusual marriage.  And also, both of us had been in jobs that allowed us to be -- when I went to grad school, I was part time.  And having a, being in academia, you always have work hanging over your head but you’re not, it’s not a nine to five job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s right, yes, it’s -- there’s a certain amount of flexibility in your schedule, if nothing else.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  The demands, the amount of time that you have to work are very high, but your control over here you have to be when are flexible enough, and there was -- you know, so we had somebody come, we had somebody come to the house when the kids were little and we were in New Haven, and then we had day care.  There were day care centers in Santa Monica, so -- which we might not have had in Rock Island, Illinois.  You know, we might not have had any of those options in Rock Island.  But, so we were really able to work things out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s just interesting that you read the very early literature of, um, Women’s Faculty Forum and groups like that in the early ‘70s at Yale, and things like childcare and flexible working practices and all sorts of things were there, top of the agenda then, and 35 years later, guess what Women’s Faculty Forum is always on-- --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI know!\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- talking about?  It’s the same things.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYet -- uh, and it does make you wonder how much a transformation has gone on in the 35 years.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I know, that’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr has it, or is it just that everybody’s expectations have become much higher?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThey have.  They have become higher, and I think for women in my generation, the expectations -- the hopes were high but the expectations were low.  So, you know, can women do this?  Can women do that?  Could a woman possibly do this?  Well, how can you work if you have all this childcare responsibility?  You know?  Um, so, I mean, that was a question that was raised.  I went to a AAA meeting, the American Association for the Advancement of -- there was a, I don't know what the other A is.  It’s a scientist organization.  What could the other A be?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAmerican?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, there’s American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Maybe it’s AAAS.  Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s AAAS, yes, I --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tThat’s it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- yeah, I knew it was that, yeah.  Mm-hmm.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnyway, the point of the program was how can women be scientists, given that they also have to have all these homemaking and childcare, family responsibilities.  And now, I think the question is, is a little bit reversed.  I mean, how can you have a family given that you have all this career stuff to do?  It really is reversed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that, uh, I, I remember Elga talking about, and I think she does talk about it publicly as well, is that maybe as a society, we’re just not paying enough attention to the major demographic changes that have gone on.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUm, you know, that we can expect to be healthy and, uh, and work, able to work, you know, much later than, than people, you know, before the war, that we can actually have active, productive, professional lives into our 70s or later if we, if we wanted.  And, and that, so that there are, there’s a way that women could have children when biologically they should have them --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUh, but then develop a career afterwards.  But we somehow, we haven’t really negotiated that yet.  I just wonder what you thought about that, especially when you look at the whole tenure \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"issue in universities where, where the, the biggest demands professionally, that is achieving tenure, comes at those optimum child-bearing years.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, absolutely.  It’s a terrible problem.  It’s really terrible, and it’s part of that, um, well, I know I’m being repetitive, but I really think it partly comes back to consciousness raising, that there, it doesn’t have to be the way that it is.  And partly, it comes back to just conservatism and prejudice and sexism.  Because organizations really are designed for a man with a wife, and careers are designed for a man with a wife or a person with a housekeeper.  So I call it the two-person career, and that means that it just, it may, it puts, um, career and family in, at odds and it makes them compete with each other.  There’s no need.  There’s no need for people to have to work 80 hours a week to compete and get ahead.  It’s just silly.  I mean, I, so -- but that’s the way, that’s the way the competitive, um, situation is set up.  So it doesn’t -- it makes, it makes sense in terms of the competition of male primates to be alpha male, but it doesn’t make sense in terms of getting the -- having the best quality of work from your organizations or from your people.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm, the best health of the herd, in a way.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.  So I think it’s pretty archaic, and I mean, when I say archaic, I mean primate archaic, not, you know, just 100 years ago.  And, but you know, we’re human so we should be able to understand those things and, and change them, and I think efforts are being -- there are serious efforts being made to recognize some of those things.  Like Lotte Bailyn has this book, B-A-I-L-Y-N and her first name is L-O-T-T-E, she’s at MIT, called Breaking the Mold, and it’s about ways to rethink how organizations are designed and ways that you can redesign organizations and redesign careers to make them, um, more sensible, you know, more humane, more able to really get the best out of what everybody has to offer and get a lot of great work done instead of insisting on this stupid, you know, two-person career.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  A sort of straightjacket almost, isn’t it?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  It really is.  And it’s self-perpetuating because the people who compete and get to the top are the people who have behaved that way.  So, um, yeah, it’s, it’s still a really big issue.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tAnd that was also part of the problem of, you know, why we can’t take, um, part-time students, because if you’re not full-time, you’re not serious.  Well, that’s silly.  You know?  So that may not be silly if you’re judging on the basis of men like George Bush, our recent president, who was a goof off.  You know?  I mean, you know, he, when he came to graduation, he bragged about the fact that he had been a C student and look where it got him.  You know?  So if you, if you judge part-time it means not serious, perhaps in terms of people like him it’s true.  But it’s, as a generalization it, it doesn’t make sense.  I don't know if that added up, but -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yes.  It does make me think, too, that, um, you know, there has been a tremendous rise in the number of women on faculty, uh, and in senior administrative posts at Yale, as well as other places.  Um, and, um, and it does raise the question in my mind of the numbers of women coming in.  I mean, again, we’re, I think at Yale, at 34 percent of the faculty are now women, something like that.  And maybe a little bit less than that is tenured.  But, um, it’s a significant advance on when you were here, um, at, in the Office of Women.  Uh, and I wondered if that means that those women are transforming the institution, or is it that they’ve just become more successful at negotiating their way through the system as it is?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I’m afraid it might be more the latter than the former.  But I -- the picture that I have now or what’s coming to mind is the, the relatively recent shift in research in my field, and I’ll tell you why that’s relevant.  Um, most of the research for at least 20 years or maybe 25 years, as I explained earlier, was on proving again and again and again, “Well, we looked here and look what we found.  You know, women are -- men are getting this\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"much and women are only getting that much,” or, you know, “People are, you know, saying that you, that this study in Sweden that the women had to be literally two and a half times as good as the men to get judged as good enough to get this fellowship.”  Um, so most of the research was just to keep demonstrating how unfair things really were in reality, that if you look at the numbers, you are forced to see that women are -- it’s not that women aren’t just good, it’s that women are being, not getting a good deal, that women are being discounted and, and shut out.  But more recently, the research has turned to what are we going to do about this and what is going, what will work, given that, for example, women aren’t supposed to brag.  You know, if, if a man says, “I did, I accomplished these five things,” you might say he’s ambitious and that’s a good thing.  But if a woman says, “I accomplished these five things,” well, she’s, she’s bragging and she’s obnoxious and you don’t want to have her around.  And, and I’m saying this in an informal way, but the research has demonstrated these, these types --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, it’s like, it’s like using the word, um, assertive and aggressive.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  So, OK, so what do you do about this?  I mean, what are the ways that women can present themselves, present their credentials, and not be dismissed as somebody I don’t want to be around because she’s too aggressive?  Well, the research, the new research has shown that the key issue is that if a woman is judged to be ambitious, then she’s, then people make the assumption that she must be the opposite of how nice women are supposed to be.  She must not be nice because she’s -- ambition and niceness are opposite.  So if you, if you’re describing a woman and you’re saying how accomplished she is and you also say, “And she really cares about her people and she’s done these three things to help make everybody feel included,” in other words, if you’re going to say, if you want to present a case for, for a woman candidate, you want to say how accomplished she is.  You need to also say how caring she is and how, in fact, she has satisfied the norms of how a woman is supposed to be toward other people.  That’s what you need to do.  So, so my point being we’re just starting to start to do the research and the experiments and to figure out how, how can you actually change these things that are so deep seated that people deny them and don’t even know they’re doing them when they are doing them?  So I think we’re still kind -- I think we’re kind of at the beginning, but we’re starting to make progress in understanding how to change things, which I think we haven’t really necessarily known before.  Because the progress that we’ve made, which certainly should not be trivialized whatsoever, but has been, you know, we’ve made all this progress in getting to the middle, but then we haven’t gotten to the top.  And, and this requires, this, this new push from middle to top requires some effort that we haven’t made before, some, some, a whole new level of consciousness raising, a whole new level of understanding and inventing the, the, the actions that we have to do to get over this, these hurdles.  So I think this is sort of something new.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s, it’s about making some of the things that are traditionally seen as female attributes, um, actually things that everybody wants --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- and organizations want.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yes, I think that’s right.  And it may be that this, um, economic disaster that we’re having and all the corruption that’s being uncovered and all the, you know, as a result of all this insane and narcissistic greed, you know, that’s sort of the alpha male behavior, it may be that this is an opportunity to say that, “Look, the things that we valued in the past are not so hot.”  You know?  And some of the things that, that we’ve said are characteristic of women are, are just what we need right now.  That’s not going to be falling off a log, but, um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I can’t imagine it would be.  Well, you’ve talked a lot about, um, you talked a lot in, in, in your research and, and you’ve mentioned it here, you know, that there’s the career/family tradeoffs, um, that a lot of women, you’ve identified that as a, as a trait in a lot of women.  Um, uh, and I just wondered, in your own professional life and career how many, as it were in quotation marks, “accidental opportunities” you’ve had.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh, accidental opportunities?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Your things that have just, you’ve been -- perhaps another way of putting it is opportunistic, that you, you’ve been a person that’s been able to grab opportunities wherever you find yourself.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh.  I don't know, because I don’t think I’ve, I don’t, I’m not, I’m not totally \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"sure that I’m understanding your question, but, um -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things you did say earlier on in your interview was that, um, you didn’t use the word passive but you said you sort of floated along?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I think I did float along.  I don’t think I, I don’t think -- and see, a lot of the women that I’ve talked to in my research, um, I think I’m very normal in this respect.  Of the 40 women that I interviewed in depth for my, for my book on women’s adult development, few of them said, “Oh, I want to, this is my life’s ambition.  I want to be, you know, president by the time I’m 40,” which is something that’s pretty commonplace for me to identify this place that they want to be by the time they’re X age.  And I think at least for the women that I talk to, very few of them had any kind of a goal like that.  You know, because things were -- it’s like the road, the road was unfolding as they went along.  You know?  I never said I wanted to be a tenured professor at UCLA, or, you know, I want to be this professor, or I want to do this or do that.  I did have the goal of wanting to be the Director of the Office on the Education of Women, but I thought that would be when I was 40, not when I was 26.  So, um, you know, that kind of fell in my lap in a way.  But, um, I think the path I took and, you know, the research that I did, that I’m known for in my field was kind of, sort of an opportunity came my way and I -- I did shape the opportunity.  But it wasn’t something that I had set out to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo, um, I’m not sure if that, that that exactly answers your question, but you know.  I don’t think I’ve, that I’ve been -- I think the word is teleological, that I had this goal in mind and I was pulled, pulled toward it.  I think it’s been more kind of things unfold.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that, um, I’ve, I’ve just observed about, uh, about Yale, um, and the faculty and administration, that actually there have been, over the years starting in the ‘70s, a significant number of very, very, very successful women administrators, women like Hannah Grey, um, and Susan Hockfield later on, and Allison Richard, and there’s a whole raft of them --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- who’ve all gone on to, um, the top jobs in, in the academy, president.  And Judy (inaudible) is another one.  And I just wondered that I’m not sure that there’s the same sort of, uh, major flowering, in some ways, in, in, in the faculty.  Or at least these huge, as it were, stars.  I don’t, I’m, I’m not expressing this the right way.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt, it’s about, you know, these women who seem to have been able to negotiate, um, the corridors of power in a way that is, seems ultra successful.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUm, and I just wonder how that happened.  Was there something about Yale that enabled them to do that?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI don’t know.  I, I mean, if you think about, you know, American presidents, a lot of them have, Yale has produced a lot of the most powerful people in the world.  So, um, I think part of -- it, it’s hard for me not to contrast Yale and Harvard, because I think that both are, both Yale and Harvard are -- I think Yale and Harvard are the two top universities in the country.  And, you know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t -- I’m certainly in the, they’re in the top group in the world and I don’t want to be silly and say that, you know -- I don't know how I would rank all the other universities.  But, but certainly they’re in the very top.  Um, to me, having lived at both places, Yale has the high, the same high quality of Harvard, but Yale is more humanistically oriented, um, whereas Harvard is more hard-driving, just the way that the two places feel.  So although both Bush and Obama were at Yale, but (laughter) -- and Clinton.  But anyway, so I think part of, part of the success rate of, of that you’re just talking about, it may have to do with this is a, you know, incredibly selective place.  So the people who end up coming here and being hired here, um, are very, you know, are very much at the top of, of their groups in the first place.  And then also, the people that they associate with, um, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"you know, the networks that they form give them access to opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise, even if you’re really talented.  Like say Susan Boyle, you know, this woman singer who --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.  Yes.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\t-- um, she has incredible talent.  Once you hear her, you see the talent.  But she, she’s isolated off in -- if she, if she had grown up someplace else and had -- you know, having, having talent is, is very, very important, but then also having, being -- having access to other people who are similarly talented and who have access to opportunities is sort of the other piece of the equation, and I think you have both pieces at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tSo maybe that’s part of what explains it.  And, you know, and your, your idea about, that they learned and/or were able to negotiate the political process in a place like this, um, was part of the skill and talent that got them where they were.  I’m sure that’s right also.  So I don't know about the, I don't know about -- you’re, you’re, you’re sort of wondering, “Well, did the faculty not have” -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I, I, I meant that entirely, I got that -- came out of my mouth completely the wrong way.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh, OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause that sounds as if I was denigrating faculty.  I’m not at all doing that.  It’s just it seems, it just seems as, as coming in from the outside, of course there’s many, many talented women on the faculty.  I don’t mean that at all.  But there just seemed to have so many women in administration who’d gone on to, to being presidents and principals elsewhere.  I’ve just been struck by that.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell also, I think that when people, you know, in other places are looking, you know, and they do their searches, they, they kind of focus their lens -- they don’t look very deeply when they focus their lens.  They’re going to look at a place like, “Well, OK, who’s the, who are the administrators at Yale and Columbia and, and Stanford,” and you know, they’ll, they’ll look at a small number of places.  So, you know, that’s part of being in the right -- being in a place that you’re going to be noticed too, that you’ll be found as opposed to a Susan Boyle who, um, you know, by chance has been found.  Because she was a, she was a, this fabulous singer when she was just sitting there in her apartment, you know, in her little apartment hidden away.  She was equally fabulous, but now she’s been noticed.  But other people get noticed more easily.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s the village Milton syndrome, you know, the, uh, Gray’s Elegy, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe village Miltons, that all these people could be Milton but they’re only villagers.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tUh, because they, they don’t have the access to --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- to being noticed.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd being nurtured.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  What do you, um, you’ve talked a lot about how you and, uh, your husband negotiated from, from you having --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- having read, um, Betty Friedan.  Would you say that that might be maybe one of the major factors in, in, in enabling you to become a really successful professional woman?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, absolutely.  Because, um, well, otherwise I wouldn’t have had time.  (laughter) But also, it’s not just time.  It’s your self-concept.  Do you, do you think of yourself as somebody who has a chance or, you know, who’s, who’s legitimately, um, a serious person in the, in the world of ideas and work?  Or do you think of yourself as somebody who kind of is maybe even going to, you know, trying things sort of as a hobby or on the side or something?  So yeah, I think that, I think the idea of, you know, our taking turns and your career is as important as mine or your work is as, is -- both of our work is important to us and both, and our family is important to both of us.  So I think, I think that’s a platform, that’s an important platform for being able to, to, um, try things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat would you say our greatest achievement has been?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tMy kids.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYour kids.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.  Yeah, they’re really wonderful.  They’re just absolutely wonderful.  Um, aside from the kids, I have done some -- the research that I’m most known for is, um, is a real contribution.  I can tell you about it, but it’s not on the subject.  But it’s, it’s, um, I discovered something about what, how, how groups work.  This sounds so, um, kind of esoteric, but it’s actually not.  It’s actually very everyday.  But anyway, um, research had been done on how groups develop since -- partly because of World War II -- but since certainly the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and nobody found this thing that I found that happens in groups, which is that groups essentially have a midlife crisis.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267/transcript/31928/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Task groups.  Groups, groups are projects that have a beginning and a deadline.  The middle is really, really important because when it gets to the middle of the time, people say, “Oh, we’re halfway to our deadline,” and they, they do a whole paradigm shift in the way that they’re working, which if you know it, it’s real important to managing how your work is able to -- how your, how your work gets done and how your group works together.  So, I mean, it’s hard to communicate in two sentences, but --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, so the group has a life cycle --\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- rather mirroring our human life cycle.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.  Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tPart of why I recognized that was having been friends with Dan Levinson and knowing about the midlife transition.  But, um, you know, and part of the reason I discovered that, which, you know, people had been doing research for years and years and years and years and they never found that because they were so busy trying to be rigorous and count how many questions were asked and how many answers were -- you know, they were trying to take all the content out of group behaviors in, in the name of science and just count things that were real objective, and they missed the whole, this whole real important phenomenon that was happening that you have to listen to what people are talking about in order to see this thing.  You know?  So, so, um, so that’s, you know, that was a good, that’s a good contribution to social science.  And I hope that my book on women’s adult development will also be a good contribution.  It remains to be seen how, whether it will get launched or how it’ll be launched, but -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen’s it due?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tWell, I’ve almost done with the manuscript and I’ve just submitted it to a publisher.  Don’t know how it’s going to play out or, you know, when and where it’ll be published.  But it’s, I’ve been working on it for a long time, so -- some of the things that you’ve been asking about, I’ve been answering from the point of view of that research.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Well, it’s probably a very good prism through which to review, um, the work you did at Yale.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes, I think it is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tA useful kind of Litmus Test almost?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tBut I think social, I think the work of social scientists, um, always gets eclipsed and, you know, it’s always continuing to evolve and very few people, you know, there’s only -- there’s one Darwin, there’s one -- you know, people who really, really make a lasting difference as, as academics are, are, you know, there’s a handful who, of people who you’re going to remember their individual work.  Other than that, it’s a stream, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, and it’s incremental as well.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, thank you very much, Connie.\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tOh, you’re welcome.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThank you.  Is there anything else you’d actually like to add?\r\n\nCONNIE GERSICK:\tI don’t think so.  You covered a lot.  Um --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I, I, I’ll turn this off now, I think.  Thank you anyway, it’s great.\r\n\r\nEND OF TRANSCRIPT","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48960/file/122267#t=7500.0,7702.96163"}]}]}]}