{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/nk3610wm67/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Wasserman, Elga, 2007 May 24"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Wasserman, Elga, 2007 May 24. 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/801944"]}},{"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-056_wasserman_elga_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2007 May 24 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Elga Ruth Wasserman was born Elga Steinherz in 1925 into a middle class Jewish family, in Berlin, Germany.  She came to the United States at the age of twelve with her parents and younger brother to escape Hitler, and the family settled in Great Neck, Long Island.  She excelled in high school, and won a scholarship to Smith College, from which she graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude in 1945.  She considered a medical career but, for financial and personal reasons, she opted instead to do a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Radcliffe College, supervised by Nobel Prize winner Robert Burns Woodward. She graduated in 1948.   She was, almost certainly, Woodward’s one and only female doctoral student.  She married fellow Woodward student, Harry Wasserman, in 1947.  The Wassermans moved to Yale in 1948 when Harry Wasserman joined the Chemistry department as an instructor.  She found a position at Yale as a research assistant in Microbiology but resigned voluntarily shortly before the birth of her first child.  For the next twelve years she raised three children, supplementing the family income with part-time jobs as a chemist in industry and teaching at local community colleges.  Once her third child was in school, she returned briefly in 1960-1961 to chemistry research at Yale, but in 1962 she accepted the position of assistant to the Dean of Yale Graduate School.  She discovered that administration enabled her to be both professionally independent and to work part-time, so in 1964 she accepted the position of Assistant Dean at the Graduate School, with special responsibility for graduate science programs, a post she held until February 1969.  Yale’s decision in the fall of 1968 to admit women undergraduates led President Kingman Brewster to seek out Dr. Wasserman to oversee the implementation of co-education at the University.  She was appointed chair of the University Committee on Coeducation before becoming Brewster’s Special Assistant on the Education of Women, a post she held from 1969 to 1973, by which time Yale’s transition to coeducation was complete.  She felt it was then time to move on.  Her experience with equal access issues at Yale resulted in Women in Academia: Evolving Policies toward Equal Opportunities, published by Praeger in 1975, and inspired her to become a lawyer.  She graduated from Yale Law School in 1976.  She spent the next twenty years, until her retirement, in private practice, first as a tax lawyer but subsequently as a family lawyer.\n\nIn retirement, reflecting on her own experience as a scientist and administrator, Elga Wasserman began to address the question of why there are not more women in science.  Her conclusions were published as Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science (Joseph Henry Press, 2000), and she continues to write and speak on women in science and related issues. (Bioghist)","Elga Wasserman briefly recalls her early childhood in Nazi Germany and her first impressions of the United States.  She reflects about the educational and social expectations of women in her family and in society at large in postwar America, speaking at some length about the ambivalences she encountered in college and graduate school towards women in higher education, especially in science.  Throughout the interview she engages with the reasons why, in her view, women were, and continue to be, at a disadvantage in academic life, and the ways in which equity balance in academia might be achieved.  She discusses the relationship between individual choices and structural change, and addresses tenure, salary, promotion and retention, and reflects on the significance of affirmative action and the opportunities it presented to women in the 1970s.  She speculates at some length on why combining a professional career with motherhood appears, in her view, to be more difficult in the United States than other parts of the world.  \n\nThe bulk of Wasserman’s interview deals with her career at Yale, including her experience as an Assistant Dean in the Graduate School, her work on the Coeducation Committee and her role as Special Assistant on the Education of Women to President Kingman Brewster.  She talks at length about the reasons why she choose to work part-time when her children were small, and recalls the challenges faced by women scientists like Mary Ingraham Bunting (who she knew as a colleague at Yale) who combined full-time scientific research with motherhood.  She talks about the difficulties she experienced as a faculty wife within the prevailing culture at Yale in the 1950s and the persistence of gender discrimination at Yale institutions like the Yale Club of New York and Mory’s until the 1970s.  She also recalls her relationships with senior Yale figures including John Perry Miller, John Wilkinson, Georges May, Henry “Sam” Chauncey, Jr., George Pierson, Alfred Fitt, Hannah Gray, Bart Giamatti and Kingman Brewster.  Lastly, she devotes much time to the challenges and difficulties she experienced in her job overseeing coeducation and negotiating affirmative action within the university, and details the reasons she decided in the end to leave Yale to pursue a new career in the law. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;55c8bade-78d5-4af2-8236-a7d71f21c27b (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.","Elga Ruth Wasserman was born Elga Steinherz in 1925 into a middle class Jewish family, in Berlin, Germany.  She came to the United States at the age of twelve with her parents and younger brother to escape Hitler, and the family settled in Great Neck, Long Island.  She excelled in high school, and won a scholarship to Smith College, from which she graduated with a B.A. \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003esumma cum laude\u003c/title\u003e in 1945.  She considered a medical career but, for financial and personal reasons, she opted instead to do a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Radcliffe College, supervised by Nobel Prize winner Robert Burns Woodward. She graduated in 1948.   She was, almost certainly, Woodward’s one and only female doctoral student.  She married fellow Woodward student, Harry Wasserman, in 1947.  The Wassermans moved to Yale in 1948 when Harry Wasserman joined the Chemistry department as an instructor.  She found a position at Yale as a research assistant in Microbiology but resigned voluntarily shortly before the birth of her first child.  For the next twelve years she raised three children, supplementing the family income with part-time jobs as a chemist in industry and teaching at local community colleges.  Once her third child was in school, she returned briefly in 1960-1961 to chemistry research at Yale, but in 1962 she accepted the position of assistant to the Dean of Yale Graduate School.  She discovered that administration enabled her to be both professionally independent and to work part-time, so in 1964 she accepted the position of Assistant Dean at the Graduate School, with special responsibility for graduate science programs, a post she held until February 1969.  Yale’s decision in the fall of 1968 to admit women undergraduates led President Kingman Brewster to seek out Dr. Wasserman to oversee the implementation of co-education at the University.  She was appointed chair of the University Committee on Coeducation before becoming Brewster’s Special Assistant on the Education of Women, a post she held from 1969 to 1973, by which time Yale’s transition to coeducation was complete.  She felt it was then time to move on.  Her experience with equal access issues at Yale resulted in \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eWomen in Academia: Evolving Policies toward Equal Opportunities\u003c/title\u003e, published by Praeger in 1975, and inspired her to become a lawyer.  She graduated from Yale Law School in 1976.  She spent the next twenty years, until her retirement, in private practice, first as a tax lawyer but subsequently as a family lawyer.\n\nIn retirement, reflecting on her own experience as a scientist and administrator, Elga Wasserman began to address the question of why there are not more women in science.  Her conclusions were published as \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eDoor in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science\u003c/title\u003e (Joseph Henry Press, 2000), and she continues to write and speak on women in science and related issues.","Elga Wasserman briefly recalls her early childhood in Nazi Germany and her first impressions of the United States.  She reflects about the educational and social expectations of women in her family and in society at large in postwar America, speaking at some length about the ambivalences she encountered in college and graduate school towards women in higher education, especially in science.  Throughout the interview she engages with the reasons why, in her view, women were, and continue to be, at a disadvantage in academic life, and the ways in which equity balance in academia might be achieved.  She discusses the relationship between individual choices and structural change, and addresses tenure, salary, promotion and retention, and reflects on the significance of affirmative action and the opportunities it presented to women in the 1970s.  She speculates at some length on why combining a professional career with motherhood appears, in her view, to be more difficult in the United States than other parts of the world.  \n\nThe bulk of Wasserman’s interview deals with her career at Yale, including her experience as an Assistant Dean in the Graduate School, her work on the Coeducation Committee and her role as Special Assistant on the Education of Women to President Kingman Brewster.  She talks at length about the reasons why she choose to work part-time when her children were small, and recalls the challenges faced by women scientists like Mary Ingraham Bunting (who she knew as a colleague at Yale) who combined full-time scientific research with motherhood.  She talks about the difficulties she experienced as a faculty wife within the prevailing culture at Yale in the 1950s and the persistence of gender discrimination at Yale institutions like the Yale Club of New York and Mory’s until the 1970s.  She also recalls her relationships with senior Yale figures including John Perry Miller, John Wilkinson, Georges May, Henry “Sam” Chauncey, Jr., George Pierson, Alfred Fitt, Hannah Gray, Bart Giamatti and Kingman Brewster.  Lastly, she devotes much time to the challenges and difficulties she experienced in her job overseeing coeducation and negotiating affirmative action within the university, and details the reasons she decided in the end to leave Yale to pursue a new career in the law.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u002655c8bade-78d5-4af2-8236-a7d71f21c27b","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/48971/file/122276","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-1py3i7h.mpga"]},"duration":10124.568,"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/48971/file/122276/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/276/original/open-uri20210827-32762-1py3i7h.mpga?1630069883","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":10124.568,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-056_wasserman_elga_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"WASSERMAN052407\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's Thursday, the 24th of May, 2007, and I'm here with Helga Wasserman at her home at 1010 Waltham Street, Lexington.  So, Helga, I -- there are three or four main sections I'd like to try to take --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- the interview in that way.  And we can stop whenever you want and we can review what we've done, where we're going and all of that.  So just take it at your own pace.  But, the four sections that I had in mind were, first of all, your background and influences.  I think that's really important when we think of women's history to look at the context of your life.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: The second section I'd like to concentrate on is being a woman in science and your experience of that and your perceptions, generally, about women in science, particularly in that period after the war.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And then, the third section is, I suppose, that's about you and your life here at Yale.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And in your various positions here.  And especially to look at co-ed.  And, the fourth section, if we have time and if you're agreeable, I'd really like to get a sense of what you think -- where women have got to now --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- in terms of academic aspirations --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, the last one is easy for me.  I just lectured on that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Oh good.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: So that's fresher in my mind than some of the other stuff.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: OK.  Well, I'll do my best to prompt your memory --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- but I'm sure once you get going it will come back to you and I've done my best to try to figure out questions that were actually relevant to you --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- rather than generic questions.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: All right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So I hope that that will help you.  So, if we start with the background and influences, could you tell me something about your own background.  I mean, for example, your own background, I understand, is Jewish and I'd be really interested to know about your family --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: All right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and particularly your mother and your siblings and whether or not there is an explanation that you would have a career given your background.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: All right.  I'll give you as best a recollection as I can.  We just came back from a week in Berlin.  We were actually -- I as born in Berlin and came to the United States at the age of 12.  And the Berlin government invited us back so some of this I've experienced going back and thinking more about that period in my life.  I grew up in a middle-class, upper middle-class Jewish family in Berlin.  Very, I would say, very assimilated, openly Jewish but not absurd except on the high holidays.  My parents were comfortable.  My mother had studied to be -- she got a degree that qualified her to teach in nursery school, but she did not work after -- of the two children, I'm the older one.  I have a younger brother.  She did not work -- we had household help, as all comparable families did.  And I had an uneventful childhood.  I think even very early on I was somewhat rebellious.  I remember my younger brother always being very obedient and pleasing the nursemaids and I always resented having to report to anybody.  But -- and then I went to Montessori School, which I loved.  And, that was closed in 1933 when I was nine-years-old.  At that point, I transferred to a Jewish school, which was a Zionist School, in the neighborhood.  I made some friends there.  I didn't like the school nearly as much as I had liked the Montessori School.  But I got very much into Zionism and the idea of eventually going to what was then Palestine and getting away from the government.  My parents protected us very much from what was going on in Germany.  But you pick it up anyhow as a child.  A, you were -- I remember going to the Olympic Stadium and there was a big sign:  No Jews Allowed, in '36 before we left.  There were all of the posters.  And I was just told these are not good people and ignore them.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And don't pay any attention to them.  A lot of members of both of my parents family perished in the Holocaust.  We were never told the details of it, but obviously it affected the atmosphere at home.  From '30 -- let's see, we left in '36 -- from '34 to '36, we had an English-speaking nanny.  So, the result was, when we left in 1936, I was pretty fluent in English.  My mother -- my father would have stayed in Germany.  My mother saw everything coming and insisted that we leave.  My father was 10 years older than my mother.  She decided that Israel -- she had visited Palestine and decided it was too hard an adjustment with Hebrew and agriculture -- he was a patent -- a chemical patent attorney.  So, we decided to go to the United States and I remember at the time being very disappointed.  I pictured this as some kind of Wild West country with Indians, not at all ideologically compatible.  But then, I didn't have a very hard time adjusting, partly because I did know English.  And I went into junior high school here.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Where did you --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: On Long Island in Grade 9.  And I remember a very funny experience.  In junior high science, there was a discussion of I don’t know, two compounds -- which one had the higher boiling point or something.  And the teacher got them mixed up and I corrected him and he said to me, oh no, it's because you measure in Centigrade and we measure in Fahrenheit.  And I came home and I thought that this was hilarious, but, you know, none of this stuff bothered me but I was always, and I attribute it partly to my character and partly to living in a country where you're out of phase with the government, so that I was always somewhat irreverent.  I had a perfect -- I skipped a grade.  I graduated when I was just barely 17 from high school in Great Neck.  And, applied to several colleges.  I enrolled to be a freshman at Barnard, which would have meant living at home.  I had applied to Smith and New Jersey College for Women.  That's now Rutgers.  Well, New Jersey College for Women turned me down.  Smith admitted me but didn't give me a scholarship.  So, I started Barnard, but after two days at Barnard, we got a letter from Smith, or a telegram, saying they were giving me a scholarship.  And my mother said, look, it's better for you to be away from home, which was very good of her.  So, I had four good years at Smith.  The war broke out my freshman year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Can you tell me, when you were at high school, were you encouraged -- you told me the story about your chemistry teacher -- but were you encouraged as a girl to excel like anybody else?  Like the boys?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: My parents were very proud of my scholastic achievements and they used to brag about them, which used to annoy me.  I also -- I mean, it was the 40s and it was a precursor, really, of the 50s.  So, as a girl, you didn't want to be too smart.  I mean, I was a good student and socially, that was a handicap.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: How did it express itself?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, the guys were afraid of smart women.  The same story as today.  Not too different.  But, my mother really did not think it was a good idea for women to have an occupation.  If we had friends with wives in Germany already where the wives were working and had professions and my mother was very into the Freudian thing.  She should be at home.  Although we had nursemaids, she wasn't always home.  It's the same story you have today.  But I would not say that she pushed me in any way professionally, but they did take pride in my achievements.  I took some -- there was some contest.  I won What Future Leader of Nassau County, Long Island one year.  And it was based on some test, Lord \u0026 Taylor awarded me something.  And, you know, they were very proud of my achievements, but I could take them or leave them.  But I was very happy to get into college.  And I really, in a way, thrived in a women's college because you didn't have to hold back.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER: So you say it was a perfect fit for you?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think at that time -- stage of my life, it really was.  And, Betty Friedan was the editor of the school paper.  She was two years ahead of me.  I still have friends from my class, then.  And, I had a good experience.  I -- early on, I even had an uncle who was a physician.  He came over from Europe and I used to babysit and cover his phone.  There were no answering machines in those days.  And I always read his library, so I got a lot of medical information.  And I think in my heart I would have loved to have been a physician and I remember thinking that I will love that and I want to have a family so I can't combine it.  And, because I was good at science, I think I majored in science and decided not to apply to medical school because, A, it would have -- it would have been very expensive.  With science, you got fellowships.  And, so, I took the easier path, but probably not my first passion.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you think at some time, maybe, medicine would have been much harder to combine with --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: With family.  Sure.  I was very conscious of that.  Well, no.  I didn't think it would be harder to combine.  But, I figured, well, if I gave up chemistry, it wouldn't break my heart.  But, if I got into medicine and really loved it, that would be harder.  So, I sort of deliberately, almost.  And, you know, you become very much part of the culture.  This was war time and women worked, but the real idea was to get pinned and get a husband and to have kids.  I mean, that was the goal in spite of -- I mean, we were very -- my friends and I were strong supporters of Betty Friedan and all of this.  But, you were still very much influenced by that.  You know, it was early marriage; early children in those days.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, because I think it was Margaret Mead who remarked way back that women can be educated like men, but they're taught to a fair marriage.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I think that's an interesting statement.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Absolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So you'd say, in your own experience and experience of your peer group that was the case?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, we didn't get that message from the faculty, but it was in the culture and you absorb it.  I mean, I think women are still doing that.  I think, in fact, there are women today.  But, so -- I had a good experience at Smith.  And I had a professor who had been to Harvard.  A young guy who urged me -- I got into Yale as a graduate student.  I was supposed to teach the Navy cadets.  I have still a letter saying that they're sure the boys will be very polite to me.  I mean, it's a priceless letter.  He said, don't go to Yale; go to Harvard.  It's got the better department.  Better people.  So, I did, and I had a great time there.  I did have a very hard time academically.  I mean, I felt I was well prepared.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Well, you seemed to have done your PhD in record time.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I did.  That was partly luck.  I mean, even then, I was -- I was a graduate student.  A lot of GI Bill people were there.  Harry came back.  I did the first semester and then he was discharged from the Army.  And he'd been at Harvard before his service.  I lost my train of thought for a moment just before that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I said, you had gotten your PhD in record time.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh, right.  So, a lot of the guys who were married and on the GI Bill stayed right there all through vacation, but I wasn't going to do that.  So I went home on vacation.  I think it was my -- my first or second year there.  And I left a compound sitting in my locker that normally I would have worked up right away, and when I came back from vacation, the stuff had crystallized and was beautiful, red crystals.  We never totally solved the structure, and somebody is working on it today and it's still not been -- I think finally it's been totally resolved.  But that was just left, because I was irreverent enough to go away and leave my stuff sitting.  If I had been obedient, I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get a PhD.  And, I dated a lot of guys.  They were no longer threatened by somebody who was bright.  I mean, that was the major change, and that's what I enjoyed about graduate school.  I'm sure it’s a familiar story to you.  And then, in 47, which was the second year of graduate school, Harry and I got engaged.  And I sensed right away -- well, two little anecdotes I'll tell you \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"just to give a flavor.  I interviewed with a young guy who subsequently also got the Nobel Prize.  He was in his early -- almost Harry's contemporary -- about working for him because he had been recommended to me.  And he said, he'd be happy to have me work for him on one condition; he didn't want any tears, because the prior student he had had left him in tears and he didn't want a repeat.  So I kept that promise.  I don’t think any other woman got a PhD from him, later, in this [scheme?].  I don’t think it was deliberate but -- I don’t know.  He was a hard worker.  So, I accepted those terms.  I worked for him.  I was sort of lucky and the results -- but, as soon as I got engaged, I felt that he lost interest.  He figured I was written off as a scientist.  I mean --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did he ever say anything?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No, he didn't say that.  He was very friendly and we socialized with him.  But, three years were up, I had solved this problem.  Harry was ready to get his PhD so I got my PhD but he never asked me what I was going to do.  The question was where Harry was going to work.  Now, I never perceived that as discrimination at the time, but, years later, it was clear to me it was blatant discrimination.  It didn't matter what opportunities there were for me.  He never considered that.  He figured I was a lost cause.  Years later, when I applied to law school, he was very happy to write me a letter.  Wrote me a good letter of recommendation.  And, halfway through my graduate study, we had the system of taking cumulative exams.  Not one final.  And I had done well and then all of a sudden, I guess, my performance slipped and I still have the letter from him saying, well, we know that there are reasons -- this was when I was dating Harry -- so, they were forgiving.  But then we married in 47 and left in 48.  We were married the last year of graduate school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you ever -- did it even cross your mind -- I'm trying to think what --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Cross my mind what?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: That you might have a career or --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I assumed I was going to work.  It never crossed my mind that that would be a problem.  My family was on the East Coast.  Harry's family was on the East Coast.  So we had some opportunities.  Harry had some opportunities on the West Coast and we decided we'd rather be on the East Coast, but I don’t think -- he was told it was foolish to go to Yale because, as a Jew, he'd never get promoted.  And the idea of a woman applying to Yale -- people say, did you ask to be, to get a faculty appointment -- I mean, that would have been like a dog applying for a faculty appointment.  They would have just left.  I mean, this was inconceivable.  There was one woman in arts and sciences.  I'm not sure she was there -- Mary Wright -- I'm not sure she was there when we came to Yale.  She was certainly there in the 60s, but even by the 60s there was only one woman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Actually, I think Mary was the first tenured.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Mary and then Marie Boroff --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- came very, very early.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, Mary came.  Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: But, certainly, there was no woman in the sciences.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I think Dorothy [Houseman?] if I remember, but she was in medicine.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: But she wasn't in arts and science.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: In medicine.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  In the arts and sciences, there was absolutely nobody.  Anyhow, so, I really didn't think about it much.  We -- you know, Harry was getting $3,000 a year.  And -- but, first, I got a job.  I interviewed and they were horrible jobs.  In rubber companies.  Awful.  Eventually, I got a job the first year working for a very nice guy who had a background in chemistry but was working in microbiology and wanted a chemist.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Was this in industry or --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  This was at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: This was at Yale.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: With David Bonner.  And, I worked in his lab.  Mary Bunting, who then later became the president of Radcliffe -- you know who she is -- she worked in the same lab.  She worked evenings because her husband was an MD.  They had four kids.  Mary would come in after the husband got home from work and work from 6 until midnight.  And they were building a house in the country \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"at the same time.  So, and they -- another fellow was working in my lab who I've kept in contact with, whose son is now in the same department as our son at the University of California.  Very interesting.  So, it was a --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: What was it -- what sort of impression did you form of Mary Bunting?  She came in as a very junior research assistant.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: She was not a junior research assistant.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: No, you were, though, I think.  You were hired as a junior.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I'm coming to that.  So, I worked for David Bonner.   I loved it.  He was an irreverent character.  A Mormon background.  He had five brothers, all of them -- most of them in science.  When I was about six months pregnant and I went in and I quit and I said, I'm expecting my first child and I resigned.  He certainly would have kept me.  I don’t know what compelled me but that was the climate at the time.  What I remember about Mary Bunting is she brought me a box of maternity clothes in a cardboard box and I took the stuff out and told her that there was chicken feet in the maternity clothes because she was not only working in the lab and raising four kids but they had farm-like place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Oh, she wasn't giving you a subliminal message, then, about women in science?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  No.  I don’t think so.  No.  She was amazing.  She was very friendly.  Very easy-going.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: She must have had tremendous energy.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes, clearly she did have tremendous energy.  And soon after that her husband died and she went to Rutgers and then went on to -- and I kept in touch with her when she was at Harvard at the time.  So she was a very easy -- she also collaborated some with my husband.  Sort of down-to-earth is the way to put it.  So, the biography of her out there --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Is there?  I was looking.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think the woman's name if Jaffe who wrote it.  But you can Google it and find it.  And she --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Would you have seen her in any way a role model, either consciously or unconsciously?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  I wasn't thinking role model.  Well, I took it for granted that I could do what I wanted to do.  And, I mean, I can either tell you now or we can do it with \"women in science today\":  in 19 -- skip ahead.  1973, Harry was getting a sabbatical.  I had worked at Yale for four years.  I was friendly with Pat Graham and Pat Graham was then in the administration of Princeton.  She subsequently became the dean of the school of education at Harvard.  She still lives in Cambridge.  Pat published an article in Science indicating that of the women in science who had made it in the US, a very high proportion were foreign-born.  And, I had noticed this myself, so he had a sabbatical.  I applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant, which I got, to look at what other countries did differently than the US to account for this difference.  And I took a tape recorder and I decided I would go to Sweden, England and Israel.  I was originally going to do some more countries.  And I saw Alva Myrdal in Sweden.  I saw women in Cambridge and Oxford in England.  Had fascinating interviews in Israel.  My theory, originally, had been that there was something these countries did.  But that was a totally false theory.  It became clear very early on that in Sweden, in England, Israel is a special case -- but the people who succeeded were also then from the mainland and moved to England or a high proportion.  And it's the transplanting and being out of your own culture, the way you, in some degree, are here now --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- that frees you to do your own thing.  I wasn't constrained by the expectations that were prevalent here.  In Europe, middle class people had help and I didn't know many women who were working, but I never thought there was an issue about it.  It never occurred to me -- I mean, I never was aware of any issue of discrimination.  I was aware of the practical differences -- you know, if you had children, how did you do it -- \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"but never that this was -- they wouldn't hire you or anything.  And I think the fact that I'd been transplanted freed me to be -- to do my own thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: That's -- that's really, really interesting because I've been struck -- again, I suppose as an outsider and obviously not having grown up in the 50s, but I'm very, very struck by a kind of ideology of domesticity that seemed to have taken very strong root in the states.  I always thought it was a patriotic duty other than to be at home --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: With the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- to bring up the children and inculcate the American way.  And I do wonder if it was something to do with, not just post-war and getting back to normality after the war, but also the kind of new Cold War, that it was -- this was --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- this was a place for American values to be worked out and to be celebrated, the whole --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I don’t know what it is.  I just read recently that the United States has the highest proportion of people who don't believe in evolution of any western country.  It's clear that religious observance or even affiliation plays a stronger role here than it does in much of Western Europe.  And, I don’t know where it comes from.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And yet, of course, in post-war period, you look at the statistics from -- government statistics about the numbers of people who worked and who was working.  It was just a fact of life that women were in the work force, that married women were in the work force, and that married women increasingly were in work force in the whole of post-war period.  And that has gone on ever since.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, no, that hasn't gone on ever since.  That happened in World War I and it happened in World War II.  Now, the talk is always about women who can afford to stay home, right.  Nobody ever cares about the women who can't afford it.  In fact, the issue is should we have Welfare and should we have child care.  And so there is the assumption that without welfare and child care, these women can still work -- I mean, it's crazy.  So, the whole discussion -- I think we're a culture that's very upwardly mobile.  In Europe, the mobility between classes, I think, is less than here.  You're not born as easily to working class and move up to very wealthy.  And so -- and this is just speculation on my part.  So, everybody strives to rise to the top.  Why was there this big fuss in 69 when Princeton and Yale and others admitted women.  I mean, women had been educated at European universities at -- our big co-ed universities for decades.  So why the big fuss?  Because the best universities hadn't had women.  And so you always look at what's at the top, and I think working class women always dream of being the spoiled housewife.  I think it has much more to do with a profit motive.  With the advertising.  And, make your life easier, you know.  All of the make-up.  They wear high heels.  And a huge brainwashing in this country.  They depend on constant consumption --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- and -- there was real pressure for women to go back home and have children in the 50s. I mean, yes, there was pressure for them to go in the work force, but there was no pressure afterwards.  The door was closed again.  And that came out -- I don’t know if you read the book I wrote.  You should.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  Door in the Dark.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.  And so those women stories, there are a lot of refugees number one.  But, also, what's her name -- the woman whose name begins with an E who worked in industry for [Burroughs Wilton?] and they wouldn't let her study part-time at Brooklyn College, so she never got a PhD, I think.  But, what was I going to say -- yeah.  She couldn't get a job.  She had a top-flight master's degree and she had to work as a secretary, I think, for a while post-war.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So, I think this door that opened during the war swung shut again, very shut in the 50s.  And there was a real pressure to have children and be domestic.  And I remember going to my fifth college reunion -- that would have been 1950 -- and Adelaide Stephenson spoke and said, remember, now, you women are the culture bearers.  Men have to work and you are the culture bearers.  And somebody just told me very recently -- I know who it was, Betsy Auchincloss(sp?) -- who is in that freshman class and who is now a psychiatrist in New York -- she said she remembers Brewster saying the same thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Really?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: And one of the reasons that Brewster stated openly for admitting women and for wanting Vassar to come to Yale was that the humanity departments were underutilized and if they just got women in who were just the culture-bearers, they would take advantage of those and would be better balanced.  They wouldn't have to add new faculty.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: So, I think the 50s -- Betty Friedan was right on and everybody -- if you could possibly afford it, you were home.  And it was the men whose wives who couldn't stay home that felt that they were aspiring to move up, so they could have a life of leisure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So working in a way was associated with some sort of failure?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: At least a stigma --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: From a cultural perspective?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- lower-class, and they were all trying -- yeah.  And, it's also very -- it's a macho country, on the one hand, from the pioneer days.  But other countries that are macho, like Spain and Italy, also had an upper-middle class where household held was accepted.  But here we have this egalitarian strain so you don't let somebody take care of your children and then you're exploiting the underclass or whatever.  So we have the combination of you don't work but -- if you can't have help and you have kids, so how can you have a serious career?  So, it's -- it's very ingrained in culture.  I'm not a sociologist, so I -- I mean, there's a lot of good writing on the subject, now.  But -- and I had a real struggle at Yale.  I mean, we're skipping ahead in years --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: All right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- you can sort it out later.  I realized very early on, in the four years that I oversaw this and worked for Brewster, that the real issue is not educating women.  You know, we did have to have a pool where people wore bathing suits and sleeping accommodations.  But, the rest would take care of itself academically if we had a more equal student body, a more equal faculty -- but the real problem would be what happened when these women got out.  And Yale opened its doors and so did the professional schools -- but nobody was worried about any kind of planning for using your education, having a family and what they would need to change.  So I think it was less than two years into co-education that I started to have a series of seminars and brought in dual-career couples, a lot of them from the faculty; some from the outside -- to give seminars on how they managed this.  Well, one of the unfortunate things that happened to several of those couples shortly after that divorced.  And I'm never sure that they had looked objectively at their situation or whether it was in the cards.  I'm sure it was a combination of both.  And I managed to get outside money for this.  Susan Hillis said, I'll give you money.  I don’t want to give money to those Yale people.  Yale was furious at me, the development people.  I got a $25,000 grant from her to run these seminars and they said, you had no right to get money from her.  She's got to give it to us.  So I was very happy at all of the money I got.  And I invited these people.  And I had wanted Yale to be in the vanguard, not only of admitting women but in showing the way -- having their economists and their sociologists deal with the issue, which were new \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"-- they had been written about.  Jesse Bernard wrote about it and a lot -- I mean, there were women addressing them but not at the universities.  It was zero interest on this.  They would take women on their own terms and they're still doing that.  I mean, it's true that Yale has drawn in industry, but women have to fit in.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, but women fitting into prevailing culture?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I mean, I keep saying to people, look, the demography has changed.  Our life expectancy has almost doubled in the last century.  We have contraception.  Infant mortality is down.  So, the result of all of this is that people are having smaller families.  Child-rearing takes up a far smaller portion of women's lives than it ever did in history.  And economically, the vast majority of people -- some people, I think, is well over 90 percent -- need two incomes.  So, we can't go on the way we've gone on through history and women were never idle at home, anyhow.  I mean, you had five children and you were the nurse and you were the teacher and you were often involved in your husband's -- if he was a preacher or --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, indeed, in pre-industrial society --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It was joint.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- your home was the workplace, also.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Exactly.  You sewed everything.  You did the laundry.  You didn't send it out.  It was a different world.  So how can we have the same conditions in industry that we had in the early industrial revolution in the Victorian Age is nuts.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.  I was really struck -- in doing some of the background research for this project that in the early 70s at Yale and elsewhere because there was an awfully large literature on it of what women were talking about, what do we need to do to make the workplace easier for us to enter --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and to stay in it.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It was childcare.  It was a lot of social issues.  It wasn't really only about changing the way tenure system worked --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- at universities.  It was about all these other things --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It's the other things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and 40 years on, we find what's the same is the top of the women's faculty form agenda, exactly the same.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Same thing it was in 1970.  I have a Harvard report from 1970.  I just talked to New York.  I said, you look at that and it's still the same agenda.  So, I'm now telling young women, forget institutional change.  It's happening at a glacially slow rate.  Under the present presidency, it's not going to make any progress.  We've got a lot of other problems and I don’t see dramatic change as --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Are you talking about the president of Yale or are you talking about the president of the --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: The president of the country.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: And I say right now, what you need is coping skills with the existing system, and I tell women now that they should -- there has been change to the effect that some industries, some universities, not the elite few but some universities, are really doing a lot to help women fit in because, for various reasons, industry, economically, needs the women scientists.  The universities that are a little beyond the very top tier want to attract the very best women.  And they find they won't get them if they compete on the same terms as Harvard.  But, if they can sweeten the deal, they can compete with Harvard and Yale.  So I tell young women, figure out what appeals to you about science.  What you want.  If you want to be a pioneer and you want to go to Harvard or Berkeley -- fine.  You know what you're getting into.  If you don't want that, you have slews of other options.  Vote with your feet.  Really shop for a job the way you shop for a car.  Women are so pleased to get a job that if something is offered and their research director says this is a good opportunity, they grab it.  They never ask questions.  They don't know -- they're always told, oh, last year, half the women we hired, half the people we hired were women.  And I say to them, that's the worst sign of all.  That means they've got a revolving door.  You don't care how many they hire.  You care how many stay and are happy there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting you should say that because Kim Bottomly said that at a meeting only a month or two ago that I was at.  She says that Yale is actually doing pretty well in the hiring state \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"but it really needs to address the retention rate.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, it's obvious.  It's not that I'm so brilliant, but I mean, Kim, she's now the president of Wellesley.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, she is.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: She is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: This was while she was still at Yale.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: How long was she at Yale?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I'm not sure because I've never -- I've only heard her speak.  I haven't, actually, met her.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I haven't met her, either.  I don’t think she was at Yale very long.  I was going to Google her and see.  But, it's obvious and so my feeling is now that women can find places that are right for them if they figure out what they like to do and find the place and go there.  And don’t be taken in by going to -- you've got to marry the right guy.  That's the other thing.  If you're married to the wrong guy you either give up the career or you give up the husband.  And, because -- it's fine.  Let people work on institutional change, but young women can't take that attitude.  I mean, they'll have such trouble getting a career.  I say, if you find the right person, marry and have your kids early.  Don't sort of buy into this you've got to get a tenured job before you -- you don’t need to do that.  Women who did it, a lot of them are sorry they did it.  Either they could no longer have children or they have one child and they wanted three.  Or, it's just -- it's not the natural time of life to have kids when you're 35 or 40.  It's all --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting you should say that because one of the things that did go through my head looking at the post-war period is that I did wonder if -- although it was almost impossible for women to get into the workforce, to break through the glass ceiling, at least there was a funny kind of paradoxical flexibility that you assumed that you would have -- if you were going to have children, you would have them early.  You'd early on get that out of the way.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And we've lost that.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: We've lost that.  And Polly Bunting, one of the things she told me, she said it's much better -- excuse me, I had a cold --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Would you like some water?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No, I'm all right, if you don't mind my lower voice than usual.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Not at all.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: She said, she thinks it's much better to have your children early, even if you get your PhD after that.  But, the structure in science today is such that that is not workable.  I mean, that is very difficult.  But I think people should make their personal choices because I think, in the end, the marketplace will determine what Yale and Harvard do.  The reason they admitted women, and we may have talked about this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: We talked about it but we need to talk about it again.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It was simply, for economic reasons, wanted to expand the student body.  If they took only men, they would lower the quality, so they decided they would take women.  But it wasn't a charity act for women.  And I don’t think Harvard and Yale and the like are going to have more flexible policies until they lose good women and good men and decide to go to institutions that are still academically perfectly fine, even thought hey may not be the 99th -- maybe they're only the 93rd, God forbid -- and they can have a life.  And, when that happens, when enough women vote with their feet, you're going to see the rules change because they don’t want to be left off.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.  It's really interesting to hear you say that because I think it was -- oh, what was the two-volume book on women --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Notable Women?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: No, women scientists in the USA.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh, yeah,  Rossiter.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Margaret Rossiter's book.  One of the final remarks that she makes in her summing up in the end is that she says in some says, she wonders that a generation of women -- and these were really women that came in in the '60s and the '70s and the '80s -- were just so glad, just so glad to have a job to have actually made it in academic life.  That somehow, they don't want to rock the institutional boat.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh, absolutely true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And I thought it was an interesting remark that she made.  She didn't follow up on it.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But she made that as kind of an end statement.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh, that's absolutely true.  And I mean, they're actually self-delusional, these women.  I don’t know if you noticed, but if you read my book -- but most of these women said they personally never had any \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the fact that they were female never affected their career.  But they know of a lot of people who were affected.  So they -- they sort of put blinders on and they don’t deal with discrimination.  Because, if they did, the ones who dealt with that issue dropped out.  It's too innovative to deal with it.  So, if you put it aside and say I can do it and just go ahead and do it, they can make it.  And, of course, we have this gap where there were no women.  Then, affirmative action came in the 70s.  And those women of my generation who had persevered and been invisible suddenly had the opportunity, if they had turned out good work, to be recruited.  So, the women -- a lot of the women weren't in their 20s -- had their children.  Worked at no pay or in their husband's lab or at very low pay.  Their children were in high school by the 70s.  Then they moved into the tenure track.  I think that's a one-time historical opportunity.  It would be nice if that could be repeated.  But, it's not in the cards because you don't get hired if you're 50 years old now at Yale to go into physics.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And, despite the aging demographic of people.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  No.  No.  I mean, that's -- they don’t want that.  Then we have the whole granting system, which is another whole issue by itself, but it's just -- it is awful for young people and, particularly, for women.  If they have a child and they're not productive, then they don't get their grant renewed.  If you don’t get your grant renewed, you can't hire post-docs and you're out of the game.  So, that has to change.  And, I think here and there, there's awareness of what has to change.  I don't sense -- I mean, Larry Summers spoke up, and I give him great credit for that because I think there is a lot of company he has out there and they're just too chicken to say, I think, the same thing.  And, until that changes --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So you're really talking about structural change.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  And there has to be basic structural change all around.  I mean, we need it for the people who can't speak up, who need the two incomes.  If you have a real 9-5 job, it's a little easier than if you have a professional job, which is never 9-5 full-time.  But --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I imagine in some ways academic life is, in many ways, much more conducive to a balanced life in that yes, you're frantically busy during term time, but the summers and vacations and the time -- it's a little easier --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: That's true in the humanities.  I can't -- I really don’t know enough about the social sciences.  In the sciences, it's not true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Because you don't --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: You don’t take time off in the summer and the lab and your experiments go on.  So, and your grants go on.  So, the way science is structured right now --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- it's very difficult.  It would be very easy to relieve young parents of the need to do administration and to temporarily omit their teaching.  They could do their family and research, and that's doable.  And the women who did it in the early years show that that's doable.  And then you're going to lose these people.  Nobody figures in the cost of the turnover, set-up money, the education that's wasted -- if people either drop out or, you know -- I gave a talk in New York on Women in Science just two weeks ago at Cornell Med School.  And this guy says, well, we can't afford that.  The most efficient way to work is seven days a week and there's no -- we can't do it any other way.  So, somebody, a colleague of his, spoke up and said, don't you consider human values?  You know the most efficient way is to have slaves.  And that was a good remark.  I mean, we're not valuing either children or women or it's not quality of life.  It's dog-eat-dog and make the biggest paycheck and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And to take on those would be a difficult thing at this time.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, it's -- that's why I say, I think it has to come and it will come, eventually, but I don’t see it on the horizon.  And so I think women have to think of themselves and be much more honest.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I'm very worried about the people who are dropping out.  I mean, that's happened before.  It happened after World War II and it led to Betty Friedan and we now have a whole generation who are going to have to sit there -- I practiced divorce law for 20 years, after I went to law school, and I met all of these wives who weren't so dull.  I mean, they had university education and everything and they decided to put their spouses through med school and law school and then they stayed home and raised the kids.  And, then, when they were about 40 years old or 50 years old, the husband found the new graduate students much prettier and more interesting than the housewives and wives, which means that they hadn't shared very much.  They had had two separate lives.  And then they dumped them.  And I met -- represented many of these women and I think the current generation that is dropping out to spend full-time with their kids, they're going to wake up one day or their husband will die of a heart attack and they have no training.  It's crazy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Certainly, the divorce statistics are --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: They're apparently going down some.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But that's -- right, because not so many people are marrying, but they're still having the same relationships.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: That's right.  Actually.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Why don’t we stop there for a second so we can just take a rain check.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: You've talked for almost an hour.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: All right.  Let me ask -- answer your second question first and then I'll go back to the drifting.  What you know -- science and scientists encompass a huge universe and there is a difference between a small group of scientists who are really of the avant-garde and the large population of scientists.  The further up in the echelon you go and the more talented people are, the more there are individuals and their styles differ.  So it's very hard to generalize -- and the consensus is that differences between -- among a group of male, outstanding scientists, and the differences among the group -- within the group of women, are much greater than the differences overall of the average man and the average woman.  In other words, they're very individual.  So it's hard to say that women are collaborative and men are not.  I think on the whole women have, I mean, as a group, women probably -- most women have better people skills than men and collaboration skills.  And, to that extent, collaborative work comes more easily to women.  They have less of an ego of their being the sole person holding onto it.  It's not true of every woman and I'm sure there are men who make wonderful collaborators.  But, what I think also is very important is that the established disciplines -- chemistry, physics, engineering, have long-standing hierarchical organizations and expectations.  The newer fields that tend to be collaborative grew up in a different climate.  They don’t have that history of a hierarchy.  So I think they are much more open to diverse group of participants than the old fashioned.  So part of it is the professional structure of straight physics versus bio-physics, of straight chemistry versus, you know, of chemistry and biochemistry and microbiology.  I suspect that as a group more women like the more biological sciences or, even if they're interested in theory, they like to apply it to more real world problems.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Certainly, I think that a number of women doing [inaudible] may really [shine?].\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.  And it's very hard to say to what extent that is the woman's interest and the fact that they're much more welcome in those areas than in others.  And I think we have to wait until the hierarchy dies out to see how much is innate.  Countries that required, for instance, four years of science rather than having them as electives have more physicists and more chemists because women don't select out for social reasons because it's not a nice female thing to do.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So, how much ends up being biological and how much is environmental and cultural -- I don’t think we know and I don’t think it matters.  Because, as to any individual woman who wants to do science, all of this stuff is irrelevant.  If you like to collaborate, that's great.  Maybe there are more women who like to collaborate.  On the other hand, maybe women are sane and if they're in an environment where they're treated as strangers and not really in the \"in group,\" they're smart to move into an area where they're welcomed and appreciated, and once you have a critical mass of women, then you attract more.  So I think the judgment is simply out and I think collaboration is obviously the way of the future and it rubs a lot of the old fashioned scientists the wrong way.  And, there is the risk that if you're too collaborative, you're not going into depth in any one discipline.  That can lead to superficiality.  So, I think there are opportunities there, but I don’t think we should -- you know, I don’t believe in tracking people by gender.  We used to say that women make good nurses, so that women became nurses and the men became doctors, but then you notice that when opportunities open up, those stereotypes don't hold.  And, all of the secretaries were women, and I think one of the teachers, women were gold teachers -- now, very few women are teachers.  I think it's one of the reasons that public schools are not as good as they used to be because the brightest people are leaving that field.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: So, I think tracking is a bad idea and you should just do what you want to do and what you love and let it sort itself out.  And how it's going to end up, I don’t think any of us know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting that you should say that you should do the thing you love because that's exactly what Dr. [Hoffert?] said to me.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Well, that's --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: That that's the most important because if you don't do what you love, you're not going to be happy.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Not only aren't you going to be happy.  You're not going to be very good at it.  So, I think that's, in the end -- and it's hard for women who think they're going to be happy just taking care of their children and then the kids grow up -- I may have told you this story.  I worked in the co-ed office and this undergraduate came in and wanted to work in the co-ed office and they said, a man, and I said, why, you know, most people interested in working here are women.  Why do you want to work in my office.  And he said, well, because I don’t want to happen to my future wife what's happening to my mother.  We're all leaving and she's there with an empty nest and she gave her whole life to us and that's an awful thing to happen.  I don’t want it to happen to my future life.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you take him on?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, I took him on.  Sure.  I had no problem taking him on.  I was just curious what motivated him and I thought it was very thoughtful of him at that stage.  I mean, not all guys are scared so much of what's happening to their mothers as to what's happening to them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Well, back in [inaudible] turns out for good or ill, you always blame the mother for it.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  That's absolutely true.  As far as drifting goes and what would have made me stay.  A, the first step would have been if my research director had taken my goals more seriously.  That's the first step.  And certainly, in the early phases of my career, it was not outward discrimination, although there were barriers that I wasn't aware of.  But, it was in my head that I was going to be home.  After I was home full-time with our oldest son, until he was about -- I was very bored being home full-time.  You wheeled a baby carriage.  And you meet other mothers and you can coo at the baby for a while, but not 24/7.  So, I began to do part-time work.  And it was post-war and there was industry in New Haven.  They were delighted.  They told me they'd pay me $10 an hour.  This was in the 40s.  That was a lot of money.  They didn't care when I worked; just let them know.  I had a flexible schedule, so what could be better than doing that?  So I worked part-time.  The work didn't get me anywhere.  It was not work that was leading up to anything, but it helped money-wise and got me out of the house, got me into chemistry.  And then I did some teaching at local colleges part-time.  Somewhere after we had our third child, I was eager -- I felt \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I'd been out of the lab long enough I would have wanted to get a post-doctoral fellowship.  They were all full-time, and I knew I couldn't commit myself to full-time work.  If there had been part-time fellowships, I would have probably done that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Being at Yale, because you were based in New Haven, was -- was Yale really the only place you could consider for post-doc?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Well, if you add commuting to it -- I mean, there were non-graduate schools, like Southern Connecticut, but that's where I taught.  But that's no place where you could do research at that point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  This has, I think, almost always been a difficulty --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: In New Haven.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- in New Haven.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, it's a big jump -- it's a big disadvantage that Yale has.  [phone rings and Ms. Wasserman says, \"let's wait until he picks up.\"]  OK.  I could have gone to Wellesley and to Columbia, but that's even worse.  If you're going to do something part-time and then spend the rest of time commuting, that made no sense, to me anyhow.  And I'm not that high-energy person and energy is important in this whole game.  But, what I should have done was taken a full-time fellowship and just worked half-time.  Nobody cares.  And the men don't spend every minute.  I mean, it's naïve.  So, if I were in my head where I am now, I would have taken that full-time fellowship and I would have probably been fine with it.  Did I tell you the story about when I was working in the graduate school and the associate dean, who could never have a meeting on Wednesday afternoons?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: No, you didn't.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, I -- come back to drifting.  I did these various things until 62 and I wrote to Smith College and I said -- they sent me -- I didn't write to them.  They sent a questionnaire:  are you looking for a job.  And so I said, I'd kind of like a job in science administration and I got a letter right back from the dean of the graduate school:  we're looking for somebody with a science background.  We lived down the street from each other, so we got together and he said, you can do this and I said, well, can I do it two-thirds time basis so I can come home at three?  He said, that would be fine.  So that's what I did.  And that was very conscientious.  And some day I wasn't in, and I made it up and I was very careful to give him the full two-thirds time.  But we had this associate dean and he said he couldn't meet Wednesday at 2 or something.  It would have to be a different time because he had a seminar.  So, we respected that and we never had a meeting.  Well, one day I discovered it wasn't a seminar.  It was his squash game.  At that point, I was a different person and I no longer worried so much if I had to take a kid to the doctor.  So there was a hour less there.  I said, if full-time people can take time off for squash, I can take an hour here or there because the kids need me.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting that it seems historically that men have always been able to play the game their way and women played by the rules.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Of course.  I mean, women just have to get more self-confidence and be a little more assertive and bargain more.  And, it just -- otherwise, you get taken advantage of.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: There was a woman who was in my book, who told me she was chair of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and she said the women don't come and ask for raises the way that men came.  And you just don't volunteer raises.  She said, some of the salary and space discrepancies.  And not that we don’t want to give it to them, but women don’t know enough to ask.  And, she's right.  There were a lot of these discrepancies that are hardly the attitude of the outside world, but they're also women feeling insecure about having a job or I better not rock the boat.  Well, you're at Yale.  Your husband's at Yale, right?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: They know that it's not as easy for you to say forget it.  I'll work for someone else.  I don’t like the way you're treating me.  I mean, they've got us captive there.  I tell people, another piece of advice I give to young women:  go to a location where there are multiple employers, if you possibly can, and if you have a significant other because otherwise, you're bargaining power is less.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I did read a story, actually, about the captive labor force and I don’t know whether it was you who told me or if it was somebody else, somebody called Betsy Sewell -- I think it was Betsy Sewell -- this would have been back, I think, in the 60s or maybe the early 70s.  She was some sort of research associate position at Yale.  And, she had the temer-- she was a lecturer, and she had the temerity to ask for -- to go on tenure track.  And, apparently, she was pulled down on the basis that she was a captive wife.  She would do the work anyway.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And then -- but she turned the tables on them because apparently one of the California universities offered her and her husband positions and they both went.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.  Well, that's the same as this Nobel Prize couple.  We've lost several couples that way at Yale.  They just -- oh, the secretaries used to work for nothing at Yale.  The reason Yale got all of these union troubles was because they exploited the wives.  I can understand, they're here.  It's better to be a secretary, low pay, than sit home, bored.  So they took those jobs, you know, at least -- and, the exploitation of them was terrible.\r\n[interruption regarding lunch]\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So, earlier on this morning, you talked about coming to Yale and maybe even contemplating a job at Yale and wondering whether [inaudible] Jewish.  You covered all of that, but one of the things I wondered about, were you aware, at that time, whether there was any nepotism rules in place or was that something that never came across your consciousness.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I don't have specific recollections.  I mean, I'm sure that must -- I must have been aware of it, although I really -- on all of these issues, they're pretty much individual problems of mine until sometimes in the 60s.  Particularly sometime in -- and I think it was before 60 -- in the middle 60s, I went to a conference at the University of Pennsylvania.  It was one of the early feminist conferences and I began to put things into perspective.  And realized it wasn't my personal issue.  And, actually, I don’t think I thought about that.  I thought very much an individual problem.  1959, we went on sabbatical to Berkeley with the children, and I found at Berkeley -- of course, I wasn't on the faculty there or anything.  But there seemed to me, on the west coast, a more open atmosphere than on the east coast, mostly because there are a lot more newcomers and so on.  And I sat in on some courses there and I thought about getting back into science.  And then I worked -- I guess right after we came back from Berkeley - I worked for a year for somebody who wanted a compound made so they could take an X-ray picture of it and they needed to have radioactive atom incorporated in it.  But I found it hard doing lab work and having three kids.  Partly, because I didn't like lab work for its own sake and to keep up with the science and the intellectual aspects and do the work in the lab and have the kids, it was more than I could handle.  I didn't have that much energy, either.  So, that -- shortly after that is when I got the job in the graduate school and there I began to get -- become aware of issues because, as a dean, I had people coming into the office with problems they would never air in their own department because they were afraid they would have repercussions.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So, what sorts of problems were people bringing to you?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: People who said they wanted to drop out because their spouse didn't like if they were going on.  It was threatening to their spouse.  These were women.  A guy came in and said he was always outstanding in geology in college and they made him go to graduate school and he was doing well, but it wasn't what he really loved.  And he wanted to get out and actually go into the Army \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=3600.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"as an alternative.  But, you know, he should have been caught earlier somewhere, but nobody asked.  This is one trouble.  If you're very good at something, people propel you in that direction and you never step back and say is this what you want, which is let me, in retrospect, urge people to look at what they really want.  Not what they're being told they should want or not want.  They have to make their own decisions.  And then there were people who were spouses and who were home and they wanted to get back into part-time study and, at the time, the rule was you couldn't enroll part-time.  And, so then I said, well, I'll tell you what you do.  Just audit the course.  Sit in.  Do all of the work.  And, if you do well, then you might -- and I got several people into graduate school through the back door that way.  And then Marie Boroff picked --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I was going to ask you, was Marie involved in this?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Marie was involved with that and very helpful.  And she and the faculty pushed for permission to get some people in on less than full-time basis.  She was never a leader and didn't get identified with the women's movement, but she was always sympathetic.  And there, she could be really helpful and she was very willing to do that.  And, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you have -- were -- let's come up to the, the, the -- your job as the assistant dean in the undergraduate school.  You've just covered a little bit about it.  I'd just like you to backtrack a minute or two and -- when you and Harry turned up at Yale, that would have been what, 19--\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: 48.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- 48.  What were -- do you recall what your first impressions of the place were?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.  Well, I don’t recall -- well, I recall several.  I'll tell you -- I have not had -- I think they marked my whole career at Yale because they influenced my later feelings about Yale.  There were seven instructors in Harry's department who were hired the same year, all bucking to make it at Yale.  And they used to have -- those were the days you had dinner parties and we did all of the cooking and everything and the wives used to separate after dinner.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Were any of these instructors women by any chance?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  Not a one.  All the spouses were the women and several of us had PhDs.  But I never forget when we were doing the dishes and one of the wives said they couldn't have sex very often because they couldn't afford the contraception.  And they couldn't afford the condoms or whatever it was.  I mean, people were penny-pinching.  The salaries were awful, but I thought, jeez, this is the end of the world, right.  Too poor to -- and, so it always separated into men and women and you cooked and you did everything yourself and you felt -- I felt, and we all felt, compelled to back the pie and make the dinners and it was a large crowd and, of course, there was competition among them.  And, then, wait a minute.  I had the thought that's now left me which was -- yeah.  It was -- I don’t know -- then, our son was born -- our first son was born in 49 and it was the custom of people in that department to call on you and the new baby with white gloves and calling cards.  So, Dan was a fussy baby anyhow.  It wasn't Dan.  It was the next one.  Our second one, I think.  We'd already moved.  It was a little later.  It was the mid-50s.  Anyhow, one of the professor's wives dropped in unannounced on Sunday morning and you had two little kids in the house, in a tiny house, and we ended up -- I said to Harry, will you put water on the coffee and he didn't realize I hadn't put fresh grounds in.  And we served her watered-down coffee.  And she made some comment about how lived-in the place looked.  But -- and then the wives poured tea at, you know, departmental teas.  We took turns.  I know what I was thinking of.  When our first one was born and he went to nursery school, which was then on Prospect Street, the Gazelle Institute -- right across from Sterling Lab -- and I had these part-time jobs but I remember dropping Harry off to work, Dan off at Gazelle, and sitting in the car crying because I really disliked it that much.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I just felt I was in an alienating place and I didn't belong there and I hated it.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you have a sense that other people felt the same way?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  I think I felt very alone at that point.  I didn't feel that my reaction was normal until I got to Berkeley in 59.  And there we had friends who had four kids.  The wife worked full-time.  Her husband was a physician.  And they managed it and it was much -- much more easy going.  It wasn't all that -- Yale was so formal and so stiff in those days.  And every -- all of the women belong to -- what was that -- it's still there.  It's not called the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: The Yale Women's Organization?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  YWO.  And I never went to YWO.  It wasn't -- I didn't like -- I hated being classed as my category was wife.  You know, I was perfectly happy to be a wife and a mother, but that was not what I wanted to be identified with in life.  So, I worked.  We had a tiny little house and I was lucky enough to get some -- a woman who did baby nursing and helped out.  But then the neighbors on the street began to claim that this woman was beating our children.  And she worked for somebody else I knew too.  And I knew she didn't do that.  I mean, there just -- there was no question.  But they were all very angry at the fact that I was getting out.  I think it was jealousy underneath, but made it very unpleasant.  So, the guilt trip that you felt.  And, then when I went to Berkeley, I realized that what I had disliked about Yale was perfectly normal to dislike about Yale.  And, in the subsequent years, I certainly met people who felt the same way and who I've met since.  Some of whom are on this list.  And I said, oh, what a breath of fresh air to get out of New Haven in those days.  It was like the worst of Cambridge must have been at some point.  You know, with the Dons and the -- so, and I just really disliked it and Harry was working all of the time and I was entertaining his students at home and I would just -- and I never warmed up to the place.  I enjoyed the work in the graduate school.  And then Etta Ohnought(sp?) became a dean there.  And there were several other people, one of whom was Sam Babbitt, who I saw -- not recently.  He was associate dean, assistant dean, and then he went on to become president of something called Kirkland College, which folded.  I don’t know if you've read about them.  It was a sister college to Halloughton(sp?) College.  And his wife is well known as a child book author.  But, apparently, he is now acting.  I don’t know where I read it, in the Yale Alumni Bulletin or somewhere.  Anyhow, what happened was that that -- in 68, Yale decided to admit women and Brewster asked me if I --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Just before we come to the co-ed issue because I know that's a really issue in your professional life as well as for Yale, given how much you felt uncomfortable and out of sync with Yale in those years, in the 50s, what was it about -- what attracted you to take the job at the graduate school as its assistant dean?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It was a job that permitted me to work part time.  It gave me a salary.  I was home at 3 o'clock and I was still involved with science.  But what I was going to tell you is, first of all, I was head of both the National Science Foundation -- I was in charge of National Science and National Institute of Health fellowships.  Etta Ohnought did the humanities, with a comparable thing.  Whenever the people from Washington who ran those programs came up, the dean of the graduate school would not include us in the meeting.  He ate with these representatives and then we were just sort of asked doing the work.  So, one day she and I got together and saw John Perry Miller and we said, you know, if we're going to run these programs, we would like to be included.  And they're coming up.  And we would also like to go to the meetings for the people running the program in Washington.  And he said, oh, I thought you girls didn't want to leave your families.  So, we said we could manage. \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"The other thing was Morey's -- you had to pay extra for a room, so women were excluded.  So he -- they just took that for granted, and we, sort of, were the worker bees.  68, Brewster asked me to head up the thing with co-education and I told the dean of the graduate school that I was going to do that.  He was furious at me.  Now, they had promoted the men.  It was a stepping stone.  Being an assistant dean or an associate dean, all of the male people were promoted and they went elsewhere and here and they were very proud of doing that.  When I went -- not even leaving Yale, but just leaving him to work for Brewster, he was furious.  We had always been invited to his Christmas parties.  He wouldn't hardly talk to me for years after that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Good grief.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: And then just a jilted lover.  I mean, like he owned me.  I was one of his ladies.  So, that really boggled the mind.  But then the job with Brewster was great.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Why do you think Brewster decided you were the --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Person?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- I want to say girl for the job -- I mean the person for the job.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, there were hardly any women around in any administrative position.  And I had let it be known just by word of mouth it must have reached him, that I had done the graduate school job for 68 -- for six years.  And I was interested in doing something else.  But I think it was mostly by default.  He must have talked to some people and they knew they were happy with me as a dean in there.  I don’t think he knew who he was getting, really.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: What do you think he was looking for?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, he was looking -- Brewster was through and through a gentleman and I think -- he really wanted to do it right, number one.  But, he also didn't want to have no woman planning for the advent of undergraduates and he wanted somebody who could be a spokesperson to the alumni about that, and he had Sam Chauncy, whom you may or may not have talked to.  And, so he wanted Sam and me to oversee this.  And, he gave us really carte blanche and handed -- he used Sam very effectively because Brewster was the idea person and Sam implemented a lot of the stuff.  I know May Day, Sam was a critical person in handling that.\r\n[Helga's husband comes in and asks her to talk for a second]\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: OK.  I want to ask you --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, go ahead.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- again, why we switch back on.  I'd like to ask you -- first of all ask you about Sam, but after we've talked about Sam Chauncy, I'd like to just go back again to that period just before co-ed when you were -- you were still at the --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Graduate --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- graduate school.  Because I'm interested in organizations -- because I think you were a member of the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And I'd like to get that out of the way before we move on to co-ed cooperative if that's all right.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.  Well, that was a group -- I was in that before co-education.  That's correct.  And it was a group that met irregularly at Helen Hadley Hall.  I know -- it seems to me Margaret Mead was there once.  We had other speakers.  It doesn't -- I don’t have many recollections of it.  I know I went to the meetings.  It was one of the few woman's groups at that point --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Which had a genuine kind of intellectual --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- working?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: But it wasn't ever an important factor in my life and I enjoyed it.  And I met some people there.  But --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.  It was Marie Boroff who alerted me to the existence of the fellowship.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  And Sophia Simmons --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- Pruton(?) belonged to it.  Was active in it.  There weren't that many women around.  So I really -- you'd have to look up the membership.  We met in Helen Hadley Hall, which was the only place for women graduate students to live and it was pretty dreary.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And that was Marie's memory of it as well.  In fact, she told me a story that it -- just to give you a sense of what low esteem it was held in -- you had to survive with your Margaret Meads and everybody else with paper plates and plastic cutlery -- \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"ELGA WASSERMAN: I had forgotten that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- rather than the tinkling of silver which the other colleges had.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Very primitive.  But, you know, I guess my life was busy.  I was happy to be home in the evening anyhow, so I don’t really have any recollection of Helen Hadley except that it existed and there were a couple of women who had sort of for years been in the registrar's office or done that kind of work and I guess Brewster thought I would be more -- I think I was the only one with a PhD also.  I don’t know whether he cared about that or not.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did -- by the mid-60s, I know there was talk about including women as fellows in the regular colleges, like Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight.  And I did come across something in the records, it was the [Chancellor?] of masters which had the initial list of women who were elected.  It included Marie Boroff.  It included [Sammy?] Skiven(sp?).  Elizabeth Kirk, I think, was another one.  I don’t recollect the other names, but was that -- when did you become -- or did you ever become a member of the college?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I know that George Pearson objected to Mary Rice becoming a fellow at Davenport.  She did eventually become a fellow there.  I --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: What was his objection?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: She was a woman.  Simple.  Sam proposed -- now, who was it -- I had chance to become a fellow at Seabrook.  I don't remember how that happened, but Sam proposed me as a fellow at Davenport and I would have much rather been at Seabrook because at that point Davenport was a very stuffy fellowship and George Pearson had a major role in it.  But, somehow, I was working closely with Sam, so I said yes to Davenport.  I'm still a fellow at Davenport.  It's changed a great deal.  I rarely go there.  But I did go to Fellow's meetings there for quite a while.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And, I know it was not until the mid-70s when they started to talk about --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Co-masters --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- women masters.  Maybe that's something we can come to later?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: After we've -- so, let's go back to Sam because that's where we interrupted you.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, Sam was a wonderful mentor.  I must say, men and women, he was the best mentor I think I ever had other than in the legal profession.  And he and Si said to me, you need a big budget.  You need a big office.  And he taught me how to function as an administrator at a university.  And Sam never married.  I always assumed that he was gay and I think he was.  And I thought -- I think he didn't have the hang-ups that a lot of the other guys had.  I mean, he wasn't threatened by them in anyway.  So, he was very helpful and pretty soon we decided that Sam would do -- would work with buildings and grounds and doing the Vanderbilt and doing the things at the gym.  And I would concentrate more on admissions and policy and that worked out very well.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But you -- why didn't you bring a traditional title to it.  Like dean or assistant dean?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It was a big battle.  Well, the first year, I should have asked -- I mean, there again, I should have initially asked for a proper title.  I was supposed to be the Master of Trumbull College and that was supposed to be a women's college.  I don’t know if you know that whole story.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I know there was talk of making it into a woman --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, he called me -- Harry was in Texas.  I called Harry and I said, is it all right if I accept the mastership at Trumbull.  Harry said, sure.  And, then when Brewster went to Trumbull, he had a big revolt.  He didn't want to give up that college and he wanted women there and they didn't want all of the women in one college and I had talked to the other college presidents, like Polly Bunting, here and to the person who was at Pembroke.  And everybody said, don't spread the women out.  Get critical mass and have fewer colleges.  I lost that battle.  Brewster lost the battle for a women's college.  And -- so it was quickly decided to put 25 freshman in each college, but they would all be housed in Vanderbilt freshman year.  And, at that point, of course, then he said, all right, you're not going to be the master, but will you oversee it?  And I -- my title that first year was special assistant to the president on co-education.  \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"When -- I think it was two or three years before I said to Brewster, I've got to be in line authority.  I had a lot of power, probably more than I could have had any other way working straight out of the president's office because we went over everybody's head.  And, I said, I've got to have a title.  I was a dean in the graduate school.  And he came back and said to me that George May was then the dean of Yale College and John Wilkinson was the associate dean.  To this -- the associate dean was sort of the dean of students.  And, he's still in New Haven, and so I won't go into my relationship with him.  But, what Brewster told me, the deans in Yale College would be too threatened if a title went to a woman.  I always thought, whoever it was that felt that way, George May could have persevered if he had thought -- and he was a good friend of ours so I always wondered if he was afraid he'd lose John Wilkinson.  I don’t know.  But I accepted that and then we got -- we came up with this insane title of special assistant to the president on the education of women.  So, that's what it was.  And, you've probably read all of the reports.  I realized, as soon as the women came, that I needed feedback on what was going on.  So I asked each of the colleges to designate -- I think I asked each one to have one representative.  I had a committee but also had an undergraduate from each college and we had monthly lunches.  And, so I got feedback on what the issues were.  And it was very clear that the issue were the numbers.  The ratio was impossible.  And then there were minor issues, property, discussed in the reports.  But the ratio was a major one.  There were some issues with women sports, not getting enough time on the courts at the right time and so on.  But that was very helpful and I had that co-ed committee where I had some graduate students.  And we also had a graduate student counselor in each of the 12 colleges who was supposed to look after the women, and I thought that worked rather well.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did any of the women undergraduates come to you when they were in difficulties?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Some of them did.  I have -- I told you the story about the dog, no?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  And I'd like to hear that again.  That's what prompted the question.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Well, one of them arrived in tears when they -- absolutely, really devastated -- and when I calmed her down, I said, what happened.  She said, well, I asked Professor Pearson if we could please have a course on the history of women and he said that would be like teaching the history of dogs.  I think there were other questions they felt very free to come in there.  But, the majority of women who did not meet with me and they adjusted -- they didn't all have an easy time, and I think, especially, the transfers, some of them had a difficult time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But, I understand, too, from reading the files that the committee that actually chose those women to make the offers to -- you chose very carefully, didn't you?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: We chose very carefully and I think we chose very well.  Those women, if you look up their records now, I mean, they're all outstanding.  And we chose -- we chose them for survival qualities.  Not just -- there were plenty of brainy women, but we did not take women who had been only children going to a small, private school, for instance.  We would just rule them out.  They had to show that they could survive, either in a huge high school or in some other way were resilient.  If they were too overprotected, we were too worried about getting them into -- and so, they turned out to be a very interesting bunch.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Did you -- did you bring in any African American students?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Because nobody has ever mentioned that to me --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh, we did.  We did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and I was curious about that.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: We did, and I was instrumental in getting some women in who have done very well since them.  I got in a woman who had two children as a transfer student.  And, in spite of the fact that her scores were not that high.  And she's -- I can't think of her name, now \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"but I can find it.  And she distinguished herself.  There weren't large numbers, but there were several and they did very well.  I think one of them went on to law school.  There weren't that many students of color in Yale College, then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But I think -- they had -- with [Inky Clark?] and his notions of 1965 -- there was beginning to be an expansion of --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh absolutely.  [Inky Clark?] was intimately involved in diversifying the student body in every respect.  Mostly from private -- exclusive, or predominantly private schools, to more public school kids.  And Brewster took a lot of heat on that score from the alumni.  I was impressed with how gentlemanly Yale alumni -- not only Yale faculty but the alumni were, because I know they gave a lot of heat to Brewster, but I spoke extensively around the country to alumni groups during those years and they were all most respectful and a lot of them have daughters.  So, I found them supportive.  And there was a vocal minority that never, probably to this day, isn't happy with Yale's decision.  But maybe some of them have come around.  I also found the Yale Corporation very supportive.  There was Judge Higginbotham who is Afro-American was on the Corporation and he was always very supportive.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: What -- from the women who -- the few women who were on the faculty, did you get any feedback from them about --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Very little.  Very little.  I think -- I mean, Marie was supportive.  I never -- Mary Wright must have gotten ill.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: She was ill, I think, in -- she got ill in about 1970, didn't she?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  And, who else was there?  There weren't that many.  The young ones I had contact with and then they began to organize and there was a women's lib movement in New Haven that I never directly was involved in.  They used to come see me, though, and I found them useful to have that group pushing for what I wanted.  And here I was.  I could keep my safe middle ground.  We had big discussions about affirmative action.  I don’t know if you've heard about these.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I'd like to know more.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I'm happy to talk about it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  Because that brings us on to the -- the issue which I'm principally in, you know, faculty women and senior women and administration -- to me, affirmative action, Yale's attitudes to that are really quite crucial to try and understand the culture --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Refresh my memory.  What's the sequence?  There's Benno Schmidt.  Was Giamatti right before Benno Schmidt?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It was Kingman, Hannah Gray, Giamatti --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and wasn't it --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I see.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- the federal mandate --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- which expanded affirmative action to the universities came in 72.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: That's right.  That came while I was there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, it was clear that the federal mandate raised the issue of affirmative action and there were no women and half the degrees in the humanities at Yale had gone to women for decades, so it was clear something was needed.  We had plenty in the pipeline.  And, so Brewster set up a committee to look into affirmative action.  I was on it, and there was a guy, Al Fit, who was the assistant for governmental relations.  I forget whether there were other people.  Higginbotham was on the Corporation and was sympathetic.  I knew that.  Brewster told me right away that he thought goals would become quotas and therefore were unconstitutional.  And, I used to go over to the law school and talk to people there because I wasn't sure -- my interest in law arose.  But, in 70, I think it must have been the year 72, the fall of 72 maybe -- when, \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Harry and I were on sabbatical and I came back --it may have been another time when I was away briefly in the summer -- anyhow, I read in the New York Times that Princeton had issues an affirmative action plan.  So I called up Al Fit, I said, I've been away but I read in the Times that Princeton has an affirmative action plan.  Did you -- have you seen it?  And he said to me, Helga, you know you can't believe what you read in the papers.  No, I haven't seen it.  I don’t know anything about it.  So, I didn't trust it.  It was like your intuition up there with autistic kids.  And, I picked up the phone and called up the provost at Princeton and I said, Doug, what is it about your affirmative action plan.  I've read about it and I'd like to see it.  And he said, I'm surprised you haven't seen it.  I've sent copies to Al Fit and several other people at Yale.  I said, well, I haven't seen it.  And he said, well, I'll get you a copy.  And then I called up -- I was furious.  I was livid.  Because Al Fit had just told me a blatant lie.  And, in retrospect, I realize, I should have confronted Al Fit, but I was so mad I went over his head and complained to Brewster and was absolutely livid.  I said, I can't work with somebody who is going to lie to my face and so on.  Well, Brewster listened.  He was very diplomatic.  I think it was a year-and-a-half or two years later that Al Fit left.  I am sure there were other incidences where the guy just didn't behave properly.  He had come from Washington, some kind of -- but, I was sorry that I hadn't confronted him.  But that turned my attitude.  I became -- I always thought that academic institutions were different from business and everybody trusted everybody and it was all among friends and I began to see the light -- that this isn't the way things were working.  And -- now, in the meantime, somebody had been appointed --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Do you think it was different from any other ed -- universities?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No, I was naïve.  I was truly naïve.  I just thought universities were sort of saintly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Transparent.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Huh?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Transparent.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Transparent.  Certainly they weren't transparent and they were deliberately not transparent because they resisted any transparency and they said we can't operate that way.  We have to be able to do this like family behind the scenes.  That was the big difference between public and private universities.  So, that must have been about 72.  It was the same time when people from health education and welfare came and looked at the figures at Yale.  By then, there were active lobbying groups in the town and on the campus and some of the faculty organized.  That's why I was wondering when Brewster -- well, Hannah Gray was president for a year.  Actually -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And she was provost before that, wasn't she?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I'm not sure.  I didn't think so.  She was -- and I think she was only an acting president, wasn't she?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: She was only acting, yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: She was never confirmed.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: And I once proposed Hannah Gray for -- Sam asked me who I thought should get an honorary degree from Yale and I proposed Hannah Gray at one point, which made her an alumnus of Yale, which made her eligible to -- did she go on the corporation?  No.  But anyhow, then she was a Yale alum and she became the acting president.  Hannah Gray, I think, was, while she was at Yale, she acted more like one of the old boys than most of the old boys, so that didn't change anything very much.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Why do you think she acted that way?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Because she didn't want to be identified with activist women.  She wanted to belong, I think -- that's a common phenomena -- particularly people in that age group.  I mean, it was an insecure job and she didn't want to be identified as a woman.  She wanted to be the acting president.  But, before -- while Brewster was still there -- I said to him that -- I realized that any issue affecting women at Yale landed on my desk.  And, I didn't think that \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"was healthy.  I thought, really, it ought to be picked up around the university in the departments and so on.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Because especially by 73 the numbers of women coming into the --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, hadn't gone up very much --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Hadn't gone up very much.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No -- it went up after I left in 73, in the next year or two later.  We were pushing for that very hard.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Because once they did start to go up, they went up really very quickly --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and girls seemed to be assimilated reasonably well.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.  So, I said to Brewster, I really wanted a job in the dean's office and they had a woman who was doing affirmative action, which is a job I wasn't really looking for because it would have been too similar to what I was already doing -- but he never responded to that.  And I have a whole sheaf of letters between me and Brewster.  I don’t think I put them in the archives.  For my saying I'd like a job and his either not answering or hearing, I haven't heard from you.  So, that went on for a whole year.  And then eventually -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Why was he dragging his feet so much?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I was, by then, identified with pro-affirmative action and active feminist and the -- I don’t know what the story was at Yale College.  I remember very well, when we were discussing the first year that the women came -- the freshman were in Vanderbilt and the upper class women were on alternate floors in the colleges.  And they had their separate bathroom.  And then the issue came the next year about mixing women and men throughout the college and I said that I thought that they should have separate bathrooms.  And it was some public meeting where John Wilkinson said, either to my face or about me, that's a Victorian attitude.  So, I said, OK, John, that's fine.  I'm willing to be Victorian.  But any family in the house, if they could have separate bathrooms I'd love it, and I think it would be better to have separate bathrooms,  you know.  So he -- I think he was threatened by me.  He's still around.  He'll deny it.  But, I think for him it was his whole life being dean of Yale College there and he didn't want any woman, I think, having a major role.  That was my assessment.  I could be totally wrong.  I think if there had been a push from Yale College, that Brewster would have said yes.  That's my assessment.  I remember one interesting master's meeting.  It was also a lesson on how universities work.  I was sent out the year -- 68 -- the way they were going to house -- transfer women in the colleges was to crowd the men and free one entry for the women.  And I met, and I was invited to meet, with the students in all of these colleges and my job was to explain to them that they would have to have four people in a suite instead of three so that women could have the other one and, because we were short of housing.  So, I did that.  I remember going to one of those meetings and somebody saying, I hope you admit only beautiful women.  And I said, well, if you want us to admit only -- some of you -- and depending on the size of your biceps and triceps.  That shut them up.  But, in any case -- so there was a story that they had the crowd, right.  And then the next year a lot of students wanted to move off campus because it was so crowded.  And, the provost's office said, Charles Taylor, can't move off campus.  We need the extra room rent.  And so if you're going to move off campus, you still have to pay a fee.  And that brought home to me the hypocrisy.  Here I went and advertised there was no space but if they wanted to go off campus, then suddenly they need -- so, I began to feel that a lot of this was economically motivated.  There was a story originally that they were going to build another college, and then they said \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"they didn't have the funds to maintain it.  I don’t know what was behind the thing, but it put me in a very strange position to go out on a limb and say, we're crowded.  But to go back to the same people and say, but if you want to move off, you've got to pay extra money.  That doesn't make sense.  But one of the counsel master's meetings during this period, the masters were all complaining about the crowding and, like me, objecting to this extra fee.  And Brewster said, he had to do it because that's what the Corporation wanted.  And, Bill Horowitz, who was then the Master of Branford, said, he said, Kingman, come off it.  You know perfectly well that the Corporation will do anything you tell them.  So, let's get on with it.  So you begin to see, you know, how these committees were used and Brewster says to me, deans would be threatened.  For all I know, somebody said, if you make her that, I'm leaving.  How do I know?  So then he offered me a job in the career counseling office without a budget.  And, he offered me the job of assistant secretary of the university.  Well, career counseling without a budget was a non-job.  If I had gotten a budget, I could have made a good program for career counseling and done a lot of the things I wanted to.  I wouldn't have minded that.  But there was never a budget.  And, assistant secretary, I envisioned as going to every funeral, every honorary degree thing -- a purely, perfunctory boring job I had zero interest in.  I'm not somebody who likes formal functions terribly and to spend my life with these dumb things.  So, I explained that to Brewster.  And, then the rumor came out that I had resigned or something and the students wanted to know why did I resign.  And, a reporter for the Daily News came to talk to me and I said to the reporter, it's not that I resigned.  I asked for a job.  There wasn't a job.  So I'm not coming back.  But I didn't resign.  And I got a call from Brewster saying that's really -- I would retract that story.  And I said, but it's the truth and, I mean, there isn't a job for me and these two jobs don't fit and I'm not going to retract it.  Harry was really upset that I rocked the book.  He was at Yale and it was difficult --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It was a difficult position for him.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Very difficult for him.  So, the story -- you know, it was -- the news story got printed and I took a job with Ken -- actually, I think even before this we were on sabbatical -- I know how this happened.  We were on sabbatical in the fall of 72.  In the spring of 73, I had already either been admitted or, at least, applied to law school.  I didn't want to stay at Yale knowing I was going.  And, so, I talked to Ken Kennison(sp?) who had a grant from the Carnegie Counsel on Children and I worked with him on that because I saw a big issue as the family of children and what the implications of co-education were rather than the practical day-to-day running of it, which seemed to be going OK.  So, I worked on that.  Actually, Hillary Clinton was in that group and some other interesting people.  And it was a fun group, even though Ken Kennison, maybe he was prophetic.  He said the women aren't going to stay in the labor force.  Or they're not going to go in large numbers.  And he was proven wrong for 20 years, but now -- so, anyhow, I did that and went to law school in the fall. \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER: Did you go to Yale Law School?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I went to Yale.  I got into three.  I got into Columbia, Connecticut and Yale.  And Yale was around the corner.  And I had a good time at Yale Law School for three years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Why -- why did you decide to have that complete -- I mean, obviously, I can understand why you didn't want to do what you were doing at Yale, but why did you choose to do the law?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: That's a good question.  Because Harry didn't want to leave Yale.  And, I -- you know, having been so much in the news and in a major role at Yale, I didn't feel like going to one of the lesser schools and moving in there without -- I had given up my academic credentials, really, about being out of chemistry that long.  And I had gotten really interested in the equal access issues, and I wanted to do equal opportunity law and I put that down on my application.  And then, when I got through, I was persuaded to clerk, which I did, on the second circuit for a year and I loved that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: You had no problems getting a clerking position --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- because I think that was certainly maybe in earlier times when women went to law school, clerking was always a problem for them.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, by this time it was 76 by the time I got out and, actually, the judge for whom I clerked was a senior judge.  He was already in his 70s.  He had been appointed, I think, first appointed as a judge by Roosevelt.  He was one of the first Catholics ever to go to Yale because I didn't realize that Yale hadn't always admitted Catholics.  He was a wonderful guy.  And the other person who clerked for him was somebody who had been in the economics department, a guy, but he was also older.  So he had the two of us as clerks and there was a great experience.  We went to Hartford every day except for the week when the court met in New York and then we stayed in New York.  And it was very exciting and he was a wonderful judge.  But then it was difficult to decide what to do after this heady job of clerking.  And I liked appellate work.  So, the closest thing to it -- there was a law firm that did only tax law and I was good with numbers and I had done that with math and I didn't want to do the typically feminine thing so I joined that tax firm for a year.  But I found myself -- I was the only woman in that firm and they were doing, primarily physicians, but they were beginning to get an international law practice.  And they did the physician's pensions plans.  And then they did their estate plans.  And then when the estate plan was ready to be signed, without any other consultation, they called in the wives to sign.  And, the first year at Thanksgiving, one of the wives called me at home and said, listen, I need an explanation of what I'm supposed to sign  now and all of their documents said I leave everything to my wife unless provided she doesn't remarry.  And this struck me as rather grossly unfair.  And the other thing, I was supposed to research how much of Bar Mitzvah expenses could be conducted for business.  So, I said to myself, I went to law school but this is not the kind of stuff that I really want to do.  Again, if I had been more calculating, I could have been -- tried to be more aggressive there and moved up -- it was, from many points of view, a wonderful job.  It was from 9-5.  Well-paid.  Wonderful support staff.  Recently, they were written up as one of the leading international law firms.  But it wasn't what I had my heart in.  I didn't love it.  So, I joined a firm of two young lawyers, one of whom was doing divorce law and the other of whom was doing equal opportunity law.  And I really wanted to do equal opportunity law, except this guy didn't really need help.  He could handle all of New Haven like the back of his hand.  And the divorce guy was really anxious to have a woman and I found myself with a built-in clientele because I had been in the news and so I had almost an immediate following of my own.  I stayed there from 77-84, then I opened my own office, which I later shared with two other women, but we each had our own practice.  And I did that for 20 years and I did more -- I did some taxes and some estate and some \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"very little juvenile law but some.  And mostly divorce and family, which was an interesting perspective.  I enjoyed being out of the Yale community and getting a broader perspective then -- because I found New Haven very divided into university and non-university and so, in the legal world, you weren't part of the university necessarily and that was interesting.  And, I'd also seen the best appellate lawyers arguing in New York and I realized New Haven wasn't really -- the best New Haven firms weren't really necessarily that terrific.  And I enjoyed that.  I gradually -- I won trials.  I did well.  I won some trials against some very experienced New Haven lawyers.  But I realized that winning in a divorce case might have been a win for me -- I mean, ego -- but in the end it was terrible for the family to be dragged through that kind of fight.  So I gradually settled more and more cases.  Eventually got trained in mediation and did this until the middle-90s.  And then decided -- Harry retired officially in 1991 and it became obvious to me that he was going to go to his lab forever and ever and if I wanted to wait, I wanted to be free, a, to travel with him and we also got -- even mediation, I found, you have to be there for your clients.  I couldn't go away for the summer and leave them high and dry and put their [inaudible].  So, I retired from that and at that point I went through some of my old files and Brewster had said to me, when I -- he had wanted me to do what I thought was right to make Yale a good place for women and I said, you've got to have a better ratio, you've got to have women on the faculty.  And he said to me, Helga, we certainly will try to get women on the faculty, but I can tell you one thing -- we will never be able to hire tenured women in science.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: He actually said that?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, he said.  I mean, that was just a precursor to suffrage.  And, so when I looked at the figures in the mid-90s, we equalized the student body, there were non-tenured women, there were tenured women in the humanities, not many in the social sciences.  And, there were still hardly any tenured women in -- then, there was nobody in physics.  I think, at most, one in chemistry.  She may have come a little later, actually.  And it was true across the country.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And yet -- and yet, from the late-60s onward, there are more and more women getting PhDs --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- in the sciences.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: The pipeline was there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So it wasn't a pipeline issue.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It has -- it was always alleged to be a pipeline issue.  But I knew, because I had looked at the humanities earlier, that the pipeline isn't -- doesn't determine how many they hire.  It's their other barriers.  So, and they had, by then, a lot of books had been written about women in science.  This was in the middle 90s.  But, they were all written either by historians of science or sociologists.  Or failed women scientists.  And the scientists paid no attention to any of these books.  And so they said whatever they say, it's just worthless.  We don’t have to listen to it.  So, I decided by then there were about close to 100 women in the National Academy.  I think among 3,000 or something like that.  I said, I'm going to talk to the women in the sciences who are alive and who are in the National Academy.  And, I did.  I interviewed them.  And something surprised me about those interviews, but the recommendations those women had for change were identical to what these other people had said.  But now they couldn't be discredited because they had been sort of vetted by their male peers.  And then I was very lucky in that the president of the academy offered my book free to every member of the National Academy, which gave it great distribution right off the bat.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Authoritave.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Authority.  And the MIT report came out about the same time, which put the thing \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in the headlines.  And I think my interviews with the women in the Academy, many of whom had the attitude -- who were we talking about?  Hannah Gray -- they were just surviving.  They hadn't talked to each other.  They hadn't really been active.  But they all -- I was going to write a magazine article and they said, no, we want a book and we want to know and you've got to have the anecdotes in now.  They were all curious about each other.  But I think I catalyzed their activism just by doing the book.  And it was the right time, although the book came out in 2000.  It was ready in 1990, it was supposed to be published.  I get a call -- oh, I had trouble getting it published.  Because the academic presses didn't want it.  It didn't quite fit.  And it wasn't a popular book.  [She talks briefly to her husband.]  So, yeah.  I sent it out and sent it to an agent.  Didn't seem to fit anywhere.  Finally, someone at the Harvard University Press liked it very much and said, try the National Academy Press.  And they were very anxious.  They were thrilled.  They wanted to do it.  And they'll get you talk shows and this and that.  And they had a young woman who was doing the PR and I did the book, had trouble with editors there, but that's really minor.  And it was ready to go to galley when I get a call from the editor at the National Academy Press and they said, we have some summer interns here, young, summer interns, and I gave them your book to read and they don't think it's going to sell among young women because they think the problem has been solved.  And so I think, if you want to do a book, you're going to have to include men and blah blah -- something like that -- so, I said, look, I'm not including men.  And the problem hasn't been solved.  Either you take the book the way it is or you give it -- cancel the contract and I'll deal with it myself.  But how about getting some readers, before.  So, it went out to three readers.  One was the woman at MIT.  One was Dudley Hirshbach(sp?), who had been on my original co-education committee.  He was on the Harvard faculty and a Novel Laureate.  And I forget who the third person was and they all said to publish it and it was -- it didn't need any changes.  But that delayed the publication a whole year, which was too bad.  But, it was a nuisance.  And, I find that a lot of people still think the problem has been solved.  We're admitting women so what else do we need to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah, that last report that the NAS --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- published a couple of months ago, reiterating --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- the same issues and the same potential solutions.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Exactly.  And, I think there is too much emphasis without qualification on mentoring because I think one of the big issues now is the mentors are still predominantly male and they want to clone themselves and that's not always what the women want.  They don't want to go and exact that pattern.  So, I'm making a very strong pitch that women either have to have several mentors or they have to at least -- if they don’t like what the mentor says -- get some other -- I think you should never have just one PhD advisor, because that's a problem and in terms of sexual harassment issue, because they can't report it.  And their whole future hangs on one person.  So you need to have two there to protect yourself against that -- but, so that's --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Going back to the time of co-ed, a phrase that I've seen bandied around a lot was Kingman Brewster talking about Yale's obligation to produce 1,000 male leaders.  And I've never really understood, exactly, whether that was the brief or it's a myth.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No, it's not a myth.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's not a myth.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I was there and I once tracked down the exact date.  It was a meeting in New York and I was there.  I went to the \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"ladies room and it was in the ladies room that there was this uproar about how he could say this about the 1,000 male leaders.  And, some people --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: What date was this?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, it had to be before 73 and I can look it up.  I have some --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But it was in the early 70s at sometime?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  It could have been in 69 but it had to have been between 69 and 72, actually.  Was it -- the guy, I mentioned him to you, earlier, who wrote the history of -- it's not Smith, is it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It is Smith.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, it is Smith.  Denied this in his report.  It's one of the factual errors he made.  And that's when I tracked it down.  And the other day when I spoke in New York, I was introduced by a woman who was in that class and in part of her introduction she mentioned that she had heard him say that.  That was absolutely true and he wasn't embarrassed about it.  There were 1,000 male leaders -- Brewster did not foresee the women becoming leaders.  I mean, his view of leaders was still different.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: He was still rooted firmly in the idea that an educated women made a good partner.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And I think he changed even over the course of his presidency.  He was very political and very savvy and in some ways very flexible, because the background he came from, he had this terrifically anti-Semitic family.  Did you ever read the book, \"The Guardians\"?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: \"The Guardians\"?  Yes, I have.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, that's an interesting book I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It gives you a lot of insight into that period and into his background.  So, he moved with the times and really -- I'm sure by the time he quit, already was at a different point than before.  Some other people were less flexible than that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Certainly, I think what the [inaudible] of this book and one or two other things I've read subsequent to that suggests, yes, actually, it was a recent biography of Bart Giamatti, suggests that Kingman -- Yale would not have necessarily survived the way it did over the May Day business --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Without Kingman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- without Kingman's flexibility and, in fact, flexibility was the word that was used.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Kingman and Sam Chauncy was a big influence.  He had street sense and he and Kingman together -- and I remember when they walked in New Haven and everything was boarded up and they were very courageous about that.  I think it was Bill Coffin, whose sister is here actually, was also played a big part.  But Giamatti was interested, and that was already when I was out of Yale and there was then an active women's faculty group, but I went to one of their meetings and Giamatti did not believe in affirmative action because he said it's a merit system and we'll keep it.  We want the best people, but we -- we don't want to hire people because they're women or because they're minority.  The implication being that if you do that, then you're not taking the best people.  That's -- \r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: You're feeling that Bart Giamatti wasn't --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- at all in favor of affirmative action.  Because it was a meritocracy.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  He was a real academic.  He was a wonderful master, a wonderful teacher.  Should have never gone into -- well, he got hung up with the unions because he was also a purist.  I mean, his purist -- I mean, in an ideal world, you take the people who have merit, right.  And an ideal world don't need a union, either.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting that you said that because I also, in the literature, read that there were quite a number of faculty who were not necessarily at Yale.  Certainly not on the record -- but across the country, a number of women, like old school female faculty, the one or two women in a world of men who also weren't terribly keen on affirmative action.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Using the same argument that it would let people in who weren't as good as they were --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- because if they could do it, why couldn't --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Why couldn't anybody?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- anybody else.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And one hears that, of course, in \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"political discourse all of the time --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- as well.  But I was struck with there are a number of women who also came out --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Oh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- rather unfavorably.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: The women, I mean, people asked me how I felt about having a woman president at Harvard.  Well, I think it's important, but I think -- I wouldn't ever take a person just because they are a woman.  I mean, there are qualities I want and if they don’t have it -- I mean, I'm very torn about whether I want Hillary to run or not.  And certainly I don’t want her just because she's a woman and I have certain reservations about her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: One of the things that I came across -- there was an article in the New York Times -- I think it was, if I could just find it here in my notes -- it was in 69 --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I know the article.  By Jonathan Leer.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and it was about your appointment and it just struck me -- I'd love to know what your response to it is now looking back at it -- you were described as a girl with brains and a lot of inner charm, which are clearly true -- a really, brilliant girl who doesn't --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Push it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- push it.  And, it -- when I read that, of course, I have my kind of post-- my feminist kind of goggles on.  Hold on a second.  What a gandered(?) thing to say.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Oh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Really quite disrespectful.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  It's --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I wondered what your response was at the time.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: It was not -- I was amused by it at the time.  I realized afterwards that it was an awful article.  Not so much what it said about me, but the poor women who were here had been described as this bunch of super women and what a reputation to have to live up to -- I mean, they all thought they were freaks.  I mean, the whole deal with the press was unbelievable here.  The press was here en masse.  They wanted to come and take the classes.  We didn't let them in.  But, I may have told you this before.  I think what helped make co-education a success, finally, was May Day in 69 -- 70.  May Day was 1970.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: The 1970s.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Because, until then, the women were here as some kind -- I don’t want to say freak -- but circus, maybe.  At least, not as part of the community.  And with the threat of May Day, suddenly there was this external threat and women and men worked to deal with that.  And forgot about co-education.  And, I think that marked the turning point from the self-conscious, you know, what does a woman say and, oh, it was sickening.  And, the poor women, if she missed a class, she might have been the only person -- the only woman in the class -- so it was noticeable.  A guy can cut a class and she spoke for all of the women when she opened her mouth.  It was real tokenism.  And, even before the numbers changed, the fact that they sort of had to cope with this together, I was the only person who welcomed that whole episode because it did move that a long, long way, I thought.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's interesting because I did not hear anybody else say that.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No, I don't think anybody else is going to tell you that.  Sam might feel that way.  I don’t know.  But, to me, it was very obvious.  And it happens a lot in our country.  I mean, unified groups, if you get something external going --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Or sometimes, of course, it goes the status quo [inaudible].\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: As you were.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, the momentum was going.  The momentum, nationally, was going toward co-education.  I mean, we would have been a dinosaur at Yale if they hadn't changed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So, really, in some ways, the co-ed issue and the move to co-education, wasn't really winning a moral argument.  It was winning some other sort of argument.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think it was the finely elite institution accepting the fact that they were left behind in where this social movement was going and the social -- it was really like a tide and you couldn't just stop it at the door and keep us this little island.  And the secondary schools then went the same way.  I get asked, now, how do I feel about co-education.  Should there be single-sex colleges.  And I would like to see single-sex colleges survive for a while, because I think it's important for women to have an option.  I thin once all single-sex colleges disappear, women will be less well-treated, still, at the ones that are \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"co-ed.  And, I think for some women, it's an important stage.  Certainly not for everybody.  And there's an irate power quality about going to a woman's school where, I have some examples from when I was at Smith.  I mean, the competition is not for certain courses -- I mean, you take science at a women's college, you can get an A and everybody thinks it's all terrific but they don’t have the same pressure that they do in men, because -- so, it gives women a false picture in some way of what the real world is like.  And, if you're vulnerable enough, it's important to have those four years before you go to graduate school --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- for some women.  And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I sometimes wonder with single-sex education if there maybe also a good reason for it or one of the reasons that one might argue for it, for co-education or for single-sex education, is earlier one when -- when the person is still being formed.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think that's right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And I know --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Junior high school might be a good time --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- when girls and boys are discovering their sex and gender roles --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- and it's sometimes very difficult to exist --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.  No, I think, interesting -- our granddaughter, who is now 14 1/2 goes to Milton Academy.  That's co-ed.  And she's very cute and very social and everything.  She chose to go to a women's Quaker wilderness camp last summer and she's going back there, but I think the respite that they get from these pressures, they even welcome.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And it helps build -- it's like building immunity --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yes.  Exactly.  Exactly.  So, and I sometimes felt that the women who had two years at a women's college and then came to Yale had the best of all worlds, although being a transfer student is very hard.  And, I think it's -- Yale is a hard place for a woman academic.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.  What -- what kind of impression did you form of the female faculty when you were here as an administrator?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think there is difficult -- I may have told you about Patricia Goldman [Rociche?].  She was in neuroscience, the medical school.  She's in my book.  I profiled her.  She was head of a department at the NIH which she ran and had her own budget.  She had a relationship with a guy who I think may have been in Boston somewhere.  And he got a job offer at Yale and Yale recruited her.  So he had to have a commuting marriage and they had the opportunity to both come to Yale.  She had such a hard time -- this is off the record.  I don’t want the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Do you want me to switch it off then?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  I think if women come to Yale with a husband and the husband is the one that's recorded, they have a difficult time being taken seriously.  If they come and they're recruited and a job is found for the husband, he's considered -- and I hear them talked about in this way as if they were, you know, scum, the other person, just because it wasn't THE person they're looking for.  And, for a single woman, I think they tend to be not included in the social life.  I think, in a European capital, single women, whether it's France or Germany and even England, I think, have an easier time and here it always comes back to this sexualization or something or other that goes on and you feel like they're all out to snatch other people's -- they don’t get included.  So I think social life is probably very difficult for single women at Yale.  I don’t know, you may get --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Well, one of the things that I've tentatively tried to get a grasp of is whether there was any awareness of same-sex issues at Yale in the late 60s and early 70s.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, there certainly was a lot of -- it was well known and we used to kid about -- there were a lot of married guys who we knew were really gay.  I mean, this was a place they tended to come to because they had all of these secret societies and the fellowships.  And then there were others who weren't married, but it wasn't \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"talked about openly, but it was very prevalent.  And I think those were the kind of people who were hurt when women came and their sort of unthreatened existence.  On the lesbian issue, well we -- when I was at Smith in the 40s, there were some wonderful women couples there and outstanding teachers and we just all accepted that.  I don’t know what a lesbian faculty member would be -- how she would be treated.  I can't think of any offhand.  I don’t know whether they would come to Yale.  There must be some.  I can't think of any now, but in the course of talking to the women you might ask them -- did Marie Boroff ever say anything to her about her personal life when you talked to her?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: We have talked about her personal life.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: You have.  Yeah.  I mean, I don’t know Marie well, but for a long time, she and one of the male faculty members were very much a couple.  I mean, she was always seen with him.  He died, recently.  And I think he was a Shakespeare scholar but I'm not sure.  I don’t know whether she would talk about that or not.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Well, we'll have to see when we do our formal interview. \r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Or how she found it.  And she may be also a very private person so she should cope with not being in a social circle.  Anne -- what's her name -- Anne Hanson, who was here --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: She was history of art, wasn't she?\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  She was history of art.  She got divorced.  She had two or three children.  Got divorced very early in her career.  Had a Fulbright fellowship in Italy with three kids, I think, either before she got her PhD and, eventually, was he the father -- I think she married somebody else, who she then divorced, but they kept living together.  It was a very strange marriage.  Wonderful woman and very gutsy and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes, so I hear. \r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And very glamorous, too, I hear, also.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Very glamorous.  Great.  It was so sad when she got sick.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: There was one story that you told me at our last meeting and it was -- I'm just thinking of all of this gandered stuff, which had everything to do with academic life and nothing to do with academic life and -- when you -- when you had formal meetings to go to, there was a meeting you went to at the Yale Club with George May and it would be great to hear that --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- because it's such an interesting and --\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, it was sort of typical --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: -- telling story.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- of the times, and this must have been -- probably in 1969.  It could have been the second year of co-education, 1970.  Kingman Brewster was on a panel at the Yale Club talking about Yale and I was to go with him and a student and George May, the Dean of Yale College.  Brewster was already in New York.  Dean May and I and the student got a ride from the Yale campus police to New York and in the course of the ride, I knew that Yale had a separate entrance for women, and I don’t know what possessed me but, in the car on the way down, I just said, you know, I'm not going through the woman's entrance.  If they make me go through that, then you'll have to have the panel without me.  And so the student said, oh, no, if they make you go through the ladies entrance, I'll take you to the movies.  I said, that would be fine.  So, George May didn't say anything, but it was obvious that he was quite proper and envisioned trouble.  This was after 1970, so it must have been 70-71, probably.  And he didn't want any trouble.  And I didn't think through how I was going to handle this, but I knew I wasn't going through the ladies entrance.  But I did realize that guards at the Yale Club were ancient.  They had been there for 100 years.  So, I came to the front door, got out of the Yale car and with a very deliberately, desperate face \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"asked the door -- the person at the door, the guard, I said where's the ladies room, where's the ladies room, and he, with a straight face said to me, on the 22nd floor.  I mean, this was typical.  You had a separate ladies entrance but you had to go up 22 floors to find a ladies restroom.  So, I dashed for the elevator.  Found myself in the elevator.  George May right on my tail keeping an eye on me.  And so we -- I went up there and he said let's go and have a drink in the lounge or something.  And we almost forgot to meet Brewster on time.  But, we didn't have a crisis and the women's entrance disappeared in short order.  I don’t know if that was coincidence or cause-and-effect, but I had previously talked at the graduate club in New Haven and I had to go in the back door and I, during my talk, I made some remark about that, and that separate entrance disappeared, also.  So, it was a time -- it was a similar time that some of us filed a suit, including Ellen Peters from the law school, against Murray's because Murray's which were used a de facto faculty club charged extra if you had a woman in your party.  You had to go and rent a room and that resulted in the women often being excluded from the real faculty meetings.  And that suit was settled and interestingly enough, Murray's, which had borderline attendance and budget problems, flourished after it became truly co-ed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I didn't know that.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  And it did very well.  Right now, I think, I'm not sure they're doing so well, but I think that has more to do with current nutritional trends, I think, than anything else.  But, one of the reasons that Murray's gave us for not being able to admit women was that they didn't have ladies rooms and some other such story and so that's -- that's what happened there and people today think that's very funny, but it was very real in those days.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah, and it wasn't so long ago either.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: No.  It wasn't so long ago.  And, what was very interesting -- I mean, Brewster made this remark to me about not finding women's scientists 25 years ago or more -- 35 years ago, probably -- and here is Larry Summers with a similar comment and it's not are women and men different.  Of course they're different.  But is that the reason why they're -- why there are virtually no women when many of them get advanced degrees and do post-docs and then they disappear or are there other reasons -- I think, until the external barriers, and even women's internal barriers are eliminated, we'll never know where the biology will take us.  It's going to take time.  But to say right now, categorically, that women are less able to do science.  And, the interesting thing is Summers cited the distribution at the top, at the most -- both at the top of ability and at the bottom of ability, men exceed women.  But, there is no evidence whatever that at the top -- that the people who succeed in academia at the top are drawn from that sample.  That -- there is no study done and the numbers are probably too small to do a study -- but that's -- so there is somebody, allegedly, very bright jumping to conclusions without the evidence and overlooking the fact that there are at least twice as many highly qualified PhDs and with advanced training as are the representation on the tenure level.  And they get hired on the non-tenure level.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: I know that one or two of the women that I've talked to, and these aren't even scientists, these are women in humanities, where women were more obviously represented at the Yale -- there was a feeling -- these were women who were assistant and associate professors, I suppose, around 74 or 75 and knew that they weren't going tenure and that they'd have to go elsewhere and have actually done very well elsewhere, which kind of comes back to your earlier point.  But, their feeling was what was their opportunity -- they got hired because of affirmative action and because there had to be more women on the faculty.  But they also felt that they were there just in a way \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"to make the numbers.  And, you know, whether that's absolutely true or not I don’t know, but certainly that was their perception of where they were at.  At that particular time, they were there to make the numbers, without any kind of real commitment to them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Without a real commitment to them.  I mean, part of that is their lack of security.  I mean, women never think they are as able as a comparable man.  They are always less secure.  So it is easy to make them feel -- but I don’t think the university -- I mean, I'll tell you a story that's relevant.  People, of course, know that I've been associated with this issue, so I would say it's probably about, by now, five years ago.  It wasn't longer than that.  There was a dinner party and the former chair of one of the departments of the medical school was there and he turned to me and said, Helga, I don’t see how we're ever going to get women here.  He said, this year, our department made an offer to three women and they weren't even that good and they all turned us down.  So, how can we get women.  So, I said, did you ask them why they turned you down.  And at that point he changed the subject.  He didn't want to talk about that.  They turned them down.  We can't get women.  They're not even very good.  So, if they won't come, how would the good ones come.  But, there's really no interest in seeing is there something about your department that tells these women they'd better not come here or what could you do to attract them.  What would it take.  They want to be the way they are and if women don't want them the way they are, then leave us alone.  And, you know, I don’t think women are stupid and if they know they're going to be expected to work 70 hours a week and there is no handy day-care and if they get pregnant then it's going to be held against them -- why should they take a job.  It's not that they can't work hard.  And, so, you know, the other thing that puzzles me as a nation, this has nothing to do with academia, but if we truly think it's so important for a mother to spend not one year or two years but the whole childhood taking care of her children, then why are we asking the vast majority of our women who aren't wealthy enough to do that to take a job.  Then they should be subsidized so they can properly take care of the next generation.  So we have a total double standard for raising the children of middle-class women, upper middle-class women and everybody else, because we're not concerned about the welfare.  We have no school in the summer.  We have no programs after school for these young kids.  It doesn't make sense.  Either we like children or we don't, but we ought to decide which way we're going to go.  The other thing I have no patience with are the single faculty members who complain that they have to take up the slack of the married people if we give them flexibility.  I think as a nation, we need another generation, otherwise we're killing ourselves.  In that case, the people who choose to be single and not to have children should be grateful that somebody is taking on the task.  I mean, it doesn't make any sense.  But, furthermore, if we know that we're going to give all of the younger people some flexibility while they're raising a family, we could make that flexibility available to everybody, male and female.  To do with what they want.  And, structure it economically in a way that's possible.  The health care system is one problem, because if you have to maintain health care, full health care, for a half-time person or a two-thirds time person, it gets expensive.  But you don’t have to do that.  You could have a revolving loan fund.  You could change who provides health care.  If they really want to solve the problem, there are ways to do it, but I don’t think there is the will, and I think, for whatever reason, other western European countries have put a higher value on family than our country.  France may have done it because they didn't have enough people to recruit for the army, but, once it's established and you have a support system, everybody appreciates it.  And there was a book out recently \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"by a woman who raised her first two children in France and then contrasts it with what happened when she came here.  And, so, I think sort of the Freudian myth has also affected how we look at childcare.  You know, I may have told you that initially I was going to do the study of women in the Academy in -- not only in the National Academy but also the British Royal Society.  And I talked to some of the women in Britain and one of them, I'd have to check back who it was, said -- she said, I was so lucky I had my children before Bolby(?) and I didn't have all of those guilt trips.  And I thought --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Attachment theory.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.  Attachment theory.  She didn't have to be worried about it.  And the interesting thing is I think that the children of the women who had careers who raised children turn out at least as well, if not better, than a comparable sample.  I don’t have the statistics on that --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yeah.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- but, if you look at it, it seems to be true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Actually, somebody else I spoke to who -- I'm hoping will do an interview for the project -- said that when she was doing her -- doing her academic work and went back to work -- that a lot of her neighbors, all in sort of the same age group, all in their sort of late 20s and 30s -- those women were horrified at her going back to -- you earn money.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But they thought nothing of leaving their children to go out or have lunch or shopping.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Of course.  Or play bridge.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Or play bridge.  Yes.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: That's right. That's -- [not surprising?].\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: So it's not about being at home with the kids, is it.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Listen, I used to see, and you'll get very conscious of it at a certain age -- when our kids were growing up and all of this guilt trip was coming at me -- I would see women in the grocery store with their kids, yelling at them, screaming at them, spanking them -- I said, this is the quality time with the kids, I'd just assume have my child in good daycare.  So, it's crazy.  I think it has changed.  I think -- but, what's happened is parents, both mothers and fathers, are more involved with their kids than they used to be.  But nothing else is given, so the overload is much worse than it used to be.  It wasn't doing one or the other.  Now they feel they have to do everything and they have no private time for themselves or their spouse and that's terrible, too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Yes.  You have to be super-professional and super-parent.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Super energy.  Yeah.  And that's crazy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: But what -- I think what is interesting, in the last few years, is that I think more men are beginning to feel that that's not the way they ought to live their lives.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: And I think that may be new.  Or at least they're speaking out where they didn't speak out before because the pressure was to conform before.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I think that's right and I think, in anything we do in changing institutional policy, it has to be gender-neutral and -- where did I just -- oh, this is a horrible story and I -- I heard it from my son.  It's a -- it's not for this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's probably a good place to end anyway.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: We did gender-neutral.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Gender-neutral, right.  And that doesn't mean identical.  No, the one thing I'd like to add, though, before you end is I don’t think the goal of having every family share all domestic responsibilities 50/50 is a realistic goal.  I think people differ and what we need is a lot of flexibility and individual options.  Some men love being househusbands.  Some women really want to be at home all of the time and they love being full-time homemakers.  And, some people have grandparents that want to be involved and can be involved.  Some people feel fine having live-in help and they can afford it.  Other people are completely committed to daycare.  And, just to end on a note, how we're all manipulated by the media, this recent study, you probably saw, where the headline, I think in the Times, was that day care results in discipline problems.  The actual figures are that there is a one percent increase in the number of disruptive children who \n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276/transcript/31942/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"spent a lot of time in daycare.  Now, a one percent increase in the number of disruptive children, without controlling for the quality of the daycare, I mean, that's a ridiculous statistic and headline that implies that anybody who sends their children to daycare is depriving them of God knows what.  And it is very misleading but it influences a lot of people and you follow the New York Times headlines, there is a tremendous bias to bad-mouthing working women.  I find that very sad.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: It's certainly very sad after 40 years of second wave feminism.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah, right.  And you know, it's like -- you can turn it off but it's --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Let's just say this is the end of the interview and thank you very much.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Well, you're very welcome and I hope it's -- that I added some new wrinkles.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Oh absolutely.  Yes.  It's been really, really interesting.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: Thank you.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: Did I -- I'll end on a light note --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: OK.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: -- but, after the decision was made to admit women to Yale, Brewster said we have to make an appointment for Sam and me and you, Helga, to look at the accommodations at Vanderbilt and see if they're going to be all right for women.  And this was late in the fall.  The weather was miserable.  We were all decked out in raincoats.  We traipsed over to Vanderbilt Hall, went in there.  I didn't know it well, but Brewster and Chauncy were very familiar with it.  And they knocked on a door.  It was a long delay.  It was about 9, 9:30 in the morning.  Finally, a sheepish looking man came to the door.  Brewster identified himself and said, we just want to see the quarters.  I could see immediately there was a dresser opposite the door with a huge box of Tampax on it and Brewster, in his diplomatic way, turned to Sam and me and said, I guess this will be all right for the women.  The women ended up in Vanderbilt.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER: That's a lovely note to end.  Thank you.\r\n\nELGA WASSERMAN: I always found that very -- but Brewster could handle any situation.  It didn't floor him at all.\r\n\r\nEND OF TRANSCRIPT","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48971/file/122276#t=9900.0,10124.568"}]}]}]}