{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/v40js9j460/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Morse, Charlotte, 2008 May 26"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Morse, Charlotte, 2008 May 26. 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/801909"]}},{"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-048_morse_charlotte_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2008 May 26 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Charlotte Cook Morse was born in Washington, D.C. on October 26, 1942, and was brought up in rural Loudon County, Virginia.  After graduating with a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1964 she pursued graduate studies at Stanford University where she received an M.A. in 1968 and a PH.D. in 1970.  In 1968 Morse came to Yale as an instructor in the Department of English, and from 1969-1976 served as an assistant professor.  During the period 1975-1976 she also was a program officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. In 1976 she was appointed an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in 1994 promoted to full professor.  She remained at VCU until her retirement in 2011.  \n\nMorse won the second national Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Scholarship in 1960, held a Pembroke College Southern Regional Scholarship while at Brown University, received a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1967-1968, held a Morse Fellowship from Yale 1971-1972, and was twice the recipient of an NEH Fellowship, 1982 and 1991.  \n\nMorse is the author of a number of books and articles on medieval literature, including Pattern of Judgment in the Queste and Cleanness  (University of Missouri Press, 1978).  In addition, she co-edited several volumes of essays in honor of the medieval scholars J.A. Burrow, V.A. Kolve and Judson Boyce Allen.   She serves on the editorial boards of The Chaucer Review and The Journal of The Early Book Society. (Bioghist)","Charlotte Morse talks about her upbringing and education, paying particular attention to her family history and expectations, in the context of the rural culture in which she was raised in Loudon County, Virginia.  She recalls how she came to choose Brown University for her undergraduate studies, and how she secured funding for her college education.  She outlines the gender imbalances of the National Merit Scholarships in the late 1950s, as well as her experience of winning the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award, which largely funded her undergraduate years at Brown. She describes the academic and social culture she encountered at Brown, including faculty attitudes to women faculty and students.  She acknowledges the intellectual inspiration and practical mentoring of the historian Harcourt Brown and the English literature scholar Barbara Lewalski (one of the few women on the Brown faculty at that time), and recalls friendships with her female student peers.  She reflects on the academic and professional aspirations of her peer group, and the restrictions relating to gender which they believed were imposed on women’s careers.\n\nAn account is given of why she chose Stanford University for graduate work in English, and what it was like there during the era of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war.  She discusses the challenge of combining marriage with the academic life, a subject which is a running theme throughout the interview.  Morse recounts her experience of the academic job market of the late 1960s, the kinds of discrimination facing women, and the circumstances of her appointment at Yale.  She speculates as to why Yale’s English Department appointed so many women to junior faculty positions at that time.  A lengthy description is provided of the culture then prevailing in the Yale English Department and the wider Yale community, particularly life in Morse College and the ways in which Yale changed socially and culturally during the late 60s.  Morse originally iterated the challenges of being an academic woman in a written submission to the Greene Committee on the Status of Professional Women at Yale (1971). These issues are revisited in her interview, especially sexual harassment and the complexities of combining work and marriage.  She also addresses the difficulties of the Yale tenure system and the lack of formal mentoring for both male and female junior faculty, and how far gender complicated these matters.  Many of the senior English faculty, including Maynard Mack, Thomas Greene, Martin Price, W.K. Wimsatt, Frederick Robinson and Bart Giamatti, are recalled.  Morse pays special tribute to Marie Borroff, who was then the only tenured woman in the English Department.\n\nHer appointment to Yale coincided with the arrival of the first women undergraduates; she reminisces about them and some of the challenges they faced. Morse also recalls the events surrounding May Day, 1970, and her encounter with some of the early feminist groups at Yale around this time.  She summarizes the general indifference to, or ignorance of, women’s issues in the English Department until the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare equal rights regulations were passed in 1972.  In particular she remembers a conversation with Bart Giamatti in which they discussed how these changes in the federal law would affect Yale.  \n\nMorse recounts how the oil crisis of 1974 and the subsequent recession affected university recruitment, and what this meant in her own life as she went onto a retrenched job market in search of a tenure-track position, whilst dealing with the crisis of her failing marriage.   \n\nFinally she talks about the legacy of Yale, how it influenced her subsequent teaching and scholarship, and pays tribute to the medievalists who nurtured her scholarship and intellectual life, in particular the British scholars Eric Stanley and John Burrow (both of whom held visiting appointments at Yale). (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;5534dc73-ec8b-4e78-bed5-e03fb58b2496 (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.","Charlotte Cook Morse was born in Washington, D.C. on October 26, 1942, and was brought up in rural Loudon County, Virginia.  After graduating with a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1964 she pursued graduate studies at Stanford University where she received an M.A. in 1968 and a PH.D. in 1970.  In 1968 Morse came to Yale as an instructor in the Department of English, and from 1969-1976 served as an assistant professor.  During the period 1975-1976 she also was a program officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. In 1976 she was appointed an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in 1994 promoted to full professor.  She remained at VCU until her retirement in 2011.  \n\nMorse won the second national Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Scholarship in 1960, held a Pembroke College Southern Regional Scholarship while at Brown University, received a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1967-1968, held a Morse Fellowship from Yale 1971-1972, and was twice the recipient of an NEH Fellowship, 1982 and 1991.  \n\nMorse is the author of a number of books and articles on medieval literature, including \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003ePattern of Judgment in the Queste and Cleanness\u003c/title\u003e  (University of Missouri Press, 1978).  In addition, she co-edited several volumes of essays in honor of the medieval scholars J.A. Burrow, V.A. Kolve and Judson Boyce Allen.   She serves on the editorial boards of \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eThe Chaucer Review\u003c/title\u003e and \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eThe Journal of The Early Book Society\u003c/title\u003e.","Charlotte Morse talks about her upbringing and education, paying particular attention to her family history and expectations, in the context of the rural culture in which she was raised in Loudon County, Virginia.  She recalls how she came to choose Brown University for her undergraduate studies, and how she secured funding for her college education.  She outlines the gender imbalances of the National Merit Scholarships in the late 1950s, as well as her experience of winning the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award, which largely funded her undergraduate years at Brown. She describes the academic and social culture she encountered at Brown, including faculty attitudes to women faculty and students.  She acknowledges the intellectual inspiration and practical mentoring of the historian Harcourt Brown and the English literature scholar Barbara Lewalski (one of the few women on the Brown faculty at that time), and recalls friendships with her female student peers.  She reflects on the academic and professional aspirations of her peer group, and the restrictions relating to gender which they believed were imposed on women’s careers.\n\nAn account is given of why she chose Stanford University for graduate work in English, and what it was like there during the era of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war.  She discusses the challenge of combining marriage with the academic life, a subject which is a running theme throughout the interview.  Morse recounts her experience of the academic job market of the late 1960s, the kinds of discrimination facing women, and the circumstances of her appointment at Yale.  She speculates as to why Yale’s English Department appointed so many women to junior faculty positions at that time.  A lengthy description is provided of the culture then prevailing in the Yale English Department and the wider Yale community, particularly life in Morse College and the ways in which Yale changed socially and culturally during the late 60s.  Morse originally iterated the challenges of being an academic woman in a written submission to the Greene Committee on the Status of Professional Women at Yale (1971). These issues are revisited in her interview, especially sexual harassment and the complexities of combining work and marriage.  She also addresses the difficulties of the Yale tenure system and the lack of formal mentoring for both male and female junior faculty, and how far gender complicated these matters.  Many of the senior English faculty, including Maynard Mack, Thomas Greene, Martin Price, W.K. Wimsatt, Frederick Robinson and Bart Giamatti, are recalled.  Morse pays special tribute to Marie Borroff, who was then the only tenured woman in the English Department.\n\nHer appointment to Yale coincided with the arrival of the first women undergraduates; she reminisces about them and some of the challenges they faced. Morse also recalls the events surrounding May Day, 1970, and her encounter with some of the early feminist groups at Yale around this time.  She summarizes the general indifference to, or ignorance of, women’s issues in the English Department until the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare equal rights regulations were passed in 1972.  In particular she remembers a conversation with Bart Giamatti in which they discussed how these changes in the federal law would affect Yale.  \n\nMorse recounts how the oil crisis of 1974 and the subsequent recession affected university recruitment, and what this meant in her own life as she went onto a retrenched job market in search of a tenure-track position, whilst dealing with the crisis of her failing marriage.   \n\nFinally she talks about the legacy of Yale, how it influenced her subsequent teaching and scholarship, and pays tribute to the medievalists who nurtured her scholarship and intellectual life, in particular the British scholars Eric Stanley and John Burrow (both of whom held visiting appointments at Yale).","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u00265534dc73-ec8b-4e78-bed5-e03fb58b2496","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/48965/file/122285","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210828-32762-1lgz350.mpga"]},"duration":20096.4702,"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/48965/file/122285/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/285/original/open-uri20210828-32762-1lgz350.mpga?1630174241","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":20096.4702,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-048_morse_charlotte_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview - Professor Charlotte Morse \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOK.  It's the 26th of May, 2008.  And I'm with -- it's Florence Minnis, here, and I'm with Professor Charlotte Morse at her home at 2202 -- am I right? -- Floyd Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.  OK, Charlotte, well, I'm really, really glad that you're going to do this, that you've consented to do it, and I hope you will find it enjoyable.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo do I.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I hope so.  And you can stop and start as you need to.  And we can go back and review things again if either of us need to.  What I'd like to start off with is to get a sense of the person that grew up and became the woman that went to Yale.  And so I've asked these sorts of questions of everybody else who has done an interview, and I find it particularly helpful and very, very interesting to get a sense of what kind of background you came from.  And, how -- what sorts of experiences you had before you actually came to Yale and try to track how you ended up at Yale for the time that you did.  So if you could give me some idea of your own background, some of your own background, your family, where you were brought up, your parents particularly, it would be very interesting to hear a little bit about them.  And what kind of influence you think your family had to bear on the way that your intellectual growth went and also your schooling also would be very, very helpful to learn a little bit about that.  And your expectations on you as a teenager hoping or not hoping to go to college.  So just take it -- it would be probably best to start with your own family, when and where you were born.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI was born in Washington, DC shortly after the war broke out, World War II.  Both of my parents were college graduates.  Both of them came from very poor families.  Both very intelligent families, at least in part.  They were relatively old to have such a young child.  They were in their mid-30s or a little more.  My father came from West Texas, [Post?] Texas, and was a graduate of Texas Tech.  Among early graduates of that institution with then a master's degree from Michigan State.  He had been very much encouraged by his professors at Tech to go on in horticulture, which was his specialty.  He had -- he finished school when the Depression was still pretty much in full swing and initially worked the only job he could get as an inspector on the railroads chasing down fake carloads of lettuce or something like that.  He ended up seeing some of the rougher sides of the docks and transport terminals in the northeast and came away not very charitably disposed to a good many of the immigrant communities and rather, in some sense, narrow-minded as compared to my mother, who was very open, and did not share some of his prejudices at all.  But understood why he had them and didn't really berate him for them.  He was a very good man.  His mother had about four years of education, and I think his father may have had somewhat less.  My mother said that my grandmother was much smarter than he was, but they were a very fine team and had moved from East Texas after my father was born to settle on land that had never been farmed, that was opened up by the CW Post Company which had ended, and they were selling, I think it was half-sections, and it was dry-land farming, which could be very risky \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=0.0,301.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in that part of the country.  They survived the Dust Bowl there.  (laughter)  And my grandmother worked with my grandfather and all of the boys learned how to do all of the housework and take care of babies because there were 11 children and all of the girls learned how to do all of the outdoor work as well as the indoor work, so it was a really remarkably gender unbiased family.  Lots of boys.  And certainly my father knew how to do everything in the house and how to cook and -- as well as outside work.  My mother didn't reciprocate.  She didn't know how to do outside work, really.  But my mother was born in -- near Thomasville, Georgia, and grew up really quite poor with a grandfather -- is that correct? -- yes.  A grandfather who was in the view of her mother and my mother, kind of a redneck.  And I've only recently discovered that my first cousins who belonged to my mother's older sister have a completely different view of this man, as really a rather successful maneuver in the business of farming and manufacturing.  My mother and grandmother took a very dim view of him.  My grandmother was always very irritated that he, unlike her cousins in Savannah who went to Paris for some finishing school, that he didn't provide any education and she ended up taking care of younger siblings and a sick mother and the menopausal -- we'd go to bed and somewhat embittered.  Her husband died and was not a very successful businessman and moved to Florida and he died and she was a widow raising these girls.  My mother had both a business track in high school, but also, at least the minimum of the college prep track and the president of Rollings College was going around Florida high schools looking for some deserving but poor students to recruit for Rollings College, which was a very -- it was a school for very rich kids for the most part.  It certainly had very rich kids.  So they gave my mother a scholarship that included some, and financial aid, that included some work.  My grandmother was an extremely fine seamstress.  She made all of my mother's clothes, all of my first cousin's clothes when she was growing up, some of mine.  At any rate, my mother got there and they gave her a job waitressing which I think lasted for a week or so when she -- because she thought that was demeaning.  She went and said, I have other skills to offer.  Can't you find me something else to do.  And then they discovered that she could take shorthand and dictation and one thing or another and all sorts of office skills and they commenced employing her in the office and before it was over, she was privy to extraordinary amounts of information.  They had discovered that she was also discrete and she knew the Dunn and Bradshaw ratings on virtually every student on the campus for example.  And in -- in one of the summers, the president, Hamilton Holt, who was a Yalie as a matter of fact, which gave my mother a rather favorable impression of Yale, he took my mother and grandmother with him on a trip through New England visiting very rich, mostly ladies, probably widows, to try to persuade them to give money to the college.  And my mother remembers this as walking into these wonderful picturesque, white-clabbered New England villages, walking into these homes full of rugs that were worn out, Oriental rugs that were worn threadbare and she had never -- she never quite understood why people wanted threadbare rugs on the floor.  She thought that was very odd.  But she was really encouraged in lots of different ways at the college.  She ended up majoring in economics because she quickly discovered that there were a lot of students there who were graduates of fine New England prep schools and the like.  And, they already had tremendously wide reading as compared to her own reading skills and time to read.  And she didn't, given the number of hours she was working, she didn't have time to read.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=301.0,602.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And so economics, which she understood fairly quickly, and which also partly fitted in with work she had done earlier and she could do accounting and all that stuff and so economics just made sense and was relatively easy for her and that's what she majored in.  She then decided to go to Columbia to do a degree, a master's degree in economics, not realizing that women didn't do that.  Nobody told her.  But when she got to Columbia, there were either -- there might have been one other woman doing an MA in economics.  There were other women students around but they were all doing an accounting course.  She boarded with people who -- this was the Depression -- she boarded with a family that may have been in one of those Columbia apartments along Riverside Drive that had lots of rooms and some of the children had grown up and I think the husband was dying of cancer or something, and it was a ghastly one of these situations, but she had her room and it was this rather elegant apartment, and her meals were provided because people had servants in those days, that sort of thing.  And she had a wonderful time in New York.  Some of her college friends were there.  In retrospect, she realized that probably one or two of them were gay.  But they liked taking her out because she didn't demand things of them they didn't want to supply and she didn't want to offer anyhow, so it was all rather charming and she went to lots of concerts and opera and one thing or another.  And rather enjoyed her time at Columbia.  I guess the first fall she was up there she lived in the dorms because she repeated to me the advice of the dean, the woman dean who presided over all of these women students who insisted that they must have mad money in their pockets.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMad money?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tMad money.  Mad money was enough money to hire a cab to get yourself home from any situation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYou had to have the resources to get home.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid your mother complete her degree at Columbia?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAlmost, but not quite.  She had started -- there were two things that interfered.  One -- or three.  She started working for Steve -- Stefana -- I've forgotten what his proper first name is -- who was editing the Journal of the American Statistical Society and who was a very disorganized person my mother thought.  And she kept the manuscripts and that sort of thing straight and what are you supposed to be doing and kept them in order and was, I think, quite a valuable and we would call her an executive assistant I think, but then they just called it secretary.  She also had a course from some professor at Columbia who told her that her paper had gone missing and she would have to write another paper or something like that.  And of course that was before you could reproduce work like that and her mother was ill and she needed to send money home and she didn't have the resources to stay on and redo that paper.  In retrospect, because he liked her work, it seems very odd to me that he wanted more work out of her and hadn't lost the paper at all.  But she never suspected that, and I never either when she told me those stories when I was little.  But, now that I'm a professor, I'm profoundly skeptical of that story.  But, also, along about the time that those things were happening or not too long after that, Stefan was one of the leaders in working out sampling theory and was called to Washington to work on the design of the census and so was moving along with the American Statistical Journal to Washington and he asked my mother to move with him and she did.  Again, it was not -- economic times were difficult.  Both of my parents always had work, but my father in particular didn't have work that he particularly wanted or liked.  But they were keenly aware that there were many people in the country with credentials as good as theirs and willing and able to work who simply could not find work.  And they were always mindful of that sort of possibility in the economy, let's put it that way.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=602.0,916.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"When my mother got to Washington, she joined up with what may have been a way of living in Washington that started with the Depression, but it may actually go back earlier than that and that is rooming houses in Washington.  And they both lived in places around DuPont Circle which had been a very elegant neighborhood with rather sizable houses and many people who no longer had the resources in the Depression to keep up those houses and to keep up the standard of living.  So they started renting out rooms and these widows were then running a household and were able to keep their servants employed in this way because they certainly didn't do the cooking, but they did sit-down meals for their boarders with tablecloths and good China, silver, the whole lot.  And my parents actually met -- I don't know whether it was at the same rooming house or nearby rooms or whatever -- but at any rate, they met in the boarding house culture of DC.  By the time I was working in Washington after really -- upon the last year of my Yale contract -- I was inter-governmental personnel act employee for the NEH -- NEH was paying Yale to pay me.  And although I wasn't doing this, I ran into other young people in Washington -- by this time, of course, there were no elegant boarding houses with people putting dinner on the table or that sort of thing, but there were shared houses and that was a very common phenomenon and I think still is in Washington where people rent old houses or big flats or something like that to the just-out-of-college crowd and live in some kind of elegant slum (laughter) of a house with people stealing each other's food out of the refrigerator, all of those problems of rooming together.  Do I need to say more?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I think that's --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOne other thing might be clear.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd that is the expectation that I would go to college was present from as early as I can really remember. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was a given?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was a given.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And you had a sister didn't you?  You have a sister I should say.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI have a sister.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.  She was born just after the War and was a very sick infant.  And when my parents came back after the War, and my mother had packed up -- or they had packed up their gear, because they didn't know how long the War was going to last or what was going to happen -- I was 11 months old when my father and one of his good friends went down and joined the Navy because they were pretty sure that they were going to get drafted.  I don't know whether my father was actually registered in Texas or in Arlington County, where he was then living, but the draft was bearing down on everybody whose children were not conceived before Pearl Harbor and I was too old.  I didn't count.  And all of those men were getting drafted.  So in order to get a little bit of choice about what they did, my dad and one of his -- one of the family friends -- went down and signed up for the Navy.  I'm not quite sure why they felt the Navy was better.  My father, who came from West Texas, thought he would go and see, but probably they felt that was better than the land Army, which they were perhaps already hearing more about that than they'd like to know.  So my father's home port was New Orleans, and I don't know how soon he knew that.  My mother decided or they decided to pack up all their gear and my mother, then, and I, bounced between my grandmother Nan's house in Jacksonville, Florida and my grandparents in Post, Texas, and my dad, on home leave, in Gulfport, Mississippi at one point, maybe twice in New Orleans, and finally, at the very end of the war in Miami.  And I have very vague memories of a couple of those places.  The Quonset Hut in New Orleans \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=916.0,1201.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"which I thought was wonderful and my mother said it was horrible.  (laughter)  At a very elegant old apartment building in Miami next to a river where the 8-year-olds went fishing and I wanted to go fishing, too.  Retrospectively or later I discovered fishing was the most boring thing you could possibly do, but it looked fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo then after the War, when your father came back, you settled in Loudon County?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, first in Arlington.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn Arlington, right.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was very, very hard to get housing.  Washington had grown during the War and was attracting huge inward migration to run the government or whatever after the war.  Nobody wanted to rent to people with children, and so the only places that did rent to people with children rented to virtually nobody else.  And in this one sort of garden apartment section, the Bancroft Apartments, there were 25 children within one year of my age.  We were quite the troop.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was a baby boom, wasn't it?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThat's true, it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, you've painted a very vivid picture of your family.  When you got to go to school, what kinds of schools did you go to?  Were they rural schools?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, the first school I went to was in Arlington.  My birthday was October 26.  And you either had to be six by September 1 or September 30 to be in the first grade class.  And I very much wanted to go to school.  I played school all the time with the older kids.  And I actually -- I think I went to school knowing a lot of the numbers, the combinations, but I could not start school reading.  I wanted to read but it didn't make any sense to me or something, and my mother wasn't pushing.  And when I -- so what they were doing in Arlington, trying to deal with this ginormous influx of children that they didn't have teachers for, they didn't have schoolrooms for, they were really very hard pressed and they didn't have very much money to do anything about it, either.  So they started the people who turned six after September 30 in mid-years and for several years, Arlington ran off-year classes.  So I started in January.  We had some kind of very strange room, which must have been, I don't know, an art room or an assembly room.  It was too big for a classroom.  They didn't have any teachers.  We had a substitute teacher who didn't know a damn thing about teaching six year olds.  Certainly knew nothing about how to teach anybody to read, to do math, to do anything.  So it was really baby-sitting for half days.  We got milk and cookies in the morning and that was nice, and two or three little kids could already read, so they got to read and the rest of us, we just wasted time.  In the meanwhile, my parents had been looking for some time to move out of the suburbs and they had found a place finally in Loudon County which was also in the direction, as opposed to the Maryland suburbs, of old friends of my mother's.  A family that my family's life has been intertwined with now for three generations.  My mother had dated one of these sons.  Another had brought his brother to Rollings because he was the football coach at Rollings and I still have no idea how that happened to this country family or kind-of country family from Loudon County in Northern Virginia.  But anyway, they had been at Rollings.  My mother had dated the younger and drunken son and had decided that this was not the kind of person to marry.  When he was with her, he didn't drink.  So she was a great favorite of this man's mother and when -- by the time my mother was involved with my father, that other relationship was over and the family liked my father and this family sort of became my surrogate family because my West Texas relatives were really, really far away.  This was just the very beginning of air travel.  It was expensive. About the straightest way you could get to them was at least 1,800 miles away.  So we used to visit my mother's family in Jacksonville by then, but I was 10 before I went to West Texas, having been there when I was so young I couldn't remember.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=1201.0,1505.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And the Grant family was really kind of a surrogate family.  And I called all of them aunts and uncles and that sort of thing and went to family picnics.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what was your schooling like, then?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, when I got to Loudon County, we moved in March, I think, into the farm, which my father and his friends had been working on a house for several months.  And I went to Mrs. Beech's kindergarten which had been established by quite a wealthy family.  Mrs. Beech was English and wore black dresses with little lace collars and taught the first grade and somebody else taught kindergarten and nursery class in the other room.  It was a small house with little desks packed into what would have been the front parlor and the little easel blackboard and Mrs. Beech tailored her assignments to children's capacities.  I don't know how many of us there were in the class, but it must have been around 15, maybe.  [Neddie Orr?] who was really bad, it was his father who supported this school, was strapped to his chair in the front of the room because he wouldn’t sit still.  Most of the rest of this crew had been to James Kindergarten in Hamilton, which was the kindergarten to go to before this.  So they had almost all been at James Kindergarten the year before, and almost all of the kids whose birthdays, because Loudon did the same thing as Arlington, whose birthdays fell in October, November or December.  And they were actually a pretty, not necessarily hugely bright, but a pretty up-market group of little kids and they were really rather nice.  I mean, Mrs. Beech was quite good at getting them to be friendly and so on and there was some gym equipment in the backyard we could play with and a little girl named, who was in kindergarten, named Mary Jordan White, we must have all been out there and the bad boy, the one who was strapped to his chair, called her a dirty rat, which was one of the worst things anybody could say.  We didn't know a lot of bad words like that, so those children had drunken parents, so perhaps they knew more than I did.  So Mrs. Beech marched him upstairs and literally washed his mouth out with soap.  But we learned a lot of things that I subsequently forgot:  the multiplication tables, the continents, the rivers, the oceans -- so we did geography.  We had drawing lessons, but they were very rigid.  Mrs. Beech would draw a line and we used to draw the same one, but the bad boy never did that.  He finished his flower pots with horns.  And stuff like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you learn to read by that time?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNot very well.  I was reading, sort of, but it wasn't reading with much comprehensive and I had a vivid memory of really not being able to tell the difference between saw and was, which is the only clue I have that I probably had a learning disability, since much, much later I realized that that was a sign.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tShall we say, maybe one could have a desire to read and have some impediment that really stopped you.  And I -- my parents wanted me in public school the next year, and it was a huge intake or a huge class, since everybody had babies around the same time there in Loudon County.  My second grade teacher agreed to talk to my mother and agreed with her that she wouldn't take me out of second grade, partly because she realized she could work with my mother and this would not become a horrible burden, and so I entered the second grade in a public school with 42 children in this one class, only when the substitutes came in was there chaos and there was, and I started out in the bottom of the reading group which included mostly what we called then the tenant kids.  They were the kids whose parents often moved around and were tenant farmers, working for somebody else.  And my first friend was Margaret Powell, age 12.  She towered over me, but she was very good to me and she would take me to the restroom and supervised me, as it were.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=1505.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And told me filthy jokes, which I went home and told my mother.  I didn't understand them and can't remember anything about them.  My mother was horrified, until she realized, thinking about it and noticing my lack of understanding, that I didn't understand them, and eventually I would probably, she hoped, make some other friends.  And -- but she was always -- and I did and moved up by the end of the year to the first reading group, but my mother was always very careful that I continued to be kind to this girl who had befriended me, she must have been, I don't know, about five-feet tall by then or so.  She probably dropped out of school.  A lot of kids did then.  It was clear how much education you needed and continued to be the case that a lot of those folks dropped out of school before finishing high school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo did that mean now, before you got to high school, there wasn't necessarily an expectation that your peer group would go on to college or anything like that?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, my parents worked very hard while I was in school.  The school I started in was the Leesburg High School, and it had grade 1-12, although my mother says and I have completely forgotten this that there was no 8th grade.  So it was really 11 years of public school all in the same building.  There was a primary room for the first and second graders, but by third grade we were in a classroom where we simply didn't go out of the room when the high school students were changing class.  And it also meant that we had a better school library because we had the big kids books and little kids book as well and it did have a school library.  But, my mother particularly, but working very closely with my dad, visited every single school in Loudon County to make the case.  She visited the black schools as well as the white schools.  A couple of the black schools were more recent buildings than any of the white schools.  There were four high schools in the country scattered around.  It's a very large county geographically.  None of them were really very good or very well staffed and they were all rather small.  And with really a great deal of persistence and working with other people and with supportive supervisors and -- what did we call him? -- the country superintendent of schools, from some of whom they did find some sympathy -- but she did most of the groundwork and I think my dad did most of the argument in front of the crowds, but they really worked as a kind of one-two team, with her doing all of the scouting work and getting some of the people behind it to press for a county-consolidated high school.  That was really -- because schools in Virginia were segregated at the time, there was a county high school for black students, so they were drawing black students from all over the county to this school in Leesburg, which was the county seat, and it was therefor a foregone conclusion that any white county high school, because this was about the time -- the school opened in '56 I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was just after --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo it was the -- the decision was made about the same time as the desegregation --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBrown vs. Board of Education.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- Brown vs. Board of Education.  So it was a foregone conclusion, the writing was on the wall, that this county high school for white kids would be built in Leesburg because otherwise, there would be this very strong argument that we were bussing black kids in directions they didn't need to go.  And, in fact, the high school was built about a quarter of a mile from my house.  And it was finished one year before I was to enter it.  It covered grades 8-12.  And it bussed kids -- the students who came from the farthest away got on the school bus -- the first pick-up was about 7:15 in the morning and they got to school around 9 o'clock.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh.  That's a long way, isn't it.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tBut they had very jolly bus rides and their bus drivers accommodated them, and many times they left their blankets and other things on the school bus or sometimes did homework.  I didn't have to worry about bus rides.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=1800.0,2102.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Anyway, so that was that.  And the other thing my mother did during -- just after that maybe was to work through the women's club in Loudon County to get a mental health clinic established.  She never used it, but it meant a lot to her.  But she did work very hard to get mental health services into the county after she did this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo would you say that your mother was really a very strong model -- a role model for you?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes, she was.  And, the first organization that came along that one could join up besides -- there really weren't -- I think there might have been a Campfire Girls, briefly.  But those things were -- I mean, Loudon County was pretty far away from that sort of stuff.  But, if you were 10, you could join 4H.  Then you got out of school to go to the 4H meetings which were held in the Episcopal Church across the street.  And so at the first opportunity I went to such a meeting when we were allowed to go across the road to the meeting.  And fairly quickly realized that 4H was really a much better deal than my brief experience with Campfire Girls because there were county agents and home -- I can't remember -- but there were women who did domestics then, agents, and they had degrees, generally, from what we called VPI then, Virginia Tech these days.  And they were intelligent and there was kind of a model for running an organization and so several of my friends and I joined 4H when we were in fifth grade and I stayed a member of 4H all the way through school.  And was quite -- and parents liked it because you had to sign up to do projects, and projects meant you had to do real work, none of the kind of silly stuff it seemed to me that the other children's organizations indulged in.  These were very practical things that you had to do and they had set up various kinds of projects and what we were supposed to do to fulfill the project, so I spent all -- from fifth grade onward really quite invested in 4H.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you, looking back at high school, was there any sense of gender discrimination?  Were there more expectations for the boys than the girls?  Or was the fact that it was a rural community, did that influence things in any particular way?  Were there any teachers that particularly encouraged the girls or you in particular?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, there were a -- a lot of the women who were teaching then were women who might, in another context, have done something else, but teaching school was one of the few ways that women, and intelligent women, could make money and doing something in many cases they clearly liked.  Many of the teachers, including my really very beloved third grade teacher, were teaching with two years of college education, and a whole bunch of them went in to either Arlington or George Washington, where they were running some courses that were easy for teachers to come into.  They finished college degrees while I was in school.  So, this was, I mean, these people -- that kind of person does not necessarily going into school teaching anymore, but they didn't have very many options other than school teaching, so I had some very, very intelligent schoolteachers.  And sometimes quite clever ones.  And a nice woman in fourth grade, but she wasn't a trained teacher.  Her daughter was sick with polio and she needed the job and they needed a teacher, but she didn't know what she was doing as a teacher.  But, my fifth grade teacher was superb.  My seventh grade was pretty good.  My sixth grade teacher was a little iffy.  She had problems with manic depression.  And, one of the things that made Loudon County different from many kinds of rural counties were civil servants \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=2102.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"were moving into the county or had moved into the county and commuting into Washington so there was a group of us whose parents were particularly affluent but whose parents had high levels of education and together with -- my mother -- I don’t know, she never underestimated the locals, whose parents weren’t necessarily college educated but whose parents were very smart and whose children would by and large go on to get an education.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, by the time you were coming to think about college applications, was there -- there was clearly the expectation that you’d go to college, but was there also an expectation that you’d go to a particular college, like a state school, or was it possible to pitch for the Ivy League coming from your community?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, first of all, some of my social peer group in the county went off to prep school after -- for ninth through twelfth grade.  And some of those families had done that for a long, long time.  Virginia had a very strong network of Episcopal board schools and that was kind of a common thing for more up-market kids in our county to do.  And, so, some of my social group -- well, first of all, we had cotillion, which was really kind of strange, but there was this very peculiar woman who was perhaps from the Arthur Murray Dance School or something like that who came out and did cotillion in the county and a couple of places, several places.  And my mother signed me up for cotillion because one is supposed to do that sort of thing in the seventh and eighth grades, and my mother had also scouted around -- my group in my class at the Leesburg School didn’t have any boys in it to speak of.  There were two smart boys and they were both very weird.  One of them is now probably the U.S. expert on rattlesnakes.  And I’m still in touch with him.  The other one, committed suicide when we were quite young.  But my mother sort of scouted around through her friends in the county and one thing or another and realized that once going into the high school, I actually had a very good peer group coming up but the group just a little older than me was centered in Leesburg and there was a bunch of kids that my mother didn’t really approve of.  A lot of their parents were drunks.  They were, what she regarded as a fast crowd.  She didn’t want me in a fast crowd.  So she was really pleased to see that there was coming up a really quite strong peer group.  So I did cotillion in the seventh and eighth grade and that was fun and we had balls in the Middleburg Community Center where later on the Kennedys went to mass.  The 4H had its fairs there sometimes.  So twice a year we had proper formal balls.  And, Chauncey and his orchestra playing from Washington, coming out from Washington to play.  But, my mother was very active.  She had been teaching Sunday School in Leesburg Church and she was very active in working with kids and she spent some time -- in fact, only after she died, really, when some of the older kids came back and said how important she had been as their sixth grade Sunday school teacher, giving them the ambition and a sense of the possibility of going on.  So there was never any question from my sister or me that we would go on.  But, there also wasn’t a whole lot of money.  So there was -- that was really the constraint.  And there were certainly one of the reasons they worked so hard for the public high school is they knew they didn’t have the money to send me off to a prep school which other families were doing, and it turned out there were a lot of other people more or less in the same boat, particularly civil servants who had moved out to the country.  So my eighth grade class, everybody was there, and in ninth grade, some of them went off to -- particularly boys -- went off to the very fine prep schools, and some of the girls got sent off to the Episcopal boarding schools in Virginia but left behind was a very -- still a very talented group of kids at the top of class.  I shared honors \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"pretty much through school with a fellow named Bowman Cutter who went to Harvard when I went to Brown.  We stayed in touch through the undergraduate years.  Bowman graduated sum cum laude from Harvard in anthropology with a Rhodes Scholarship and such that I opened up Newsweek and saw that he was working for Jimmy Carter.  Carter was putting together his administration and ended up number two at the OA Office of Budget and Management after Burt Lance had to leave.  And he’s still very, very fond of Carter.  He also worked on the Council of Economic Advisors for a couple of years under Clinton, but I think doesn’t quite have the same affection for Clinton as for Carter.  And has gone on to be the most seriously rich member of our class.  We had competition from another person that we wouldn’t have expected to do so well who wasn’t really, most of the time, in the top college prep class, but who -- he went off to the Marines somewhere along the way and with his Marines buddies came back and was president of Wachovia Bank.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHe probably did all right.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tHe’s done very well.  Done very well for himself.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo how did you -- how did you get to Brown?  Why did you choose Brown?  Why did you apply there?  And how did you get there in the end?  How was the financial side of it figured out?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, when I was in the third grade, the seventh grade class was next to us.  And I quite admired the daughter of one of my high school teachers, Eloise Patten.  And Eloise went to Pembrook.  She’d gone to St. Catherine’s for prep school.  Her mother taught me geometry.  Her mother was quite intelligent.  In high school.  And so I knew about Pembrook because of Eloise.  And there was -- it was funny.  I think segregation changed people’s minds, but Loudon County was oriented in the Northeast.  People went to Smith and there were Smith graduates around.  People went -- they went to New England for college.  And to some extent to New England prep schools and I had one of my peer group was at Andover, one at Deerfield, one at Mercersburg.  One a couple of -- a couple of friends in Washington and I forget.  A couple of others.  So there was in that social group there was a kind of broad sense and there was also a sense at the time that the prestige schools were in New England.  That shifted when my sister came through after the court decision, and all of the bright kids in her class who might want to go on all went south.  They went to Houston and they went to Duke and UVA and Chapel Hill and stuff.  But it was -- it’s also true that Bowman’s parents can’t -- his mother was in Virginia but his father was from Boston, and so he was sort of oriented that way and the kids who were going to the northeastern prep schools were also oriented to the northeast.  One of them, who didn’t go to the northeast, Bowman lived in Waterford and there were a whole group of really good kids in Waterford who were my age.  Waterford was an artsy little town, a Quaker community, but had a lot of civil servant types and thought really well of itself and in any way still does.  But it was an interesting community.  And, I don’t know if it was the kid or his parents.  I think it was the kid delivering a message said to Bowman, if you don’t go off to prep school, you’re going to end up digging ditches which then Bowman duly reported to all the rest of us.  And that was kind of the rallying cry.  We weren’t, goddamnit, going to end up digging ditches because we went to public high school.  And Bowman’s father used to pay him $5 a report card for every A he got, which was a fair amount of money in the 50s, and that allowed him to get As, because he had an excuse for why he did it.  It was very smart of his father.  And, my mother, I guess maybe when I was in the eighth grade or maybe even before scouted around because we didn’t start foreign language until the ninth grade \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"but my mother scouted around because we didn’t start foreign language until the ninth grade, but my mother scouted around and discovered, not surprisingly was true at almost all schools I think at the time, that French and Spanish were being taught, but the people who taught them came and went and were often young and sometimes unqualified really, whereas the Latin teacher, who went to my church, was quite well known to be exceedingly highly intelligent.  And married a local farmer.  So my mother came home and said you’re taking Latin.  The only language they do.  Well, the teacher’s smart and she’s not moving.  And so we did four years of Latin.  We actually got the school to agree to put on a third and fourth year, which alternated.  So we had four years of Latin.  My dentist in Richmond was one, a member of that class, and once we were doing that, we had all of our classes together.  So it was a very bright group of students.  One of them, who probably should have -- or might well have -- Bowman and I ended up at the top of the class, but she probably would have been ahead of us if she had been there.  Her father was a colonel in the army and she spent two years in La Pas, Bolivia, doing the University of Maryland extension high school courses by herself.  Came home and went to Bryn Mawr.  But she came back for senior year, but they couldn’t really figure out what her record was.  It was probably as good or better than ours.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo when you came to apply for college, you applied to Brown, obviously, because you got in there.  But did you apply anywhere else?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.  I didn’t.  In the end.  Because I applied early admission. My parents had -- we mostly went to visit relatives on holidays, but when I was 14 we went to New England for a holiday and it was the first time I’d really spent any time north of the Mason-Dixon line and my mother, who had affection from being at Columbia and being around Hamilton Holt and one thing or another, she -- and then attitudes of the people in the county, she was certainly not adverse to my thinking about going north to school, but she said, you know, you’ve got to look now because we probably aren’t going to be coming back to New England before you apply to schools.  So we stopped and saw New Haven.  It looked rather horrible.  All these gray buildings, stone, gloomy.  We stopped in Providence and my mother didn’t think much of Brown because Brown was really not a salubrious place in the 30s and not very important until Henry Riston was president and Bill Lawrence came and cleaned things up.  But the campus looked more like, especially the Pembrook campus, looked more like William \u0026 Mary.  It was brick and sort of colonial style and much more appealing.  And it was also in a residential neighborhood which was maybe somewhat less attractive than it looked on first blush, but not bad.  And we went over after looking at the Pembrook campus went over to the Brown campus and met some kind of Brown administrator walking his dog.  This was January so everything was shut down.  We had a very pleasant talk with him and he was very pleased with the oldest hall at Brown, which is about the same date as the grand building at William \u0026 Mary, had just been restored to its approximately late colonial splendor.  I think it was -- I can’t remember.  But anyway, so Brown looked much more inviting to me and anyway, Yale wasn’t taking women so that wasn’t an issue, and Cambridge, I almost got killed trying to cross the street in Cambridge and it just looked too noisy.  It -- Cambridge was really not appealing.  And I refused to look at the women’s colleges because my mother didn’t really like women’s colleges and so she had clearly steered me in another direction and I refused to look at Wellesley and Smith and others like those.  We didn’t look at those because I said I wouldn’t go there.  Well, that’s when I -- that’s when I saw Brown and liked it and it may be that I already knew -- I would have already known that Eloise Patten was going to Pembrook, I think.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tSo how are you -- how was the family proposing to send you off to a pretty prestigious place to pay the bills?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, they weren’t really.  It was a possibility.  My mother understood that there were such things as scholarships that sometimes kicked in.  But, as I was coming up to prepare for this that year, my parents at a certain point did sit me down and say, we can afford William \u0026 Mary and in those days the Virginia system was as segregated as New England.  William \u0026 Mary was the only co-ed school in the state, though it was predominantly women.  There were four women’s teachers colleges that were kind of billed as Longwood, Radford, James Madison and Mary Washington.  And I didn’t actually understand that -- probably at that point -- and I later did say that Mary Washington was the Smith of the south but I didn’t know that.  It hadn’t even been made clear in any way, even from the people I knew who had gone to Mary Washington.  And, all of the other schools were all male.  UVA.  Tech.  You could go to Tech if you wanted to do home ec and at some point you could transfer in.  Chapel Hill was all male unless you -- until the last two years in which you were nursing.  There was a lot of single-sex education that worked against women.  I had applied to Brown early admission and I had applied for scholarships, I think, and I got in early admission and somewhere along the way I got a small -- I think I got the Pembrook Southern Regional Scholarship that was worth $300 and this was at a time when school expenses for the year were roughly $2,500 plus maybe a few hundred more for pocket money and that may have been the average because tuition did go up some, so it might have been that first year, $2,500 might have been enough to go for one year.  So I was -- several of us had made the cut to take the second-round of the National Merit Scholarships.  That was something -- I had to go take the college boards again, which was horrible.  And we had taken them the first time -- I actually didn’t even know how important they were, but the first time we took them, the venue was at Foxcroft School, which was a very beautiful rural school in Middleburg, very prestigious, not so much academically, but in other ways.  And so we had gone over and taken these tests with the Foxcroft girls and had gone into Middleburg for lunch and had come back out and it was rather relaxed and maybe (inaudible) important tests for the rest of us.  Another bloody standard test.  We had actually gone quite well.  Nobody did badly in our group.  There was about 10 of us.  Nobody did really horrible.  Well, Bowman and I made the national merit cut-off and so we had to take the boards again and I was sick and it was miserable.  Some horrible Fairfax High School.  The lunchroom.  And then we discovered when we were sent the stuff from National Merit to fill out the rest of the forms that all of the scholarships were for chemistry, engineering, physics, nothing.  There were almost no scholarships for females at all.  And neither one us were really headed for the sciences, so it seemed like a big gyp, really.  A big misnomer.  The year before, maybe even into the fall of senior year, the state of Virginia was norming standard tests and we took it.  We finally got so tired of taking standard tests that we weren’t even pleased to get out of class, which was really the great fun of standard tests, you got not to have regular classes.  So we were all tired of this when along came the announcement that the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Test was going to be a certain date and you had to sign up for it and it was a multiple-guess test.  So we kind of groaned at this point, but, you know we got of class to take the test.\r\n  \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So almost all of us signed up to go take the test and we took the test and a couple of months later I got a letter saying I was one of the top-10 candidates in Virginia.  And, they asked for some kind of statement from the candidate and some letters -- a letter from the principal of the school, I think to make sure that the person who had tested really could go on.  That test was unlike other standard tests because it had a lot of -- I feel like domestic science questions -- but they weren’t really very hard.  And I’m not sure -- the 4H work might have helped.  Made me somewhat more familiar with the questions or things to think about because I certainly had don’t much of all that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd, so I sent all of that stuff in.  I can’t remember whether it was that application or one other one that I had to write out an -- I was so sick of writing these things and I couldn’t think of what to say and I was pissed off and so my mother set me up to work with my father and my father, with tremendous patience, sat and helped me craft this statement.  At any rate, whichever one that was and whatever it was for, I then got a letter saying I was the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow from Virginia and that I would get a $1,000 scholarship and that it was a trip sponsored by Betty Crocker for all of the state winners where we would be interviewed by members of science research -- anyway, they were the same people who made the National Merit exams would be interviewing us.  And of course this year the trip was Washington, Williamsburg, Washington, which wasn’t very excited for my point of view except for New York.  And I was really quite thrilled.  It certainly made things a lot easier for my parents to contemplate certainly that first year at Brown and they had sat me down and said, we have enough money to send you for a year, but if no more scholarship money comes in, you’re going to have to transfer to William \u0026 Mary, which I never applied to but it was my back-up school.  It was the only co-ed school in the state, although it was mostly women.  So, we went on this trip and it was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, we all had to have teachers with us, and almost everybody was compelled to take their home ec teacher.  And in many cases, some cases anyway, those students were close to their home ec teachers.  I was compelled to teach the home ec teacher who had taught me one semester of home ec, Ms. Gray, whom I didn’t like very much, although she was always a bit fond of me.  I don’t know.  I had wanted to take my friend’s mother, who was also teaching home ec, because they were out of money.  They had five children.  He worked for .4 and during the tail end of the McCarthy stuff, .4 had too many liberals in it.  It was disbanded.  And a lot of the people who worked for .4 who were suspected of being liberals or a tad bit communist and didn’t get -- had a really, really hard time getting work.  It was the kind of lunatic anti-Communism the United States had born in upon us and it was really close to the eighth teacher, her husband, was one of the victims and never got work again in the states.  My friend’s father finally got work in [Aberdeen?] Maryland and had to commute home on the weekends.  At any rate.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo was this Betty Crocker award, what do you think was the philosophy or ideology behind it?  Was it the idea that a well-educated woman became a well-educated homemaker or was it to enable women to go on to careers?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.  I think it was largely educated homemaker, but even in the educated homemaker category, there were a couple of things that women could still do outside the home, which was really quite respectable, and one of those things was teach school and, in fact, in lots of ruralish communities, like the one I grew up in, there were some really smart teachers who might well have done something else if there had been other opportunities open to them.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"One suspects that the teaching profession at least initially, maybe still, suffers some from the competition from the other kinds of work that women can do.  What was I -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe were talking about you had gotten to the national finals.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tRight.  Well, they had been -- I had looked or we had all looked, I think, at the winners from the several years previous, and the one I remember most vividly was from either Mississippi or Alabama, clearly a smart young woman, but from a family of something like 12 children, barefoot, impoverished, without this award would never go on and most likely wouldn’t be able to go on.  So I at least, and perhaps some of the others, thought that this would be true again and it was very unlikely that certainly a first place winner would be from a fairly well-off family that was going to college anyway.  And I don’t know whether the people making the judgments changed it.  I really don’t know.  But, what happened was that we all got to New York with our respective teachers and we had to room with the teacher we came with, which I’m sure was one of the ways that American General, whatever it was, food company was making sure that people were looked after and didn’t get lost.  And that’s what we did.  And we were -- maybe not then but later on -- divided up alphabetically by state in to thirds because it was three busloads.  So we did some tours in New York and had some meetings and we were introduced to the psychologists, but I don’t think they really started the work until we headed into Williamsburg.  There were three psychologists from SRI, one for each bus.  And they did a series of interviews, both group interviews studying problems and asking people to comment, and then doing individual interviews with each one of us.  And most of those were done in Williamsburg.  We were there for two or three days.  We had some free time.  I had been in Williamsburg a lot.  By that time I had gotten to be friends with Audrey M. Hanson from Michigan City, North Dakota.  North Dakota and Virginia being at the end of the alphabet.  And she was one of the most entertaining people on the whole trip and stood out in many ways.  We and the girls from Vermont who was rather quiet and then a couple of others decided that we were all very lucky that we were on this trip.  We had $1,000 scholarship.  We had $100 in spending money.  And we should be grateful and happy and if anything more came, that was wonderful, but we really didn’t expect it and we were just very lucky.  And we were going to have a good time.  And that’s what we did.  We had a good time.  And we didn’t take it too seriously.  We had the sort of plump and jolly psychologist on our bus and we had a very homesick girl from Utah.  She was really very ill.  And we didn’t know then but actually just trying to jolly somebody up is not enough to break into that level of distress.  But we tried.  And since we decided that we were going to have a good time and there was no point competing, that we looked around at each other and didn’t think we’d be the winner or anything, and Audrey and I both knew Tom Lear songs, so we decided we would teach some of the others the Tom Lear songs.  It kind of amused the psychologist as far as we could tell, instead of outraging her.  And on our free time we rented bikes and we went and saw a couple of the people I knew at William \u0026 Mary and had fun.  Williamsburg is a nice place to show other people around.  I rather enjoyed it.  And in the meanwhile, at various times, people were being interviewed.  And we were interviewed in groups and interviewed individually and the group was given some kind of problem question or something to discuss.  I don’t remember the interviews too well.  There were some questions, I think, about how would you -- what would you do if the man you were married to was about to do something very criminal or really kind of disgusting and how would you deal with that.  Whatever we said.  Who knows.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"We got to Washington, which was really my home turf.  We had been going into Washington on debating projects where we decided we could get lots of free stuff on Capitol Hill if you went to the committees, not the congressman’s office, but the committee offices.  And we -- also, they let you go to the Library of Congress then when I was 18.  And we shopped in Washington because the suburbs didn’t have anything.  At least they had a clothes shop that were expensive.  Many of us had parents who worked either at the Pentagon or downtown Washington, D.C.  And from a quite early age, we had credit cards where you had a budget and you had to keep a total running through the day.  So we got to DC and on our free time I sort of knew where I wanted to go and what to do and I don’t know, showing people around, but mostly we were taken places.  We went to the White House and shook hands with Mamie Eisenhower and got a White House tour and sort of before the big dinner, the great event for us and for the food company it was an advertisement, was a formal banquet that we had to wear formal -- long, formal dresses at one of the big hotels and there was a table for each state and, as I recall -- and each young woman’s senators and congressmen were invited to this dinner.  Before dinner, we -- I don’t remember if they came to the dinner -- but we shook hands with Pat and Richard Nixon and I actually somewhere around this house have a picture of myself shaking hands with Richard Nixon.  You can imagine how much I appreciate that.  And, at the end of the festivities, I think we were all -- it was hard to go and stand on stage -- but at any rate, whatever it was we had to do, at the very end they started announcing the prize winners for the national competition.  And the teacher from Vermont and my teacher from Virginia had really taken against Audrey Hanson from Michigan City, North Dakota.  I don’t think they liked the teacher with her too much, but they really felt she was wild and horrible and we shouldn’t be associated with her and they had told us not to and we didn’t obey them.  So, we were quite thrilled when they announced the fourth place winner and it was Audrey M. Hanson from Michigan City, North Dakota.  So a huge cheer went up from the three of us.  And then they announced the third place winner, and that was also -- I can’t remember who it was -- but it was somebody from the third bus.  The second place winner, that was me, so the third bus had done very well.  Much to the distress of some very snotty girls from the other busses.  The girl from New Mexico was horrible.  And then the first place winner was from Kansas, a different bus.  She, in the end, got a National Merit scholarship that was larger than the Betty Crocker and turned back -- gave up the Betty Crocker to take the National Merit -- so I got first place money and they announced a fourth place winner to take up the fourth place, who was also off the third bus.  So clearly we did the right thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you had your fund, your college fund.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI did.  At that point, my parents -- that reduced the price of Brown to the price of William \u0026 Mary, roughly speaking, and that means that I was good to go for the four years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s amazing.  Yeah.  You’re the first person I interviewed who has been the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow.  I see that you have fulfilled that.  So when you got to Brown, what we -- you had visited it when you were a bit younger and you had formed some impressions then, but I just wonder when you went in there as a freshman into Pembrook, which was all women, wasn’t it?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wonder what your sense of Brown was like as a culture into which women had become part?  They were sort of part of but also separate.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"(Break in audio)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOK.  There we go ahead.  So we were talking about your initial impressions of Brown.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I arrived in a hurricane or at least one was coming and most of the parents got out of town as fast as they could to get back and away from the coast.  So, my father dropped me off and I said goodbye to him and I think he dropped back on the floor.  I’m not really sure.  I don’t think he spent the night in Providence.  The lights went out and we were eating by candlelight and it was all kind of weird and wonderful.  My roommate, I think I already knew, was a woman from the main line in Philadelphia who was actually quite an amiable girl.  A math major doing math that was ways more sophisticated that I even knew math could be.  On the -- there were seventeen -- I think it was seventeen -- on this floor, one wing, of the building that may have been the first time that they had put the freshman in the upper class dorms.  All over New England that year, the yields had gone off and they had gotten way too many acceptances and so they were having to squeeze people in.  But it was the sophomores who were getting squeezed.  Not the freshmen.  But I think that may have been the beginning of when they were integrating freshmen into the upper class dorms instead of having them in the small houses or something like that.  I was in a group of 16 or 17 of us on that floor.  It was a pretty big mixture of kids.  Two of them came from somewhere around where I had grown up, one from Washington and Annapolis.  Another one from Eastern (inaudible), Maryland.  One from Texas.  But she never quite fitted in.  My roommate, who was from the main line in Philadelphia.  My future roommate, who was Chinese from San Francisco and the only non-Caucasian in the class.  And with a wild, hooting laugh.  They were, you know, a perfectly friendly bunch.  We managed to turn in the lowest average of any identifiable group on the entire campus after the first semester.  And that with one member of the group -- even she didn’t have good grades that first semester -- was from the Burly School and eventually graduated sum cum laude and is in academics.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were all having a good time that first --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWe were.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah. \r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd discovering the world and discovering boys.  One of the girls came back and said, what do you do with the noses when you kiss.  (laughter)  The level of innocence for some was really quite high.  And there were others who were rather more experienced.  The one from Annapolis and DC was an only child of a navy officer whose grandfather had been one of the founders of Warner Bros. Pictures, but he wasn’t Jewish, and he cashed out at some point.  But she had gone to Holton Arms.  She was an only child.  When things got too hot at home, she moved in with the grandparents.  When they got too hot with the grandparents, she moved back to her parents.  And she had already dated up and down the seaboard, I think.  And remained -- she almost got thrown out of Pembrook a couple of times, but she was always -- she was very good at talking her way out of things.  And very, very clever and verbal and knew people all over the northeast.  She could arrange blind dates for you in all sorts of places.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen it came to the reason you were all there, to get an education, were you aware of the women undergraduates being treated differently from the male undergraduates?  Was there more expectations of the young men then the young women?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI certainly didn’t get any strong sense of that.  There was an expectation that the women would be smarter than the men.  There were 600 men in the Brown entering class, I think, at least 500.  Probably 600.  And there were, I think, 240 in my class at Pembrook, which they had intended to take 200.  And as a result, there would be many, many \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"more places than comparable schools for men than there were for women.  The women were, as a group, smarter.  Hire scores.  Hire -- whatever.  So the men were stupid.  And also there was the Brown football team.  It’s a reason that I was giving a student around here the other day for why you don’t want a football team.  It means that you have to take in somewhere between 40 and 60 freshmen who are designated to play football and play on the freshmen football team and you could pretty much pick them out.  They were the stupidest men in the Brown class.  And it was kind of pathetic because in many cases, they couldn’t make it through, in the end, academically and I’m sure they got some help and most of them weren’t good enough or were too small to even play Ivy League football.  And the Brown football team was horrible.  In my junior year, when in the middle of a Saturday afternoon the bells rang and I thought, what in the hell is this?  Why are the bells ringing?  Brown had won a football game.  But they did that so rarely in my time that we didn’t even know that that’s what had happened.  I knew the bells rang at Harvard.  But -- so, I wouldn’t have said that there wasn’t any lower academic expectation for students.  And I’m not sure whether -- I can’t quite remember what the situation with the dean was at that point.  Nancy Duke Lewis, who was a mathematician, had been the dean.  She was a southerner.  She was very gracious.  She was a lady.  And she may still have been well enough to greet us or something.  I’m really very -- I can’t really recall that.  But we didn’t get a new dean, I guess, until maybe in my sophomore year it would have been.  Something like that.  And the new dean was Rosemary Perrell, a psychologist, who came from Providence who did not go to Brown and who did not know how to behave in the dean’s dining room with 17 pieces of silver at her place setting.  And when finally she was throwing a shovel full of dirt to dedicate some building, people cruelly said of her that she had finally done what she knew how to do. But, on the other hand, as she took over, one of the things that may have been going on beforehand, but certainly was going on when she was dean was that both alumni women and other people would come in and we had convocation every week and convocation speakers and there was a real effort to bring convocation speakers that suggested there were other things women could do besides grow up to be what we called the ladies in the pink-flower hats.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  So you went to Brown in ’59, so --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, ’60.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t’60.  And then Betty Friedan, when did she publish --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t“The Feminine Mystique”?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- “The Feminine Mystique”?  Was that ’62?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOr ’63.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t’63.  It might have been ’63.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t know.  I found it unreadable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wondered if there was any kind of the first awareness of what became second-wave feminism when you were an undergraduate, especially when you were having your exposure to women in these convocations.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThere was a -- I was innocent enough, like my mother -- there were some things I don’t think I understood very well. One of those was that even academic women had rather poor prospects then.  But we certainly knew that women couldn’t go to law school.  Women couldn’t go to medical school.  There were very, very few places in the country for women in either of those professional schools.  There was a lot of frustration about that because -- and I think most of the women who were doing -- I think one of them, I vaguely remember, was an anthropologist I think who came back or an archaeologist, so there was more sense that there were openings in academia, really, than in the other professions, which was probably accurate.  But there were certainly a sense that while one was supposed to maybe grow up to be a competent civic leader, that there were other things that women could do as well.  And I think that was probably pushed more strongly at Pembrook and -- from talking to friends who went to Radcliff and Smith \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"-- it was pushed harder at Pembrook than it was at most places.  And that may have been Perrell, but it may also have been that Duke had really had that going, too.  So there was a really pretty strong sense that women were going to do something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOr at least there was enough of a sense that it wasn’t particularly weird.  And there was a lot of resentment.  When I went to my 25th college reunion and it was quite striking how many members of the class were now lawyers who didn’t go straight to law school and then -- I don’t remember what Maryanne Moore did, whether she went to law school or not -- but she was by then the vice president of an engineering firm, a high tech engineering firm in Boston, or in the Boston area, which she was a Russian major as an undergraduate.  But her husband -- she either divorced or her husband died and she had children she had to support and so she was working for this firm doing something that was more in line, I guess, with what one might have thought.  But they realized that she had organizational skills and project management skills, so they put her in charge of the engineers who were constantly ribbing her for her liberal arts allusions, but she was keeping them in line and the higher people were quite pleased with her as the project manager for the engineers.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you have any women faculty teachers?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tHardly -- well, yes.  I did.  And a very important one.  But, that was almost an accident.  There were no women on the faculty to speak of.  I don’t know whether there were any women on the faculty when I started, and I was made aware of the woman who became very important to me by the rather -- by a then-already rather elderly French professor who taught Renaissance French and who liked women a lot more than men.  But the order went, brunette women, maybe brunette men, then blondes, and blonde women were at the bottom.  It was very odd, but very distinguished in his way and for his time.  And he told me -- I had -- well, Brown had the new curriculum starting in ’68 but it was already clear at Brown that if you had some idea that you wanted to pursue, that you could go and say, here’s the curriculum I want to do and they would approve it.  If you had any excuse for doing whatever you wanted to do, they already were very open to modifications, shall we say.  And so I ended up designing a French and English major.  I had wanted -- I went in thinking I was going to do something like international relations and political science, history, stuff that led in that direction.  But I didn’t have a terribly great experience in history.  I clearly didn’t understand -- I mean, there was a gap between the kind of school history I had done, which was really quite stupid, and the kind of history they were teaching at Brown and it took me a while.  I didn’t really quite get it, although my TA, we had a huge lecture and then breakout sections, and my teaching assistant was then, I think, a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and he went on to be a professor at Berkeley and then went on to write his first big important book was “White Over Black.”  He was a really nice man and he tried really hard to get me to understand what I was supposed to be doing as a historian.  And I was a bit thick and didn’t really get it.  So I remembered him with great infection and fondness.  The next semester we had a turkey from Texas who was our TA and I fought with him considerably because he didn’t -- he really didn’t believe that certain things could happen in America and I had grown up around enough rich people, there were these crazy John Birchers lurking around the edge of Loudon County who were quite terrifying and I thought, you don’t understand, this country could do some really weird things.  \n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=5100.0,5404.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And he was, I thought, really quite stupidly innocent.  And we clashed.  You know, the Nazis could never happen here.  Well, I don’t know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWho was the woman who was --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, the woman that Harcourt Brown sent me to see was Barbara Lewosky in the English Department.  She had just come to Brown I think at that point maybe about midway through my career.  She had come to Brown from Wellesley.  She was a Chicago PhD.  Came originally from Kansas.  And she wasn’t -- she never had a lot of small talk.  She’s not really an easy person especially who -- or even a personal person.  There were men faculty who I found easier to talk to than Barbara.  But Barbara -- she was very supportive -- and Harcourt Brown sent me over to take a course with her and get some advice and somehow or other I was going abroad the summer between my junior and senior year and I don’t think I had a course with her at that point, but I maybe was doing an independent study or something, working on [Emblin?] books and while I was in Paris, I had -- I didn’t have a letter -- I had the intention of going to the Bibliotheque Nationale, which I had heard about to go see [Emblin?] books because Brown had some but it didn’t have a lot.  And I’m not sure I would have gotten into the Bibliotheque Nationale, if I hadn’t, thanks to Harcourt Brown, been looking at a bunch of books and somewhere on the Left Bank and had picked up Agrippa D’Aubigine’s Le Tragique and this Frenchman came up and asked me why I was looking at this book and, indeed, bought it.  And I explained and he turned out to be Philippe Supot.  And he took my friend and me to coffee, entertained us.  He was really charming.  Had taught at Bryn Mawr and I never quite figured out if he’s a pair, a father or a son.  And he taught at Bryn Mawr.  He was quite interested and charmed by American undergraduates, even in their terrible clothes because the people on the continent thought we wore awful clothes and of course we didn’t have very many clothes with us because we were going to go on the Eurorail later on, so we only had a small suitcase worth.  And in the course of this conversation, I explained to him that I wanted to go to the Bibliotheque Nationale, so he grabbed a piece of really rubbish paper and wrote a note to his friend, the director of the Bibliotheque Nationale, that they should let me in.  So I went over with this piece of paper from Philippe Supot, and they went, hmm, when they saw that, and they gave me a reader’s card and asked me to come and use the library in the morning when it was less crowded, so I did.  And I worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale for a couple of weeks.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn what ways did Barbara encourage you?  Would you say she was a mentor, which is a term that’s always bandied around nowadays?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tShe was in certain ways, but like I say, she was not easy to talk with, so I -- she was hugely supportive in lots of ways.  And I took her -- I’m sure that I didn’t take any other class with her besides the Milton seminar which was a graduate/undergraduate class and I can’t remember for certain now whether it was -- maybe it was fall of senior year.  But when I was first talking with her, I hadn’t really taken a class with her, but I think that this project on [Emblen?] books, she had -- I had certainly talked with her about it.  And I suspect that Harcourt Brown said something to her, too.  And I think that must have been maybe her first year at Brown, because I think as I left Brown, there were nearly one-and-a-half or two-and-a-half women on the Brown faculty.  There was a woman in French, I think, who had a half-time appointment.  Her husband was on the faculty and they had given her a half-time appointment.  But there were hardly any women in the faculty when I was there.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=5404.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But we -- Lewosky’s Milton seminar was amazing.  She handed you on the first day this huge long bibliography which she went over and told you which ones were the most important or something, gave you some idea and everybody had to sign up to give a seminar paper, and Sue Rosenfeld [Feld?] and I, now Sue Rosenfeld again, had done French together the first year and we fetched up in this course together.  Sue was mostly doing, I think, American history or something or American lit.  American history.  But given some of her interests in American history and colonial history, she was interested in Milton, so she was in the course and Jason Rosenblatt, who is now at Georgetown, or has been a professor at Georgetown.  He may be retired.  And another woman who was Iris Tillman Hill, she was the director of the press at Chapel Hill for a while.  We were the four serious people in the class.  I don’t remember the others except for the mad mathematician, who is the reason Sue and I could not figure out showed up in the class and signed up to give the first report and Lewosky didn’t know who he was and he was crazy.  And so he started in on this report and it went on and on and on and it wasn’t getting anywhere and suddenly she stopped him and berated him.  Scared the rest of us to death.  We had never worked so hard on any course as we worked on that, and I’m not sure I ever worked so hard again, because her reading list was formidable.  And we read almost all of them within one semester.  And we did reports -- seminar reports that we gave to the class and big papers at the end and Sue and I both -- Iris Tillman, Jason Rosenblatt, Sue and I all got As.  And I’m not sure anybody else did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas that -- would you say at that point you began to think, well, maybe I can become a professional academic?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI suspect so, but I was discovering that I really liked doing research.  I liked being in the library, which I had not particularly discovered in my first year or so.  First year or two at Brown, really.  But, during the third and fourth years, that was really clear.  And, Harcourt Brown was really interesting.  I really talked more to the professors in French than in English.  Alan Trueblood, who I think finally published a big book but he hadn’t published much of anything then, (inaudible) Majesky whose introductory French course is what headed me into literature.  It wasn’t English.  He was a brand new PhD from Princeton, I think, and after a long while I think, I knew he was gay.  But I didn’t know that at the time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo would you say then that the men were just as encouraging as the one female faculty that you had?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThey really were.  And they were willing to talk and from talking to them you began to get -- I began to get some sense of their academic work.  There was somewhere along the way a bit of scornfulness that the Brown faculty hadn’t been hugely or overly productive, but some of them were working on great big long projects, and I think Trueblood subsequently published some really quite important work.  But I can remember, I would sit and talk to them for a half hour.  They were all pretty generous with their time.  I don't suppose they had lots and lots of students sometimes hanging around, but -- and there was, if anything, Brown was good, especially Pembrook was good at turning out academics.  There was clearly one of the first deans of Holyoke -- I think it was Holyoke, but it might have been Smith -- it was Smith or Holyoke was a very early graduate of Pembrook.  And it was also very clear that along the way, Pembrook would turn down faculty members.  So that was -- that was a kind of open fear in a way that a lot of the other professions were not at the time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was a good fit for you as it turned out.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was.  It was.  And, I may well have gotten more attention there than I would have at a larger or, in some ways, a different school.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And the men on the faculty were certain -- I think partly because the women on average were smarter than the men -- but the faculty liked their women students.  If there were man on the faculty who didn’t like women, and there must have been some somewhere, I certainly didn’t encounter them and most of my friends didn’t either.  But there was a really strong sense of the things one couldn’t do.  The boundaries.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And that was very much about the professional schools.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was the professional schools.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd considerable resentment.  Like I said, when we went back for the 25th reunion, there were a whole lot more lawyers in my class, and they weren’t people who had gotten their law degree right after Brown.  There were also a fair number or are a fair number of academics or former academics in the class.  A lot of people went on for further degree work.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo then you obviously -- the next thing, as we’re on the horizon, was graduate school.  Why did you choose Stanford?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI didn’t.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou didn’t?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI didn’t.  My former husband chose it.  One of -- Lewosky didn’t approve of this plan, but -- at all -- but one of my classmates and I had made this pact that we were going to travel around the world or something like that.  There were some conditions on it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tActually, things that didn’t happen or did happen.  I applied for a Fulbright and I think she did, too.  I’m not really sure.  And I applied for a Fulbright to go to France because I wanted to go to a French-speaking country because it was completely clear to me that a few weeks in France just didn’t cut it and not because I had started French really very late.  I did regret that I didn’t do more Latin as well, which did have a very big classics department.  But, my French language work was not terribly strong.  The Brown French department was quite generous.  It allowed students who weren’t French majors to write their papers in English and, I think, probably you could -- you might have been able to do it either way.  My good friend Enid Rose, later Peshel, who was briefly a member of the Yale faculty overlapping with me, but she was in the French department and she was nasty and they fired all the women after three years to make sure they never got a man’s scholarship I think. But Enid because a friend -- I don’t know quite when and where, but she was a really smart girl from Long Island.  And, Enid was very clever.  She said, oh, you can -- if you think of a really good answer to a question you want to answer on the exam, you just take the question that’s there and you twist it a little bit until you make it be the question you want to right on and then you write the answer you wanted to write.  And she got As with this repeatedly, of course, because she had really very good ideas and she was very smart and I’m sure must have -- in one way or another, most of the professors were quite happy to give her As for the better question that she thought of answering.  And she also said, when you don’t have any very good idea, write in French.  Because then they appreciate the fact that you can write the language.  But when you have a really good idea, write it in English.  So Enid became a really very good friend and actually the schools I applied to for graduate school, but hoping to get a Fulbright, so I could go to France and improve my French and actually be competent enough to do a degree in French.  I applied to Duke and Chapel Hill.  And Chapel Hill explained that, which was more prestigious by a considerable amount at the time, probably still is, who knows -- but at any rate, Chapel Hill is one of the really old, big PhD-granting schools in the country and the only one in the southeast, I think.  And it had hugely good language programs, and I can’t remember now if it was Urban Tigner Holmes when he retired, they needed 18 people to replace him.  There was somebody at Chapel Hill who knew so many language and he was so incredibly good at zoology and other things that he was impossible to replace.  At any rate, when I went down to interview at Chapel Hill, I think they were skeptical of my background work and they knew I was hoping for a Fulbright to come through.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=6000.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And they had a lot of people out on Fulbrights and they didn’t know how many of those people who were out were coming back.  So they -- I can’t remember whether they gave me a sort of contingent -- I think they said it might be contingent and then in the end they rejected me.  Duke, on the other hand, which was not nearly as strong a program and was a little bit slack as a graduate center I think, and I don't even know whether their French department was any good.  But they accepted me.  However, by the time it came up to graduation, my former husband and I had decided to get married and he had grown up in Duchess County, New York and had really explained to me how screwed up his family was and he wanted away from the northeast.  We had met in freshman English class, but had not really dated since then.  But he had spent his high school years showing -- riding and showing horses, fox hunting and stuff.  And he worked for -- one of the men who trained him or worked with him at the stables near Reinbeck, New York where he had been riding, had moved down to work as the horseman for a man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Mitch had sent two summers riding show horses, show ponies, for this family in Winston-Salem.  So he, unlike most people at Brown, he actually had some sort of a connections, which was obviously one of the reasons that we got together and I had an interest in horses, not that I was very good at it.  But I had grown up with it and liked it.  OK?  And we had gotten -- we had dated off an on, usually second semester of most years after the freshman year I think it was.  And we decided that spring to get married and he wanted to leave the northeast and had applied to Duke, Chicago and Stanford.  He was accepted at all three and he chose the one farthest from home, Stanford.  Stanford and Berkeley both explained in their materials that applications to graduate schools were open until something like the first of July.  It turned out to be a lie.  It wasn’t accurate.  But that’s what they said.  And so I went to Lewosky and said I was going to get married and I don’t think she necessarily approved of that.  She was quite right.  But she knew George Sensiball, who was the 17th Century person at Stanford, I guess, who I never took a course with.  But she said, I know somebody in the English faculty there and she stepped out of the faculty line at graduation to tell me that she had sent a special letter to Stanford and I was accepted at Berkeley, I think -- no, I was accepted at Berkeley.  I’m pretty sure.  Although I’ve forgotten -- but more importantly, I was accepted at Stanford which was what I didn’t know how horrible a commute between the two would be, but it would have been.  But now I don’t remember.  It doesn’t matter.  But I realized later that it was Lewosky’s later that got me into Stanford because one of my classmates was Judy [Sola Crinenfeld?] who was a Smith summa cum laude in ’64.  Who was about to marry a man and who was doing a PhD in anthropology and he was stupid enough to confess to this when she wrote to Stanford and they turned her down at about the same time.  And this -- she called up in great distress to the people at Smith who duly called up the Stanford English department and said, are you completely mad?  What do you mean turn down our summa cum laude?  So they accepted her.  And she is indeed very, very bright.  But because her job prospects were constrained, she has had a very haphazard kind of academic career, but eventually finally published a real big and very interesting book on King Lear.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you got -- you went to Stanford because you were married and that’s where Mitch wanted to go?  What was it like being a woman graduate student at Stanford at that time?  \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Were most of your peers also women or were most of them men?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, they were -- I don’t actually know what the proportions were.  It was probably 20-30 percent women, I guess.  But I can’t quite remember.  There were quite a few of them.  Quite a few.  Some got married to one another.  I didn’t realize until quite belatedly and indeed, even after graduate school was completely over, that one of the reasons I got the [Lieberhelm?] Fellowship was that the class before me, even though what you were seeing was the implementation of higher education of the civil rights didn’t happen until -\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t’72.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- ’72.  And this would have been ’66 or about when they did this.  But the class ahead of me figured out from the way dissertation fellowships were being given out that they knew approximately what the ranking and what people thought in ranking and that the fellowships were going to men and skipping over the women in that line.  And they threatened -- I mean, I didn’t know this at the time.  It was somewhat later when I ran into somebody, I think, at an MLA or something like that, they threatened to sue the Stanford English Department of Stanford University for discrimination against women.  And that was enough -- I mean, the threat of the suit.  Academics are really afraid of lawyers.  But exposure of that discrimination bothered them enough that they stopped skipping the women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut you clearly were not aware of that at the time?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI was not really aware of that.  And I was upset when I didn’t get the NDEA Fellowship.  I think that’s what it was.  It’s the [Sense?] Fellowship.  There were two people who were chosen for it.  Three of us in the first-year class by the end of the first two quarters or whenever it was, whenever they had to make a decision, had a straight A record.  I had taken Italian because I thought I was going to be a Renaissance specialist and I thought I needed to read Italian and I thought it would be quicker to learn than German and arguably is useful.  So I had taken Italian in the fall and they gave as their excuse for not giving the NDEA that I had taken Italian and that wasn’t a real graduate course and the other two had taken graduate courses.  But, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure it was the skipping over women and that gave them a very convenient excuse for doing that.  One of the people who got the NDEA was [Glending Olson?] who certainly panned out, but the other was a man who came from, I think, New Orleans whose name now escapes me and I think he disappeared from view entirely.  I don’t know what happened to him.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever get a sense -- and I’ve heard this from other people -- that somehow they just didn’t take women graduate students as seriously as men, because ultimately they weren’t going to be professionals?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.  I don’t think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou didn’t get that?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tMaybe it was there to be gotten, but I missed it.  If it was a message, I missed it.  If it was there and I’m not quite sure it was.  Partly that was because I was being taught by a mostly rather young faculty.  Yale -- Stanford had hired several faculty members from Oxford (inaudible) and that included Ron Rebholtz, Dell Colby, Martin Evans, and not really in the same category exactly was Dale Harris who was a Harvard PhD but he was a Brit.  With the exception of Martin Evans, I think they were all gay.  That may have had something to do with it.  I didn’t quite -- it took me some while to work that out, too.  But, I don’t know whether it’s California, Stanford, in theory, was less gender conscious, but not really.  I think.  I think Stanford was racist.  And, I don’t -- I can’t remember now what the student body proportions were, but I think there were rather fewer women than men.  I’m not absolutely certain.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"It was rather contentious at Stanford in certain ways.  It didn’t meet my expectations for what a university was supposed to be.  It was very, very good in the sciences and engineering and in doing sort of the defense work. But, they didn’t take care of its library properly and it didn’t really hire a proper librarian in my view as somebody who was really an advocate for their library because they rested on their laurels and they counted every pamphlet in the Hoover Institute and they made it look like they had a very good library when, in fact, they didn’t.  They were missing a lot of stuff and they had a lot of pamphlets in the Hoover Tower and a lot of very reactionary people.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas -- by the time you were a graduate student, of course it was post-civil rights act and was there -- were you getting any sense of what the political issues that were going around at that time and indeed were you at all involved?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThe political issues, at least on the west coast, didn’t have to do with women.  They had to do with the Vietnam War.  And I arrived at Stanford or we arrived in September of ’64 and in December of ’64 Mario Savio staged his huge -- big demonstration against the recruiters, the military recruiters on the Berkeley campus and things broke wide open.  The English and philosophy departments at Stanford participated from the beginning of the anti-war stuff, but it was -- the class ahead of me in the graduate school in English included several people who had been part of the Freedom Marchers who had worked in the south for civil rights.  And I’m not sure I really know exactly which people had that background, but there were two or three people.  There were people who thought their phone lines were tapped because anybody who had worked on civil rights or had really worked vigorously on civil rights were assuming at the time that their phone lines were tapped by the FBI.  And, in theory, I think then could have heard them and certainly later, my former husband would have known what that sounded like because he ended up as a criminal defense lawyer and knew a lot about what phone taps sounded like.  But, the class just ahead of me segued really from civil rights movement to anti-war.  And were the kind of coordinators from the Stanford campus but Stanford recruited a very -- at least 50 percent of their students were Californians.  A very high percentage of them were alumni children because they had, as it turned out, football players running their -- ex-Stanford football players running their admissions office.  And they were so stupid that they didn’t understand that they counted -- when they were counted up scores for applicants, they counted the alumni children with positive scores several times in the process.  When they recruited on the east coast, they only went to prep schools.  They didn’t go to any public high schools.  Not any of them, which was bizarre.  They took 50 percent of their intake from California or at least from the west coast and 50 percent from other parts of the country, but they weren’t nearly as national.  They took in some Japanese students, but they discriminated against Chinese students.  Elaine Lillie who now works for the New York Times, after freshman year, was my roommate at Brown.  Enid and I decided not to room together but we did get rooms next to each other.  And Elaine didn’t bother applying to Stanford, even though her father had a medical degree from Harvard because she knew that they wouldn’t look at her.  And, it was remarkable.  They also had almost no black students.  The last year I was there, they recruited several, including a young man from Watts, but I think the total number of black students couldn’t be more than 20 in the undergraduate student body.  So, Stanford was white upper middle class, predominantly west coast.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=5100.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Very European in certain ways.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd certainly women issues came much later.  It was primarily anti-war and civil rights.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.  There was civil rights.  There was civil rights, anti-war and then women’s issues kind of working their way into that.  But much more -- much more pressing were these other problems at the time.  And it was -- I found it very anxious-making to go to the Stanford airport, rather, the San Francisco airport, and it took me a long time to try and figure out what it was that -- I mean, things in my life were pretty crazy but that produced a level of anxiety that was particularly high and I finally decided that it must have been -- it was the first time since being a toddler on the train in the second World War, that I had seen a whole lot of men in uniform moving to internment but I found that very uneasy.  And the class ahead of me included I think -- I forget his name -- Tom Haas who had worked for civil rights and became a poet laureate and a really, really nice man.  A very liberal, very rational, very kind -- he was one of the leaders and a woman named Elaine Ruben, I don’t know exactly what happened to her, but they were both very liberal, very rational, very cogent, made very good arguments.  Really active.  And not goofy.  There were a lot of people who got into both the anti-Vietnam work and other things who were drunk on what you could do.  There was that woman in California, her name I can’t remember, but the rubric was -- hit a cop, any cop, it didn’t matter.  Anybody in baby blue or whatever the color the California state police wore, and they were young and stupid and privileged enough to harass the police who, after all, they had a job to do and they were just, bozos, mostly, not college educated.  And these upper middle class, snot-nosed kids were saying horrible things to them.  Things that they weren’t really responsible for.  And trying to get them to beat them up.  It was so strange.  Even stranger when one of the radicals were beaten, after he became a communist, had in his class a daughter of the secretary of state.  So there were arguments to be had.  But it was a fairly yeasty time.  Stanford was on the fringes of all that.  It was Berkeley students who were really leading the way and organizing most of the stuff, but there were some organizers from Stanford and if they were from Stanford, then they were generally from the English graduate students or the philosophy department students.  The rest of the campus wasn’t much involved.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you involved at all?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNot much.  I’m afraid of crowds.  And I was also on a deadline, which many of them really weren’t.  I knew that I had to finish everything within three years, because in three years, my husband would be through with law school and he would be leaving California and I couldn’t mess around.  And I couldn’t delay.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So that was getting through your PhD in a pretty sharp lick?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was.  It was the fashion, then.  And I think the -- I suppose economically it might have been beneficial to go through in such a hurry but I think academically -- academically, it wasn’t.  I’m astonished at the amount of time that people are taking to get through their PhD work especially because economically it’s very disadvantageous.  But, in terms of their academic preparation, it’s a real advantage to have a longer program.  Hopkins was pushing a three-year PhD.  One of the few people who did his PhD in three years was Ed Mendelssohn, now at Columbia.  But Ed knew exactly -- he did his undergraduate work at Rochester and he knew exactly what he wanted to do, which was to write a dissertation on WH Auden.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And in fact I started out in the Renaissance and later ended up in the later Middle Ages and ended up really short on some language work in English and short on some foreign language work and just short of time.  Three.  Because I had the three years at Stanford.  I was a TA for two of those years.  So I wasn’t really a full-time student.  I had responsibilities and taught.  And, I had a [Lieberhume?] Fellowship.  The [Lieberhume?] Foundation had kind of thanked Stanford for some kind of research it had done for them.  And the dean of the graduate school at the time was from the English department.  He was out of the English department the whole time he was there, but he said to the [Lieberhume?] people or the [Lieber?] people or whatever they were, it isn’t support for the sciences and engineering.  I needed support for the humanities.  And so they gave at least two [Lieberhume?] Fellowships to humanists at Stanford and there was a big reception in London for the [Lieberhume?] fellows which I went to at the [Lieber?] House.  And, as far as I could tell, the other person from Stanford and I were the only people in the [Lieberhume?] who were not dentists, doctors, engineers, chemists, biologists.  Everybody else was in the sciences.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen you were a graduate student, were there any of your -- were any of the faculty -- did they give you advice, guide you in any way toward what -- how to just go about the whole business of becoming an academic, a professional academic?  Is there anyone who almost like, you could say, took you under their wing?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNot exactly.  I think because the faculty was mostly very young --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- Stanford had a really heavy recruiting period. I babysat for Rob [Polhanis?] who was then with his first wife and his original children.  And Rob was very sympathetic but he’s a funny fellow.  He’s kind of out there.  He’s been chairman a couple of times, too.  And has had by now many wives and all sorts of peculiar problems.  But there was a very large junior faculty and we were observing them going through that six-year or seven-year period of being junior faculty members and the expectations on them and the work that they were doing and they -- because I was taught for much of the time by very young academics, they were not as knowledgeable or seasoned in certain ways.  People who were older in the profession -- my first advisor -- my main advisor until I shifted to (inaudible) was Albert Girard, who is at Harvard.  A very popular teacher in comp lit which I sort of thought I was doing (inaudible).  And I don’t know that that was much of the kind of advice.  He gave me some advice, I guess, but I was interested in a totally different field of the modernists.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there any of the junior faculty -- were any of them women?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThey had had a woman or two on the faculty, but while I was there they had none.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI’m pretty sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo how did you --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.  They hired -- they hired Anne (inaudible) and Diane Middlebrook probably -- I can’t remember whether it was after my first year or after my second year or if it was coming after my second year.  I’m not really very clear about that.  But, Anne had done her undergraduate degree at Brown and I had known her as an undergraduate.  We had both been on the debating team there.  It wasn’t a very good debating team, but we organized the tournament.  And so they -- Albert Girard and somebody else, who is probably (inaudible) they asked me about her.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I gave her a positive review.  And they were very nervous about hiring Anne and Diane.  So those would be the first women.  There had been one or two women.  I’m not sure they had ever had proper status exactly, but there had been a woman or two in the past, but they weren’t there or they had retired or something by the time my time came.  So I think Anne and Diane were the first women faculty.  Hired at the beginning of their careers and they made it through to tenure and eventually to UCLA with her second husband.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich brings us back, of course, to the fact that you were a married graduate student and that you and Mitch were going to go on the job market, more or less, at the same time.  How did you take -- how did you both negotiate where you were both going to fetch up?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I got the [Lieberhume?] and Mitch agreed that he would -- I mean, he was going to come with me to England and we were going to live on that fellowship together.  I can’t remember whether he had some saved up money.  I don’t remember whether he had any other money really -- he must have had something, I think.  And he applied to LSE.  He was going to go on and do some work in economics.  He had been an undergraduate economics major and had done quite well.  Our grade point averages at the end of our undergraduate careers were within hundreds of a point, I think, not even 10.  But maybe 10.  Very close together.  But I graduated magna and he graduated cum.  I was just over and he was just under.  And he had been working on a project on airport noise.  Somebody was interested in it.  It had to do with who pays the social cost of something that interferes with our community.  And he was very interested in developing this theory of social cost.  He’d -- after the -- he made Law Review, which was astonishing because he had fractured his skull the summer before Stanford, after Brown, and he had started law school with his memory not working.  So he had worked and worked and worked to make his memory work again.  And he finished that first year, I don’t know, 13th in his class.  And ultimately finished at about seventh or something.  I mean, he was Order of the Quois.  I know that.  He hated being on the Law Review.  Stanford didn’t reward people.  Penn, I think, gave everybody who made Law Review a tuition remission.  Stanford gave nothing to them and expected them to work 30 or 40 hours a week for free and he hated the work.  And so I encouraged him to just quit, that he didn’t have to do it.  He had already announced that he didn’t want to work for a Wall Street firm.  He did, however, because he was so high-ranked in his class got an offer from Cleary, Gottliebs and Hamilton to work for them after the second year of law school.  And I said, well, you know, you should do that.  He was trying to figure out whether he should go ride horses or do that or something, and I said look, you’d better go do that because you might turn around and regret this, but if you do it for a summer, and you really know you don’t want it, you will never regret the decision you’re making.  So he agreed ultimately and we went to New York that summer, being flown east, anytime we flew, from New York.  And we lived in this flat on the Lower East Side, sort of.  In the Village area.  A half a block from the elevated West Side Drive.  The filthiest place I’ve ever lived in my life.  It didn’t have air conditioning, so we had to open the windows because it was hot as Hades.  And, after, you could clean up in the kitchen and after an hour you could certainly, visibly write your name in the cold dust and muck on the sink.  And, much to Mitch’s distress, because he had a hearing sensitivity or something, we were sleeping in the front room, but illegally the refrigerated trucks were parked in the streets and they left their motors running and it was just at a sound level that drove him nuts.  And so we had to keep the windows closed.  Which didn’t help.  And that was a summer that I realized \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"oh, the first time I had stayed in the city with all of these horrible people are here when you’re walking down the street by yourself would, as a woman, would brush by you and say really disgusting or alarming or scary things, mostly they were sexual and they were awful.  It didn’t happen if you were walking -- it didn’t usually happen if you were walking down the street with anybody else and certainly not if you were walking with a man, but it was disgusting.  And they hung out the windows.  I finally realized that some of these people, what I could see from very far away, probably had binoculars and looked in the windows all the time, and I never felt so exposed in my whole life than I did there.  And, in fact, a lot of women have had that experience in Manhattan.  There is always somebody peeping, not to mention the horrible things on the street.  A pretty foreign experience.  So, anyway, we did that.  And they put him, because he’d been working on his paper on social cost and one of the things he was thinking about was airport noise, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steve and Hamilton put him onto an airport noise -- an airport noise case.  And he also worked on something to do with Shale Oil, which is back in use again.  Anyway, he found all the work they had given him to do perfectly disgusting.  He took his lunch to work in a paper bag and he kept getting invited out to lunch because he was -- they were recruiting those people.  But he looked around at the young associates, and he said, I swear to you, they back out the door backward, like they’re kowtowing to the senior partners.  He said, it’s a horrible culture.  So he did know that he didn’t want to do that.  What he wanted to do was trial work, and that a year away wasn’t going to make any difference.  So he was willing to go.  Unfortunately, he did some work in calculus which he hadn’t taken.  Economics didn’t become really mathematical until maybe about the mid-60s in many places, and this friend -- my friend, Anna Tolls had just gone in and changed the curriculum at OSE and it became mathematical and Mitch got there and realized, a, he really didn’t have the math to do the economics they were doing.  B, people who cut out all of the articles for the journal he was supposed to be reading and outtripped him.  He wasn’t really meeting anybody.  There was one white Rhodesian that he actually talked to, but people weren’t friendly to Americans, really.  It’s a big city and you’re just kind of on your own and they weren’t nice.  Or, they were nice, but they were very polite and very distant.  Which would have been different in a place like Oxford or Cambridge.  But in London, everybody goes on somewhere else.  So he was really miserable and I said, well, you’re going to have to go back, and his old riding teacher had a contact which he knew about and had an introduction to at the Former School of Equitation.  The wife was the heiress of the Holland-America line.  The husband was this former steeple chase jockey.  They had both gone to the Spanish riding school at a moment in its history when they took external people just after the war.  She was on the British equestrian dressage team that ran this Wilmington Riding Stable out in somewhere near Duxbridge.  So Mitch became a working pupil at the former school of equitation.  He bought a scooter off of a graduate student from -- I don’t know, he was a friend of a graduate student at Stanford and she was at UCLA or some place and she had a limited time and had bought a scooter and had traveled around on it, so she sold us her scooter when she left and he used the scooter to go out to the former school of equitation and once he did that I was quite happy and then they had an exam and he wanted to take the exam.  So he took the British Horse Society exam for being an instructor and passed it.  That was a weird and wonderful experience and it shocked all of the younger pupils there.  They had a huge crew of young people working there.  A lot of Brits and a couple of Americans and Canadians and people from the Continent, especially Holland.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"It was a huge crew of people in kind of a slum in a completely inefficient stable.  So Mitch was real happy to become an instructor of the British Horse Society and they were all shocked that he did that so fast, and I thought, no he didn’t do it so fast.  He’s been riding since he was six years old.  He was a Pony Club member, an A-level Pony Club member.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, when did you -- you must have had to start thinking about where you were going to get a job amongst all of this.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh, I started thinking about that before we left for California.  Mitch was taking the California bar, an entirely miserable summer.  Nobody should live with a spouse taking the California bar.  They should be locked up someplace special and left to their own devices.  It’s -- everybody knew that at least one member of the Stanford Law Review failed the California Bar every year without fail.  Sometimes two.  And that meant that the mere fact that you graduated high in the class and you’re very good at being a lawyer did not protect you when taking the California bar.  And they all took the bar review course and they all -- they’re awful to live with and you shouldn’t live with them and Mitch was particularly tense and unhappy and weird.  He became violent at times, I think.  At any rate, we finally got through that and he did that because you want to have a bar exam behind you.  We didn’t know where we were going.  I was writing letters to try to get a job for the following year, but there was no MLA job list.  There was a list of calling up from one department to another to see who was there.  And a lot of back channel negotiation.  I didn’t have any very strong sense that I had great supporters at Stanford.  I mean, Dell would have been a supporter but it was never his -- he never pushed his students.  He never -- his students have done well but it’s not because Dell has been out maneuvering for them.  It’s just because smart students chose to work with him, I think.  And I don’t know if any of the people at Stanford were connected up on the east coast all that well.  Twice a year students.  I suspect that the way things worked on the east coast were a little different, but it was still an old boy network almost entirely, although they would begin to do interviews.  At any rate, everybody sent out letters.  In the class ahead of me, there were two Americans who had almost identical profiles as graduate students at Stanford.  Grades.  What they took.  Everything.  And they, again, I didn’t know this initially I don’t think, but they had sent out a whole batch of letters.  There letters were very close to the same, testing to see what would happen.  And the man got something like 15 interviews and she got one or two.  And it was just very clear just how prejudice the system was.  I think I typed -- my sister came to visit.  She typed some.  Other people typed some.  But I think I sent out something like 40 letters.  The only places Mitch didn’t -- he didn’t really want to go to the southwest either, but he said, I’m a Yankee.  I’ve spent time in North Carolina.  I don’t think that a Yankee lawyer can really make it south of the Mason-Dixon line.  So he said, I’ll go anywhere you get a job, and especially northeast, Boston, the northern part of the country.  Something like that.  So there were more schools in the northeast than elsewhere and that was my happier thought.  So I wrote starting from Washington DC and moved up.  Sent out about 40 letters and Edwin [Honing?] who had taught me creative writing, at which I wasn’t very good, but he thought I was smart and I would make a better scholar, Edwin [Honing?] was visiting somewhere that spring on the east coast and I think I had an interview with him and he or somebody finagled me a one-year appointment at Brown, eventually.  I guess I interviewed somebody at [Hayward?] State, but I don’t remember doing it.  I was offered a job at [Hayward?] State and Mitch said, \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"well, I have passed the California bar.  But you don’t have to go to [Hayward?] State.  That doesn’t sound very attractive.  I -- people at George Washington, GW and Washington, didn’t have a job, didn’t think they were going to have a job, but they did hire part-time people or adjuncts or whatever they were, instructors, who said, if you don't get anything, let us know because after they-- I don't know whether I had said where I came from or not -- but anyway, they were very gracious about it and I can’t remember if I talked to them on the phone or not.  In my trip, as I wrote, I’ll be coming east to go to London to take a fellowship and stopping in Washington and New York and can go for interviews.  So I think I had an interview at the University of Maryland, which was strange.  An interview at NYU, which was stranger.  I interviewed with them twice and they were very peculiar both times.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn what ways?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt’s a little hard to remember now and I’m not sure which one is which.  I think they talked about -- I think the first time it was all men, kind of older, a couple of them, it was summertime, so they weren’t necessarily all there.  And what did we talk about?  I don’t think it had anything to do with hiring me or anything else.  It was just bizarre.  They didn’t -- later on, they didn’t reimburse any of us that they called down for interviews for the train fare to New Haven, for example.  They didn’t take anybody to a meal.  They didn’t even buy you a cup of coffee or offer you one.  They were just peculiar.  Unfriendly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo how did Yale come about?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t really know.  I had just written them a letter and they wrote back and offered me -- and set up an interview for the time I was going to be on the east coast and I think -- I can’t remember whether we spent the night or not -- I think it was something -- but Tony and Penelope [Dube?] were visiting Tony’s parents at the time or something like that I remember and maybe we spent the night at Tony’s parent’s house or something.  I do remember meeting -- I think I met Tony’s mother, but then I remember that I went from the [Dube?] household into New Haven for the interview and was interviewed by Martin Price, Sunny (inaudible), Bart Giamatti and Dick Sylvester.  And I think they were the three people -- I don’t know what they were running.  Bart was running the kind of Western World Lit course that he invented and Sunny is the lesser or both of them were involved in running English.  Or maybe one of them was running Comp.  Maybe Sunny had been running English 15, which was the entry level course and Sylvester running the English lit course that undergraduates took.  At any rate, it was a very pleasant, very civilized interview, which I quite enjoyed.  They were charming and I hope I was charming and they, I guess, asked me about their work and described something about their lower-division classes and so I left with a good feeling about them because they were really kind of nice to talk with.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tInteresting that there was a woman on the interview panel.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.  She was the woman in my way and Steve Barney’s way all the way through and she was not the most charming person at that interview either as you can imagine.  It was between Martin who was a very sweet man and very kind to me and probably Bart, who was always charming.  And Sylvester wasn’t too bad either in the right circumstances.  So, but it was a very pleasant interview that I came away from with a very good feeling.  Not necessarily that I was going to be given anything, but that it was just a pleasant interview and a very civilized interview.  I’m trying to remember whether I met any other people on the way our or not.  I don’t think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you hear fairly quickly, then, that Yale was going to offer you a decision?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, no.  Nobody made any decisions until somewhere around MLA time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich would have been --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tChristmas.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tChristmas.  So that was six months in?  Maybe not quite as long?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.  Yeah.  Five months.  No.  It wasn’t six months.  We didn’t leave California until after the bar exam.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo, and \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the [Lieberhume?] thing, I think, was the beginning of the English term so I think --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it might have been October?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWe left in September.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWe left in September or August.  Actually, we came back in August, didn’t we?  We left sometime late in the summer.  There -- well, three of us were in London.  Rodney Merrill who was a year ahead of me and who had a fellowship or something and stayed in London an extra year.  He was sometimes around the library.  Glending Olson was using his fourth year of his NDEA or whatever it was fellowship to work in the library.  Maybe he had some other travel money or something from Stanford.  And then there was me.  And as it turned out, all three of us were on the Berkeley list.  And, I think.  Or maybe Glending never applied there because Glending was certain that he wanted to go to a small college, a liberal arts college of the kind that he -- where he had studied as an undergraduate at Warren.  Rodney was kind of sometimes around the library and sometimes not, but certainly in London that year.  Maynard Knapp came through London over Christmas and he took Rodney out to dinner and he so offended Rodney with his tackiness and Rodney was from Idaho or someplace like that anyway.  Rodney was -- Rodney, Glending and I were also on, I think, on the list at Berkeley or maybe Glending wasn’t because he didn’t want to be.  But Rodney and I certainly were.  And I think Glending was the first, if he was on the list, to get a refusal from Berkeley.  And I’m sure if he did get a refusal, it was because he made it sort of clear in his letter that he really wanted to teach at a different kind of institution.  So Maynard came through and was so tacky and cheap and ill-mannered that Rodney didn’t like him and anyway, he was a west coast person.  So when Berkeley offered Rodney a job, Rodney turned down Yale and took Berkeley.  Maynard might have written me a letter but he didn’t ever call or try to, as far as I know, try to make an appointment to meet.  He was the chair, then, but I certainly hadn’t met him on my way through.  And he sent me a letter.  And it may have even been the letter of an offer of appointment, signed, typed letter, signed in a red ballpoint pen.  It was just -- it was rude.  It was really rude.  And that, I think, was the offer I got.  At that point I had an offer from Hayward State, which Mitch was indicating that I didn’t have to take.  I certainly didn’t want to take it.  It was on the other side of the Bay and it wasn’t -- and, Honing had, I think, swung a one-year appointment at Brown, but was indicating that there wasn’t anything further.  On the other hand, as a Brown graduate, the possibility of segueing into administration was not entirely unlikely.  So, those were my choices and I was already to take the Brown -- the one-year Brown job and turn down Yale.  Which is, I think, probably what Mitch wanted me to do, although he wouldn’t make it clear.  He wouldn’t tell me what I should do.  He refused.  But we had rented a flat with two bedrooms so that F. Dale Harris, who was a youngish faculty member, young in academic terms, a Brit by birth who served in the British Army and in the American Army and had a PhD from Harvard after what -- maybe he did all of his school in the US.  Anyway, Dale had many contacts in the opera and ballet world in London.  But he wasn’t sure.  He hadn’t seen these people for a long time, so he wasn’t sure whether they’d be friendly or not and he wanted a London base because he certainly didn’t want to spend any more time than he had to at Grantham.  So he asked us if we would rent an extra room, because he felt comfortable enough with us that he could stay with us, which was impressive.  You know, Mitch was straight and he was gay.  I’m not even sure he understood he was gay, but we liked him and there was not a problem.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=9000.0,28503.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So we rented this two-bedroom flat in [Belsais?] Park from maybe Thursday afternoon to Saturday, but he was always out because once he got to London and started reviewing -- he was reviewing opera for the San Francisco Chronicle or something.  And he started meeting with the ballet people and so on and he knew that they were all hugely pleased to see him and he had between his reviewing and his social life, he was out all the time.  And anyway, he went out.  But the morning that I had this letter and was going to make the decision, Dale stopped his routine.  He put the teapot on (laughter) and we sat there drinking tea while Dale explained to me that I could not turn down the Yale offer, that doing so was stupid.  And that I had to say yes.  And so I did.  And after that, I discovered that Mitch was really very displeased by it, and I don't know how quickly he made that clear, but it was a kind of a lightning that he threw during those years.  He had a notion that Yale was far superior to any place he had ever been, which I think was probably true.  And he knew that it was a special place and it wasn't an important school in his family history.  He felt that Yale professors should be super wonderful and he was always immensely scornful when he discovered, as he did, that some of the senior professors at Yale were actually assholes.  And didn't seem very bright either when you tried to get them to think on their feet or something.  And, so he was intimidated by Yale, I guess from the beginning and really not entirely happy about that situation, as perhaps he would have been happy with if I had said yes to Brown, because it would among other things -- I didn't have a proper appointment, which was quite clear, and as it turned out, they just hired Elizabeth Kirk and they weren't a very large department, so it would indeed have been a one-year stop gate and a matter of either trying to get in at URI or something, do prep school teaching.  I don’t know.  But it would have been very difficult.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, that would be a good time to stop and have a little break, because then we can come back and start your Yale story.  Is that OK?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAll right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou're going to have to start that again.  I'm really sorry.  Something went wrong, there.  Let's start again.  You were talking about you were hired as an instructor, and that was under -- there was some connection with the AAUP Yale School?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSomething had changed in the university or in external regulations or in what other departments of a similar standing were doing.  At any rate, my year was the last year when people were hired as instructors or acting instructors.  In my case, since I hadn't finished my dissertation and actually gotten a degree, I was technically an acting instructor, I think.  Or maybe I was an instructor.  Maybe you could do that without having a PhD.  But their own students had had absolutely no experience teaching.  And they had not been able to hire the students out of that class that they wanted.  Several of them were women and they had all turned Yale down.  One of them was Janet, who went, eventually, to Berkeley maybe right away.  And a couple of them had gone to New Mexico, where there had been a little coterie of Yale, mostly woman graduate students or graduates teaching in their department.  At any rate, they hadn't gotten what they wanted.  They had hired others of us and in the long haul, they were not very nice to their own students and that meant they were among the first people fired, but I think that was because of the way the contracts were written.  Theirs happened to be up in the year that Yale had a financial crisis, so they were the ones let go.  At any rate, where were we about this teaching?  Oh, the instructorship.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI didn't finish my dissertation until the end of the summer following my first year of teaching because teaching certainly took up all one's time.  There was really no time to work on anything.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=28503.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"It was a three-course load and there were some new courses.  And, a new place, a new environment, and all that to get used to.  So -- and I also, in teaching the Western World Lit. class, I had never -- what was Yale's version of that -- I had never actually done some of that work.  I had intended to do some.  And then the teacher at Brown who was going to teach it was on leave that year so I couldn't do the course.  And the upshot was that I was sometimes reading maybe 100 pages in front of the kids, and they were very bright students, but they were only freshman and I had enough experience to -- and discovered very much later when I confessed this to one or two of them -- that after they finished Yale -- that they hadn't been aware of that at all.  So, I thought, well, that's one way a little experience helps.  I don't know what else can be said about that except I'm pretty sure that this was a hangover from earlier days.  It was a transition.  Yale was hiring people in at that junior level who were not Yale PhDs.  I don't think they had done that much in the past.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere they mostly women that they were hiring at that?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, not exactly.  Although my year, they hired a lot of women and we were puzzled by that.  The year before, several of the male assistant professors had torn up their draft cards and become delinquent in that sense with great support from Marie Boroff let it be said.  And they were at risk of being drafted, although I think the likelihood of that was negligible.  At least one of them was a father as well as a husband and they were almost 26 and the Army really didn't want 26-year-olds.  It's very different now.  The high-tech army.  But they didn't want 25, 26-year-olds going to the Vietnam jungle.  I mean, now -- they just didn't.  It was the wrong -- so, people who were hitting 26 or about to were, by and large, they were clear.  And those who were already 26 and fathers were pretty much in the clear.  David [Orburn?] was one of the people who burned his draft card.  So we thought that maybe that had affected it.  And then we thought that maybe they had understood about the pill and that women had more control over they and whether or when they had children.  But we discovered that that wasn't the case, either.  As I think I have mentioned to you in the past, the English department -- I am not sure how regularly.  It wasn't every Thursday -- but on some Thursdays, at least once a month and maybe a little more often, the English department had a faculty lunch together in the Ezra Stiles' Fellows Lounge.  Everybody met there and drank some sherry and then went through the lunch line and brought trays back to the Fellows Lounge.  And it was kind of -- there were people who didn't turn up, both on the junior and senior faculty -- but it was a good thing to do because it was quite informal.  Even though there were very clear ranks and clear senses of who was important and who wasn't, people were civilized and polite enough that that was not anything that got enforced at the lunch table.  And it was one day at the lunch table, I think it might have been Elizabeth Francis, and -- at any rate, we introduced something or other about the pill, just testing the waters, and it became clear that the senior fellows -- it had just washed right over their heads.  They knew nothing about the pill or how it worked or that there was more control.  They just didn't know and never thought about it.  They mostly had wives were past menopause who weren't interested and, in some cases, had no daughters, so I guess they hadn't paid any attention.  And any way, that wasn't the reason they had hired a fair number of women.  It was too (inaudible) clearly, and it didn't seem to be the draft either so we remained a little mystified.  It was their own female students that they had particularly -- or at least a couple of them -- that they particularly wanted to keep employed, but nothing explained why they did it.  And in my case, they clearly offered -- they perhaps were thinking that every few years they wanted to hire somebody from Stanford and they were turned down by the man to whom they had first offered the job.  So, we never knew.  They never said why they did it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat -- can you remember the names of any of the women who were hired at the same time as you?\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"CHARLOTTE MORSE:\tJosephine [Hindon?] who came from York.  I don't quite know where her degree was from.  She had written on Flannery O'Connor.  She commuted up from York and she was not really around very much.  I never knew her very well.  She married the shrink that I think she was already involved with or something like that.  At any rate, she didn't come back for a second year.  Helen, whose last name I can't remember, although it might now be Cohen or it might have become that -- at any rate, she got involved with an advanced graduate student and the two of them got married and he had draft problems because he was still rather young.  And so they went on the job market together and got jobs at Brock University in Canada and left after the second or third year.  I'm not quite sure -- I just know that they had a huge collection of rock-and-roll records.  Very impressive.  Or knew about them anyway.  And who -- it seems to me -- Elizabeth Francis had a lot of babies because she couldn't take the pill.  She had passed out, fainted dead away in John Popes' office, scared him to death.  They took her to Yale New Haven Hospital and thinking that maybe she had had a stroke or a brain seizure or something, but it was, in fact, an effect of the pill, which she just simply couldn't tolerate and, as a result, she didn't have a very nice husband, she had, I think, a total of three children in the course of the seven years we were at Yale and then eventually was either left by or finally left this man after they had got to the University of Texas and ended up at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Let's see.  Who else.  It's the ones that -- it's the women you were asking about, isn't it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI'm particularly interested in the women.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tHelen.  Josephine.  Elizabeth.  That may -- it may have been that there were just four of us.  I can't think at the moment.  There were then several more women in the next group and the next group.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat about the make-up of the English department at that time.  I mean, I think it could have only been one tenured woman and that would have been Marie Boroff.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI think -- well, Marie was one of, at most, three tenured women in the college and graduate school, and I think most of the time I was there she was one of two.  And Yale did not move to actually tenure women until after I had left.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd were there any women at the assistant professor level, can you recall in the department, or --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.  Because that -- Yale just -- the department, I think, viewed the entire assistant professorship term as simply temporary.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd they shifted their thinking from what had once been an instructor's term and once something that they used to support their own graduate students into something larger.  They thought that -- they didn't call it a post-doc, but in some ways they thought of it as simply serving something like a post-doc.  That Yale was always inclined to hire its own if it could.  The only person anywhere close to my group who was kept was Leslie Brisman and while his PhD is Cornell, Harold Bloom, as you well know from the Boroughs visiting and living in his house, Harold Bloom was away the first year I was there and he was teaching at his own alma mater, Cornell, and he taught Leslie or had something to do with Leslie and he and Jeffrey Hartman, who were the big supporters of Leslie Brisman, after their own protégé, particularly again Harold's downed.  Tom whatever his name was.  And so I think that it was a little flukey.  I don't think Leslie was the person that the junior faculty would have thought would have been the person to be kept out of that any combination of years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd, quite a number of people have said to me, it's not by any means just in the English department, but right across Yale -- that they certainly felt that there was a really major gulf between junior faculty and the elite tenured faculty.  And, to the extent \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that in some places and in some times the senior faculty made obviously, you know, effort to get to know junior faculty even at a social level.  Was that your experience?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, it really wasn't.  And I think people who didn't take advantage of certain things that were on offer could well have felt that, but a faculty lunch was pretty regular and there were always women there and people didn't just sit according to rank or anything like that.  People both were mixing at the sherry hour and mixing at the way they came and sat back down with their trays so that that, for one thing, was a kind of ongoing breaker.  I got assigned to Morse College as a Morse fellow by Martin Price who was the chair, because he thought it was funny to put a Morse in Morse.  And also he had had a request from Morse College for someone to teach creative writing and there wasn't really anybody in English especially qualified, but I had at least taken some creative writing and had worked with the special composition program at Stanford, which had been headed by Jack Hawks and staffed by creative writers.  So I had had as good a claim as anybody to walk in and teach a creative writing class, which I did.  And in the first semester I had in my class the only woman, the daughter of the president of Stanford, and in the second semester, Jenny was joined by Julia Preston who I believe is the same Julia Preston who dropped out of Yale after her second year.  She had an extremely good prep school education and ended up -- I don’t know where she started -- but she ended up as a reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times working principally in the Spanish-speaking Americas and doing some very scary [santie?] reporting.  She is a very -- she is a superb writer.  She came, I think it may be as the same prep school that Drew Gilpin Faust had gone to.  Something, if not that one, than one equally good.  She had been a boarding student.  She wrote some stories about that.  But she wrote beautifully.  Yale couldn't teach her anything.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you weren't made to feel unwelcomed in the department then?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, I really wasn't.  I think part of that was that Martin Price and not Maynard Mack was the chair.  Maynard had been a pain in the ass to his senior colleagues as well as to his junior faculty.  He was, as you may know, the general editor of 20th Century Views.  Maynard was not a wealthy man and he had a lot of publishing ventures, and he kept the secretary of the department largely engaged in supervising and carrying out work for himself.  The junior faculty had gone to him and asked him for a mimeograph machine.  This is long before Xerox, even.  And so if you wanted to give materials to your students, the mimeograph was really important and the purple stuff you could write -- it was terribly messy -- but you could actually hand write on it, so you didn't even had to be able to type to give them some help.  And Maynard had resolutely refused to purchase a mimeograph.  And I didn't really know this, so I went to Martin Price who had become the chair and who no longer kept his secretary occupied entirely with his own commercial business.  In fact, he didn't do any of that, I don't think.  And, I explained to Martin that even the graduate students at Stanford had access to two different kinds of machines to prepare materials and we didn't have anything.  And there wasn't anything in the main office we could use.  And the cheapest ditto machine was really cheap.  Just messy.  Purple ink everywhere.  And Martin thought that was quite reasonable and bought us a ditto machine.  And people who were ahead of us looked at me and thought I had performed some miracle.  Well, I hadn't.  The miracle was that Maynard Mack was no longer the chair.  So that was sort of helpful.  But I do think that Martin wasn't perhaps the strongest member of the department in certain ways, but he was an extremely nice and fair person and a sane person and he wasn't working his own agendas in ways that were perceptible in any way.  And he made the whole department, not just the junior faculty but the senior faculty \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"though I didn't know that until later, were terribly relieved to have Martin as chair.  And only much later than that did I find that Maynard Mack's great strength was taking the graduate students for whom Yale had been all too much for one or another reason and they had gone a little mad and they were having a terrible time getting through and Maynard had stock dissertation topics kind of right by numbers which you could do very well or not quite so well, and Maynard rescued a whole lot of students.  He was a very good teacher.  But he was not much liked as an administrator.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid anybody take it upon themselves because I would imagine at that time there weren't any formal structures of matching -- but did anyone in the -- on the senior faculty take it upon themselves to guide you through the culture of Yale and to academic intellectual trajectories?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think so.  But there was a large junior faculty.  Most of that junior faculty knew that it was roll on, roll off.  That there weren't tenured positions to be had.  I mean, even if they wanted to, in many cases they didn't have room.  So there was a lot of kind of advice being handed down from amongst the junior faculty and at least for the western world lit. class and maybe to some extent for the major authors class, there were staff meetings.  There may have been staff meetings for English 15, which was the basic composition class, though I don't actually remember them.  But I did teach that my first year and I taught the western world lit. class MFA which had some other number.  I've forgotten.  Bart Giamatti, who had interviewed me initially, was running that.  He was kind of the convener of that whole little section of the faculty that year.  And I can't remember how often we met, but I do think -- there were always big discussions about what translations everybody was going to use and people would go off and check out the translations and come back with recommendations and that was always a fought issue.  And there may have been some kind of general staff meetings a couple of times a semester.  But it was a place where everybody -- because offices were scattered, even then -- but everybody got together and there was talk about what was going on and that course was organized so that we had to go to each other's lectures.  They didn't have a very big room, so the person lecturing had to give that lecture three times, which was very hard on Elizabeth Frances who had got out of childbed a week letter and delivered three lectures in two days.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGoodness.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThere were no concessions.  None to women.  And Elizabeth perhaps really suffered the most from the absence of concessions.  Or had the hardest time in dealing with it.  But there was a sense of getting together at least some of the time on the staff some people you could talk to about what you were doing and I'm not quite sure where we got together, really, that first year, because we were partly scattered around in different office spaces and one set of offices had a leaky roof and that caused some problems.  But at any rate, we got through that year and there was a lot of support.  The junior faculty was very large.  There were at least 35 of us -- maybe 37 -- scattered out over the year.  My year, the 10 people were hired, that was probably about as many as they ever hired in one year.  But they had people on/off all through that period.  They gave a few people associateships without tenure, which often was very difficult, because nobody in the rest of the country understood what that meant and that people really needed jobs.  They weren't playing.  They needed jobs.  So I think that was, in some cases, maybe -- especially as the market tightened up -- it was kind of the kiss of death to get that position.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And, I understand, too, that there might have been -- and indeed, I think you bring it up in a letter that we'll come to later on that you wrote to Tom Green when he was chairing the Committee on the Status of Women -- but, in the letter you mentioned, and other people have mentioned to me, that indeed, there was at least one, maybe two, women \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in the English department who were on, as were -- [ad fiminum?] appointments as sort of senior lecturers or something.  Slightly ad hoc things.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh, Sunny [Miskimmon?] and Dorothy Lipsky were both appointed -- or Dorothy Finkelstein I should say.  I think she used Finkelstein -- but Sunny was there own -- she had children with cystic fibrosis.  Harry was the pet student of Roberto Lopez and was tenured in history so if Sunny was -- both for reasons of Harry's tenure and her children's problems, she couldn't really travel, so they made her a senior lecturer or whatever they called it.  Some kind of made-up position, for which there were probably no written rules.  In the profession at large, I think, by now I think people understand that they are three-year, two-year notice positions.  If they exist.  And Dorothy had given up tenure to follow Jack to -- at Berkeley -- at the Berkeley English Department -- to follow Jack Finkelstein to Yale and I knew Jack pretty well because he was a fellow of Morse College, where I became a Fellow.  And I also knew him during the period that Dorothy was divorcing him, which was quite horrific.  Dorothy only ever married ancient Eur-eastern scholars, but she was given this form of bastard tenure, and as far as -- there might have been a few other people with this form of bastard tenure in the university -- but I don't particularly know of any. And when Hannah Gray became the provost, Hannah insisted that these jobs, these positions, be regularized.  Sunny was let go.  She hadn't published very much and what she had published was a little, I thought, wobbly.  Dorothy, on the other hand, was a real expert on the influence of Arabic literature on western literature, among other things.  And so they did, eventually, give Dorothy proper tenure.  But it was a way of accommodating women were attached to men they wanted.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think I've come across one or two --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- women, indeed, there were often -- of course, I was only looking for the women, not the men necessarily -- who were right across in the sciences as well who had this title of senior lecturer or something like that.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThey mean the same thing.  Do you think?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think it did.  It certainly -- it didn't have status, which seems to be one of the important things when it comes to judging what these positions are.  You've talked a little bit about the fact that there was only the one tenured women in the department and that was Marie, who has also given an interview for this which is great.  And you've talked a little bit about the juniors, like yourself, and the one or two women who were in these slightly luminal positions, who were there all the time but nevertheless and didn't necessarily have a recognized status.  What about the departmental wives, because if there -- I just wonder -- the culture of the department must have been changed with this influx, particularly of younger women --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt did change.  And it changed so fast that I didn't really see much of that other culture.  The first year I was there, there was a tea for faculty, women faculty and faculty wives.  The women faculty were all mostly young.  I can't remember how much -- how many of us went.  But I went with Diane Burrow and it was held in the Master's house at Ezra Stiles.  I've forgotten the name of the people who were Master and head of the house, then.  A very old Yale person.  And I had always thought that Diana was making up some of these strange stories that she told about awful things that happened to her and I witnessed it.  This was pretty early on in the fall when I was first there, and it was one of those touchstone stories in my interpretation of Diana's interpretation of her life.  As we were leaving, and we both had on London clothes or English clothes, which is to say we had on high boots and short skirts.  These had not yet arrived in New Haven or even in New York, at least not like that.  And so I think -- in fact, Fred Nichols' told me that my image probably suffered some from wearing my English clothes because \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"they were a little too much for Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo -- did they maybe get the message that you weren't serious?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWeren't serious.  Might have been available.  I don’t know quite what the message was, but it was not quite proper, I think.  And, of course, eventually, those short skirts got to America and they weren't unusual.  But certainly in 1968, they hadn't yet crossed the pond.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd, well, it must have gone down terribly well with the male undergraduates.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh, I think it probably did.  I had to be very careful about writing on the board to make sure that it didn't -- when they were not skirts but actually dresses -- that I didn't raise up the hem too much.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause your first year, of course, it would have still been all --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt was all all-male Yale.  Yeah.  And even after that, the privileged thing to teach at Yale was to get as quickly as possible out of English 15 which was the basic course that taught some literature, but it was really especially concentrated on trying to improve their writing.  And served roughly the bottom-half of the class in terms of their English -- their accomplishments in English.  And I'm not sure how they determined that because some of them wrote very well, but some of them really didn't.  And it was probably one of the signs of my lack of privilege within the terms of the English department at large that I continued to teach that basic course for longer than most people.  And didn't -- the more -- the probably most privileged class was the one that the great poets that Chaucer -- so starting with Chaucer -- Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, Wordsworth or whatever it was -- Tennyson, Eliot, I can't remember.  I think you got to choose what 20th Century poet you taught.  I'm not sure.  But I didn't teach that course until fairly late in my career and I did teach a lot of the English 15 and I think that as far as the Yale English faculty were concerned, to get stuck in that course was really a sign that you weren't doing the right thing or something.  I actually liked teaching and I taught something like that a lot at Stanford, and these were generally pretty bright kids.  Occasionally, you'd hit a class where a few students were very bad.  One year, I had a student who wrote with third grade handwriting and he didn't write very well and I wondered, what in the name of Heaven he was doing at Yale.  And I found out two years later from this weird kid that I used to eat lunch with in the Morse dining hall some, who was some kind of scientist or musician, he said, oh, he's the most talented violinist at Yale.  He's the only Yale undergraduate who got a master class with -- I've forgotten now which one it was -- but it was one of the two or three most-distinguished violinists in the world.  This kid had a master class with him and I said, oh.  That's why he's at Yale.  Because Yale was a -- it was the choice of school for undergraduates who were good enough to go to Julliard or to the Boston Conservatory of Music and who wanted a more a complete -- or their parents wanted for them -- a more complete education and it was the only school, as far as I know, that competed for musicians of that quality.  So I finally found out why I had this kid, this child, who really was terrible in English.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever have any problems with the male undergraduates in terms of often kind of personal dynamics?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNot seriously.  I had one who tried to -- who was a very smart ass kid and it was three or four years in -- who was behaving very badly and writing things to me that were highly inappropriate.  And I threw him out of class, but I don't remember exactly what that process was or whether it had to be approved by anybody.  I can't remember.  I was in Morse College by that point and I don't even remember what class he was trying to get into or was in.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But he was behaving very badly and completely inappropriately and I think I threw him out and it stuck.  I don’t think -- I mean, now, universities would require formal legal procedures to see that this was done completely and nobody could come back and sue them and the parents couldn't intervene, but whatever it was, I got rid of him and I don't think he was a Morse College student, I'm not sure.  But college deans often helped or dealt with that sort of thing.  And the college deans were often people who had been on the Yale junior faculty or were maybe teaching a little or hanging around Yale -- but they were easy people to deal with and they usually knew their students.  So when you had a problem, it usually could be resolved.  Although I was there when the records were stripped.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat's this?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI can't remember.  It might have been '72.  But there was a point when federal legislation came through and it might have had something to do with women but I'm not sure.  I'm not quite sure what the motivation was.  But it really meant that universities and schools could no longer keep a record of problems that students had.  There was a great deal of writing in student folders that was inappropriate or unfair.  And the student had no right to see these things.  So a student could be followed around by a folder that had some really horrible stuff in it and he wouldn't know, or she wouldn't know -- although it was all he’s at the time, or almost all.  And I can remember when the college dean was stripping it out and the very kind of problem at Virginia Tech last year is one consequence of what happens when you strip the records.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tBecause you don't know who is crazy.  And you can't put any of that in anybody's record.  But there were all sorts of detritus.  By that time, I was a resident fellow in Morse College, I think, and the dean of Morse who was having to strip the records was noticing, was a woman, was noticing what astonishment things were lurking in the files.  But nevertheless, college deans still continued generally to know their student population.  To be involved in advising and there were very few students whom they were not in some ways aware.  All but -- I do not know.  In the case of the boy who took off all of his clothes in the Morse College dining room one night and started screaming and shouting at everybody and then one of God Squad students dressed in a suit and everybody wore that, and he stood up and they started arguing from the salad table and I turned to the students I was sitting with and said, my former husband and I were both there, we said, what's going on.  We were quite far away from the scene and they said, well, we don't know.  We don't know who that is.  And we said, maybe it's an abnormal psych experiment.  (laughter)  But some years later I learned from another former student who actually lived next door to the one who had thrown off all of his clothes, that he thought he was John Lennon and had been playing drums in his room or something that disturbed my student a while, and he eventually got back to his room and they came in little white coats with the stretcher and they took him away.  And his father then came, maybe the father had to come to get him committed.  I don't know.  But in any way, he disappeared.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever have any inappropriate experiences with your fellow faculty, junior or senior?  Was there ever any sense that there was discrimination or harassment going on?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tDiscrimination is in some sense one thing.  Harassment is another.  And they weren't necessarily together.  And it was -- I had enough experience dealing in mixed-sex situations from way back to have a sense of how to handle things and how to back off if something seemed to be too much.  You just drew back and managed not to run across that person for a little while until things were a little easier.  The only -- and usually I knew when that was happening.  The only person who ever fooled me was Tom Green. \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And he did this on the very day that he turned in the report, having chaired the committee on women at Yale.  He turned in his report in the morning to Kingman Brewster and then the other problem was that women who had been students at Yale, graduate students at Yale, knew about him but none of them had told me.  So I hadn't a clue.  And I didn't know he was watching.  He started coming to faculty lunch, which he didn't usually do.  And I didn't pick up on it, and I was very good at picking up stuff.  And getting out of the way.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat happened?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, it was partly my fault but I didn't realize it because I did this all the time.  I was -- I wore a watch but I wasn't always all that prompt and so he had invited me to lunch at Trumbull or whatever college he was a fellow of -- I think it was Trumbull -- and I said, oh, I said, I'm often a little vague on time.  Why don't I just meet you at your office and then we can go down to the lunchroom.  Well, that must have really set him off.  It was completely innocent on my part.  I just thought it saved him maybe standing around for five or 10 minutes if I happened to be late.  So I walked into his office and he, obviously, was very excited about this, although I didn't pick that up all that fast either I don't think.  And then he started telling me how wonderful it would be to have an affair and that he would keep it secret from my husband and he would certainly never tell his wife and it would all be very discrete and this went on for some while.  And I made it clear that I was not interested.  I escaped from having him put his hands on me, although he was making some moves in that direction.  I found it very disturbing.  He told me the sad story of his shotgun wedding and how -- he had a really nice wife.  She had a terrible voice -- but to give me an idea, Larry Benson was with him on a fellowship in Florence, and as Larry said to me, you know, I don't like ugly women and Tom Green's wife is not beautiful and she has a very odd voice, he said, but she's a wonderful person and he is the most boring man I think I've ever encountered.  But there you are.  So I didn't tell anybody.  I didn't even tell Fred Nichols, one of my closest friends.  I didn't tell Steve Barney.  And I didn't tell any of the women, because I thought -- I thought that he was -- I mean, I had no idea he was a serial harasser and that he was the reason that one of the women that they had really wanted to keep had refused a job at Yale.  And they never knew that, although I eventually told her of the revenge taken by Lydia Cott Berger, who pretended that she was going to go along with it, and then just as he was about to put, as she put it, \"put his slimy hands on my shoulder,\" she could speak English with such a heavy Polish accent, she was very hard to follow, so you had to concentrate.  She said, my ass is too valuable.  So, that was the only kind of punishment that Tom Green got.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid she do that in a public place?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo, she didn't, but she told the story afterward.  And we only knew about the involvement of the woman who had refused the job at Yale because Dewey Faulkner knew her and knew what Tom Green had done to her, which was far more serious.  What he did to her was really bad.  What he did -- Lydia was asking for it.  She was out to take revenge for my sake.  And the other women's.  And I was just -- later on, I found out from Marge Barber that everybody knew, but, well, you could have told me, but they didn't.  But I was disturbed by the fact that he was the man Brewster had chosen to lead this committee on the status of women at Yale, and his colleagues, I think some of them had to have known about this other case.  It was just -- it was really very disappointing.  Let's put it this way.  And it was years before I told anybody.   It was -- it may have been when I first told crazy Lydia who worked behind the circulation.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=11700.0,12000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Was Jon Cott's daughter who refused to go to college, really, in fact, and who learned only street English because, as she said, she knew lots of languages before she got to the United States as a refugee in '68, but she never learned formal English.  So she only knew slang words.  But, Lydia liked that kind of machination I must say.  But we didn't find out about the other one except that Dewey was going to take us to the movies and they were giggling about this or something and he got very interested and then we had to know why he was so interested and eventually he divulged something of the other story.  But it was very clear when something like that happened, there was nobody you could go to officially.  Nobody.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr even appear unofficially?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI mean, that's -- officially, unofficially -- if you talk to a senior member of the university it was official, and there was nobody you could go to.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOr nobody that anybody I know of would have felt comfortable going to at all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think that had repercussions when women started to come in as undergraduates.  That there weren't any structures in place to enable these things to be a, talked about and, b, dealt with?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t know because they came with their own problems, which I think were already apparent at other institutions and which I found quite horrifying.  That there was no privacy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat do you mean?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThat boys and girls could be in each other's rooms and that there was no -- there might have been rules that everybody ignored.  They were certainly not enforced.  But I'm not even sure there were rules that weren't enforced.  There just weren't rules that were effective.  They really hadn't been effective anywhere I think about who slept in whose room and under what circumstances.  And I found it just really quite horrifying that children who were sharing -- children -- 18-year-olds were sharing bunk beds in a small room on the old campus could have a roommate fucking in the bed over her head.  And they wouldn't say anything.  They didn't do anything.  There weren't any written rules that -- there certainly wasn't any supervision that prohibited that effectively.  It might have been against the rules in a general way, but I'm not even sure that was true, and it certainly was not anything they were going to enforce and they weren't given any help.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you find because you were young faculty and female that the female undergraduates came to you with these kind of issues, or was it just something that you picked up?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThis was something I picked up because of a relationship with one professional on campus but it wasn't something -- it wasn't something that they commonly came to the faculty with as far as I can regulate.  They don't -- I mean, some of them wanted contact with the faculty and might have talked some about personal problems, but that kind of social problem and how the social worlds worked was not something they spent a lot of time talking to the faculty about and that had started being a problem at Stanford before I left.  Stanford was just beginning to move to something different from single-sex dorms.  And I think this was a problem all over the country.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIn fact, I was reading, and this was from 1974, I think, class of -- it was either class of 74 entering Radcliffe in 74 by Senator Charles Schumer's sister, but she published this book as HUMER, presumably so as to not get her brother in trouble.  But it's about being an undergraduate at Radcliffe in 1974 for the first or second year that women and men crossed campuses and they were rooming -- men were on the Radcliffe campus.  Women were on the houses at Harvard.  And it's clear.  It was a very deranging experience for some of them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow did you find that first -- because you were there \n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=12000.0,12300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"when the first girls showed up on campus, so you would have seen -- you were there, I suppose, when that first class graduated and then maybe one or two beyond that.  How did they strike you as a group of women, young women?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThey were very smart.  They were independent.  They were motivated.  They were a pretty tough bunch of young women in lots of ways.  A good many of them transferred from Smith.  Smith lost more students than anybody else.  I don’t know that they had a lot of guidance, but I don’t know if they would have taken much either, thank you very much.  And although in theory Yale didn't have a lot of things set up for the women, the college deans were really usually quite sympathetic people and I suspect that, you know, and in some cases they were women and they were in Morse, so I suspect that they did have people they could go to in many cases, not all.  But usually the undergraduates felt quite comfortable with their college deans, who were usually very people oriented, often former graduate students at Yale who knew the system pretty well.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  You've actually talked quite a lot -- you've mentioned your Morse fellowship quite a lot, so it clearly meant a great deal to you.  I just wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about becoming a Morse -- and what being a fellow there meant?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, Morse was a funny fellowship because it was one of the [Aro Seraman?] Colleges, a new college, and its fellowship included relatively few old blues because most of the people who had been at Yale for any period of time wanted nothing to do with these ugly old colleges built by [Seraman?].  So a great many of the fellows at Morse were foreigners from really academic -- so they had started in other places.  There was no senior member of the English department and, indeed, sometimes a little resentment of it because it was such a powerful department and very large department, so one could say whatever one liked in that concept and I don't think it ever got back to anybody, so there's a tremendous freedom in that group of people, and I also made very close friends.  The architect, Paul Meterocki, who had for some time taught at Yale but was by that point working as an independent architect was a fellow of Morse and he and his second wife, Sylvia, whom he was with for a very long time until she died of cancer, because very, very close friends of mine and my former husband's.  And they took care of both of us as the marriage fell apart, and so that was a terrifically important friendship.  In some sense, the first year we were there, John and Diana were really the closest people, the people we could drop in on and see, and after that, it became, with a year or two, it became Paul and Sylvia.  Later on, my upstairs neighbor was Joe (inaudible) who was the chair of political science and normally people at that elevated state did not -- were not resident fellows, but Joe had gotten divorced, so he had a wife and some teenage children to support and a new wife, so he was quite happy to be a resident fellow.  He was a very outgoing fellow and a very funny fellow.  He was the chair of poli sci through at least summer or all of that period.  And a very good advisor, he came from the Midwest.  He was an outsider in that sense and so he had -- he bumped around the Big Ten a fair amount and he had a perspective different from those people who had done nothing but begin Yale at the age of 18 and stay until they retired, like John Pope.  Very nice man.  But John Pope had never left New Haven after he had retired as an 18-year-old.  Same thing was true for Gene Waith, I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow would you characterize that true blue mentality?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think there was one mentality because you have to bear in mind that was the old \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=12300.0,12600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"white Protestant group, of which Waith and Pope and Donaldson fitted in.  And they (inaudible) wasn't really that true blue because he had been an undergraduate at Georgetown and was from a different part of the country.  But they practiced a level of formal dinner party social life that was disappearing and was not picked up by that cruder, crasser, more socially -- or academically ambitious;  not socially ambitious -- group of people that included a lot of Jewish immigrants to the United States.  Or their parents immigrated.   Hard to tell.  But the people whose undergraduate colleges were Brooklyn College or maybe Queens.  I think Brooklyn was probably the prestige college of that group.  And that certainly included Bloom and Hartman.  I'm not quite sure where Martin Price fitted in.  He was older and more polite.  None of them had, in my view, good manners.  In fact, to strangers, it was shocking.  Mitch, my former husband and I, helped Yale recruit Fred Robinson, but some of the ways that they weren't very gracious, even when they were trying to recruit Fred was kind of alarming, and then there was a famous remark by a person who should have been extremely courteous or his wife when she asked Fred where he came from and he said Birmingham, Alabama, and she said, well, nobody comes from Birmingham.  And Fred and I knew exactly what she meant, but it wasn't a very polite thing to say.  So there was a kind of politeness practiced by the Pope, Donaldson, Waith generation of extremely formal dinner parties where there had to be eight couples of, I mean, four couples of five couples -- Marge Garber went to lots and lots of those dinner parties because she was very good company and she filled in.  And Larry Nelson went to mini mini and there were a couple of other people like that who were clearly homosexual except that these people refused ever to understand that officially or actually or somehow and so they were also all the people who were highly desirable at the dinner table.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what were the departmental wives like, then?  These senior wives?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, they varied a good deal.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know, a good deal of them must have been pretty well qualified in their own right.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNot exactly.  A lot of them had been graduate students at Yale and married their professors.  Louie Martz's wife, I believe, had a degree in her own right and they wrote their books together.  She was a serious researcher and academic.  I don't think she had a teaching job.  But everybody understood -- I can't think of her name, now -- but that Mrs. Martz was the equal of many people in the department and may have even written some of the best part of Louie Martz's books.  Gene Waith's wife had worked, I guess, in an administrative capacity at the Sheffield Engineering School for a long time.  And she was kind of a wild woman, although she was getting elderly.  Mitch -- my former husband and I liked her, but I think she might have been a bit too inclined to drink.  I'm not sure.  But those were the only really, really, really formal dinner parties that we went to and I thought my former husband was going to destroy the first one.  [Whimzack?] was there and he asked my former husband what he did and my former husband said he was a criminal defense lawyer and [Whimzack?], who was quite conservative, hit the roof and thought this was horrible and made no bones about it and said something and then, as everybody in the room stopped talking and started listening, he started taking [Whimzack?] through what the old \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=12600.0,12900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"-- he was a Georgetown, Jesuit product, [Whimzack?], taking him through the logic of what he had just said and asking him step by step by step by step starting with, you know, would you -- I can't remember what the hypothetical was but it was essentially, would you shoot a man who you saw running down the street who you thought had come out of the house because you believed he had just robbed or raped or something.  So it was something like starting with some premise like that and working down to whether it mattered how you caught somebody and what evidence you brought to bear and [Whimzack?] eventually admitted defeat really fairly cheerfully that Mitch had led him straight through this series of questions in such a way that he had no recourse but to admit that it was important to defend criminals.  But it was a tense moment when he thought, here my young husband and me were maybe second year at Yale and was about to make a very big mess of a social occasion.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  One of the things I found in the archives and I know you have no recollection of ever writing this fine piece of writing but you were asked -- I'd imagine many, many women at Yale were asked to comment on -- for the -- what was it? -- the Committee on the Status of Professional -- it was the Green Report, the Committee on the Status of Professional Women, which was published in 1971, and indeed, your letter is dated January 18, and as you said earlier on, Tom Green was the chair and you do say an awful lot of interesting things and it struck me that the letter, in many ways, came from the heart because -- I'll just quote a couple of places at you and with the benefit of hindsight, it would be really great to get you to remember why you wrote what you wrote.  One of the things you said is to become and to remain an active professional woman at Yale.  That is, brings any woman to an early and direct concentration with the expectation she has for her private and personal life.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI think that had a lot to do with having children, because it was just very complicated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  You go on to say university level teaching may be the worse profession for a woman who wants a husband, much less children.  And there are several reasons for this:  nepotism rules, geographical limitations, inflexible work and promotion arrangements -- did you feel a great deal of pressure at that period as you were coming up the tenure wire -- to do the three things.  To do the research, the teaching, the service?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes.  I mean, you really did have to put out -- and it wasn't clear at Yale even then no matter what you put out that you had any chance of staying at Yale as a member of the faculty -- and this was complicated for me because I was married to a lawyer who had been willing to move but once he was established in his practice, he really wasn't very movable and he certainly wasn't volunteering to move and I wasn't asking him to.  My personal affairs were pretty fraught.  The family I married into were considerably crazier than I had any way of knowing.  They were entertaining in many ways, but it was also very difficult.  And, my former husband had many, many admirable qualities, but he had some behaviors that were very hard to live with.  So while I certainly started out thinking that I wanted children, I had reasons other than Yale to think that maybe this wasn't a very good idea.  I did have a sense toward the end that if I had a child, I would have to get a divorce, that I didn't think that he would treat a child in a way that I could stand to watch.  So my situation was really quite complicated, but it was certainly the case, and Elizabeth Frances is the best example, that they gave no quarters.  And she was their own student.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=12900.0,13200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"She was a Yale PhD.  And they gave her no help.  And she had three children in the course of her assistant professorship.  So, I thought that generally, and I don't know whether there were many other women in English were really, terribly, directly affected by this in my immediate time --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I think of certainly a little --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tComing on --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- in the later years.  Yeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAt the very end, Mary Culligan had a baby.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMargie Ferguson, I think, had a baby.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tShe was very slow at finishing.  I don’t know what happened to her at Yale.  But she had a patch where she just wasn't being very productive.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think Toni Healy had a baby.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tToni Healy had a baby.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, one, or even two, when she was at Yale.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI only remember one, but I left -- I think Toni left at about the same time I did because she was called back to Toronto to do the dictionary and her husband had -- either had work already or was better connected at Toronto -- anyway, there was more prospects for Tony in Toronto and Maureen and Michael -- Michael was a writer and home-husband so Maureen had some well help and Michael is a great mensch, so a much easier person to have a job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou certainly, the way you write that, you were speaking very directly about your own experience.  And you go on to say that the inflexibility of work and promotion arrangements at most universities -- it's interesting that you don't single out Yale.  You say most universities -- forces a young woman to work toward a man's timetable. \r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt does.  It still does.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you don't think that's changed all that much?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think that's changed very much and, in fact, it's gotten -- in some ways it's worse.  I have a young colleague now who, like many of my younger colleagues, spent a very long time getting to the PhD and then into the work world.  And it may be that she would always have had problems conceiving or carrying a baby, or it may be that there is some genetic problem, but it does -- it's beginning to look like she is not going to succeed at having a baby, but she's either 38 or 39 when she started trying and she waited until she got tenure.  So the people who are taking a long time to get PhDs -- I was in that boat sort of the last -- or near the last of that group of people where universities were still responding to the need for more university teachers in the 50s and were therefore pushing for very short PhD times so that a good many of the people that I started with finished PhDs in four years after or they were teaching full time as I was.  It was essentially a four-year degree with a couple of summers.  But were in full-time employment, often with the clock running after four years of graduate school.  And that seems now to be extremely unusual.  People are taking 6-10 years to get through to the PhD and pulling in the first job.  And that's even worse for a woman's biological clock unless she started having children early.  Paula Johnson, who was one of my colleagues at Yale, had done quite a late PhD and her children were already out and in grade school when she came back to pick up graduate work and they were close to finishing high school, I think.  She went off to direct freshman English at NYU I think it was.  And died kind of young.  But she really thought that probably the only sensible way was to get married, have your children, get them into grade school, then go back to get your PhD.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tBut there was no -- there was simply was and there still isn't much of a accommodation, although now my university, which is quite poor and doesn't give a lot of benefits, is giving people a semester off when they have a child.  And Elizabeth Frances didn't even get 10 days off.  So that tells you something -- things are a little better but they aren't a lot better, and it's partly simply the biological calendar.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  There is really no way around that, is there?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, there might be, but universities would have to be a great deal more flexible than they are.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=13200.0,13500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tDo you remember -- you don’t even actually remember that letter -- but do you remember any of the other committees, the committee reports on women at Yale?  Because there actually -- there was actually a slew of them in the late 60s and early 70s in advance of the affirmative -- the 1972 federal regulations coming in respect to sex discrimination in a university.  There was a report in Graduate Education for Women in 1969.  Then there was the Green report in '71.  And then Peter's committee report in '71, which recommended procedures concerning the recruitment of qualified women.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think I ever heard of that one.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou didn't.  No?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAt least not that I know of.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnyway, then of course in '72, the new rules were promulgated by the feds and universities had to kind of get into line.  Did you have to -- that was right in the middle of your time at Yale -- do you have any memories of whether -- what was your impression.  Did Yale kind of fall into line readily and happily or did it drag its head?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I'm pretty sure, and I don't remember why I know this or whether I ever saw the report itself, and I don’t know how I know this -- but all I know is the morning I walked into the coffee shop after the feds had announced they were going to cut off federal funds to the University of Michigan for failing to comply with EEO or whatever they were, rules.  And I flounced in and said to Bart, what the hell difference would it make to Yale and he looked up at me with kind of a raised eyebrow and said, 33 percent of the annual operating budget, and I said, oh.  And he said, and your alma mater, meaning not Brown but Stanford, 67 percent of the annual operating budget.  And it got even higher than that at Stanford before all was said and done.  And there may have been some further discussion, but Yale and Harvard had both turned in plans which had been returned to them for revision because they had actually committed the institutions to absolutely nothing.  And I think that had been with complete deliberation on the part of the people at Yale and no doubt at Harvard, that they had sussed out, that they weren't going to be slapped with any threats provided they wrote some kind of blathery rubbish that sounded kind of OK and put in absolutely no specific targets.  And that's what they did.  And so they got a reprieve of several years before they had to resubmit their plan or something like that.  Anyway, it was completely rubbish that Yale and Harvard managed to get off the hook because they didn't say anything and Michigan was about to get its funds withdrawn because they were stupid enough to actually set some goals that weren't adequate.  So I was very cynical, very cynical about what Yale was promising.  They knew how to write grant language and leave out all of the actual benchmarks.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think it was possible then that -- of course, after that, there was a sort of minor explosion of female appointments at Yale College.  Do you think that was a direct response to the new regulations and -- but, since they were all at a junior level, was it maybe just lip service?  Because ultimately there was no responsibility toward these women.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think there was much responsibility toward them.  I think I told you a long time ago that there was at least one year when four members of my class at Pembrook were either on the Yale faculty or, in the case of Caroline Convere, some kind of post-doc or something position that there is no equivalent for and, in fact, the English department regarded assistant professorships as really the equivalent of what she was doing because they didn't have any room to keep all of these people they had hired.  And I don’t know very much about what was happening to Caroline.  Nor do I know much about Marsha Dyer who stayed, I think, about three years and was an assistant professor of economics.  But Enid Rhodes I know more -- Enid Peshell -- I know more about because Enid was a good friend of mine.  \n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=13500.0,13800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"She was a summa cum laude from Brown.  She was junior phi beta.  She is really, really very smart and very, very nice.  And she was hired after -- I forget where she did her PhD now -- but anyway, it was a good place.  And she was hired as an assistant professor of French and let go in the third year.  And one reason to let women go in the third year is you became eligible to apply for Morse fellowships to be held in the fourth year and the French department, which turned out mostly women PhDs, never kept any woman past the time when she could have gotten a Morse fellowship, as far as I know, and they never ever promoted anybody and they were notoriously anti-feminist in a quite unfriendly department.  And who was it, Victor Brombare -- Enid was quite wicked about him.  She said, Victor Bromberg -- he's just another New York Jew.  So when he moved to Princeton, I happened to be in speaking to, I don’t know, was it Howard Taft?  I think it was Howard Taft who was the dean of Yale College.  And I can't remember.  I was probably in there talking to him something to do with Morse College or something, but this came up in -- one could have quite relaxed conversations at Yale without having this sense that everything you said was being recorded or -- you had to maybe use your judgment a bit but Howard Taft was a really nice man.  A physicist, doctor and part of Ohio (inaudible).  So he was lamenting that Victor Brombare had gone off to Princeton and I said, look at this way, Howard.  You've got one less male chauvinist pig on your faculty and he burst out laughing and he said, you're right.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat could have gone the wrong way to the wrong person.  \r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, Taft was -- he was quite a nice man.  I didn't think that -- and he was in a position where he had some responsibility for trying to make sure that things were a little bit more just.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou told me, actually, yesterday when we were talking, that you remember -- did you mention to me Bart Giamatti's old tenure story.  It would be interesting to have a little bit of that just as -- was the whole issue of tenure in some odd kind of way, perverse kind of way, almost gender blind at Yale.  And I just wondered if the Bart story would almost illustrate that.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI don’t think it was gender blind, but I do think that they gave men a hard time, too, and I do think it was sometimes very hard to distinguish.  For one thing, as the rest of the university world had quite changed and people -- Yale had really looked at these as -- what turned into assistant professorships had once been instructorships.  They had once gone to their own students.  And I finally worked this out because in the coffee shop behind the library where we used to drink coffee most mornings after I was living at Morse and the English department was for a while right next door in the Hall of Graduate Studies and a lot of the senior faculty drank coffee there, too, and they liked to tell me stories, and I'm not sure they would have told men so many stories, but they liked to tell me stories and being a good southerner, I liked to hear stories.  And it was from those stories that I finally worked out that Yale had a long history do giving its own graduate students instructorships, which often lasted for something like four years.  That may have been it before you were in a bit of trouble.  And that Yale graduate students didn't teach, which I didn't realize.  They sometimes TA'd in large lectures and I don’t know what they did, but they didn't do any independent teaching in front of a group of students until they got these assistant professorships.  Well, that made a certain sense when what they were being given were instructorships to get them up to scratch on their teaching for three or four years, give them a little more time around the Yale library to get their work done and pass on.  So I think, in retrospect, as I worked out quite late in the game, is that their view of these assistant professorships was simply a transfer from instructorships of old.  And they were certainly hiring way more people to teach their classes in relatively small numbers.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=13800.0,14100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I guess the numbers went up, but Harry [Miskimmon?] was fond of pointing out that the number of courses being offered, as well as the total size of the faculty had jumped dramatically since '55 to '65 or '67.  And it's one of the things that made the bookstore unproductive because instead of ordering books for classes of 300 all at one whack, they were ordered 15 different book orders for 30 kids or 25 kids a piece.  And it wasn't economically very satisfying, which Frank Turner and I discovered being elected to the board of the bookstore one year together.  But as I -- you know, as I finally, kind of toward the end and maybe even after -- realized what they thought they were doing, but realized also that they hadn't caught up with the way the profession outside of Yale had changed, though they paid very little attention and expressed little concern about that.  They only cared about Harvard and whether they were better than Harvard.  That was their only benchmark.  So I think what they thought they were doing and what in fact they were affecting in the lives of their junior faculty were two pretty different things.  And they certainly weren't counting on the other effect, which was that after the ramping up -- it took -- not having enough faculty in the 50s and then ramping up the number of PhDs they were turning out and then by the early 70s they had too many and people couldn't all have places and the oil crisis hit and that made universities even poorer, so there was a terribly difficult job market and I was in certain ways lucky that I was let go when I was because after they let me go, they then turned around and said, who are we going to get to teach our courses.  We don’t have anybody.  And they re-hired -- they went back in and they changed Steve Barney's status and gave him an associateship without tenure because they had let him go the spring of the year before and then they went back and changed his after they said no to me.  And when Steve finished that three-year hitch, there were literally no jobs.  There were not many when I came out, but there no jobs.  He had great recommendations from Harvard, Yale and UVA, his undergraduate place.  UVA took him in for a bit and gave him a temporary job and then the year I was working at the endowment, the old boy network got together.  Steve came up with a research project and the old boy network said this was the greatest thing since sliced bread and the grant went through and he got a two-year grant that tided him over and at that point his wife wanted to go back to New Haven to get an associate of some kind of degree which would have allowed her to be a physician's associate or something like that.  She was quite a strong biologist by training.  And Steve eventually got a job at Irvine, where he was Linda Georgianna's colleague and I haven't seen Steve much.  He now has houses on both coasts.  He retired a bit early because he and his wife inherited a lot of money, mostly from her side of the family.  But his farewell to the department, of which he had been chair, was that he had enjoyed -- according to Linda -- that he had enjoyed knowing them very much and he appreciated their company and he hated every minute of living in Southern California.  So, judging by what happened to Steve, who is a very amiable, presentable, intelligent, kindly good person, if I had been in Steve's position, the old boy network would not have done for me what it did for him, and I don't know what would have happened.  I probably wouldn't be in academia.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think you also said that Bart had said, either to you or to the assembled company, that he felt that -- personally felt that the Yale tenure system was terribly stressful on marriages, not just on individuals but on marriages.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYes, he did.  Bart -- and I'm not quite sure whose marriages he was thinking of.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=14100.0,14400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I think they might have been the people a bit older than I was a little bit ahead of me, but Bart had observed that hardly any marriages survived the Yale junior faculty experience and Steve and Sherry Barney were an exception, but that was still to come and he couldn't have foretold it at that point.  Bart knew a group that I barely knew that were either just -- had just left or were leaving as I arrived, some of whom I overlapped but never really knew.  And Bart was keenly aware because, I suppose, in some ways, he, too, was exposed to this -- Yale hadn't been very generous to him and in fact, I think he was an associate without tenure I think when I joined the faculty.  Or if he was in a better position that that, it had just happened.  Yale was stalling on giving him tenure until he went out and got offers of full professorships from Princeton and someplace else and I can't remember where it was, whether it was the University of St. Louis, Missouri.  It seemed to me it was someplace in the midwest but it may have been the west coast.  But at any rate, it was Princeton and one other -- maybe it was the University of Illinois -- something like that.  It was a pretty impressive, I think, midwestern department that offered him a professorship but then they moved, but they were holding Bart off, even though they knew Bart was very talented and multi-talented in terms of what he could do in the university and very dedicated to Yale.  But they didn't give him an easy time and his private life was very, very private.  Indeed, I'm nearly not sure how he ever persuaded his wife to be a resident -- for him to be the master of Ezra Stiles and although he was right next door -- for part of the time he was in Morse -- you can't get from one place to the other, so I didn't see very much of what was going on, although the kids did invite Dick Cabot back when he was retiring.  Dick Cabot had been one of his roommates or suitemates his first year at Yale and they were very good friends and Dick Cabot was very funny.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think the one thing that we haven't talked about at all is the revolution.  Because, that was plum in the middle of your time here and also given Mitch's involvement in the criminal justice system, I just wondered if you had any kind of reflections or experiences around that period.  One of the things I was really struck by going through the files for May Day 1970 in the archives was how very rarely did women's names crop up and there was one thing, I think, in -- which was a petition or -- that had been put forward from faculty expressing anxieties about just generally everything that was happening around that time and I think there were six women's names on it.  There was Annette [Colodny?].  Hester Eisenstein.  Yourself.  Anne Perry.  Sunny Miskimmon and I think there was one other name.  Etta Unid, actually.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I think those were the six names.  And obviously -- I was just wondering if that was simply because there were fewer women in Yale who -- anyway, but there were also only a few women who felt that maybe they could go public on what they felt about these matters?  I was just struck by -- there were many, many, many male faculty names but only, as far as I could see, only like six women.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThat is surprising, and I don’t remember what that document was or how it circulated or anything.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Yeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo, I -- no, I really don't know.  I do know that when the -- Brewster and company knew that Yale was going to blow up.  For one thing, the year before May Day, Harvard had had this huge riot of a ROTC and Yale had been on the verge of something similar when their was an \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=14400.0,14700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"enormous meeting held in the skating rink, which I didn't attend, in which the Yale student community had voted 1254 to 1254 against completely anything on a motion to deny ROTC a role on the Yale campus.  And I don’t think anybody ever thought that that was an accurate count.  The idea that you could count people accurately in the Yale way was kind of lunacy but it was close enough that Yale students let it go and I think they let it go because Yale's exams were coming up rather swiftly.  Harvard exploded, and I guess it was the same year.  I'm not sure.  But Harvard exams started fully a week later than Yale's exams.  And Yalies were worried about throwing away a whole year of tuition, and so everybody let it stand.  There was a remarkable moment in a faculty meeting, a college faculty meeting, where that was reported and Arthur Wright stood up and said something -- he was making some sort of comment and what was clear is that as far as Arthur Wright was concerned, and I think this actually represented generally the Yale feeling, the Yalies were undergraduates. People who came to Yale as undergraduate students were no Yalies, no matter what sex they were.  They weren't Yalies.  Only undergraduates were Yalies.  So somebody stood up and corrected him, but somebody had to correct him, so that's kind of funny.  But I really don't know.  I mean, Hester -- I can't remember Etta hung out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEtta, I think, was in the administration.  She was in some kind of --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIs that where she was?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- she may have been in the provost's office at that time.  She's in very poor health, now, so I can't ask her.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I know her, for some reason, but I can't remember where she was.  Hester was in Morse College and it may have been that Hester had something to do with circulating this thing.  It may have just not circulated all that far because I -- I don't know that many of my women colleagues then were measuring what they did in fear that somebody was going to see that their name was on something and they were then going to be black-balled because they had signed something or the other.  I certainly didn't have the sense that I was going to be black-balled for something like that.  I mean, I could have been wrong but I didn't -- that wouldn’t have been quite characteristic I don't think.  Maybe the odd person or two, but it would have been other persons to protest, including Marie Boroff who had handsomely supported all of the young men who burned their draft cards.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, tell me about that.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, it was the year before I arrived and David Thorburn and I can't remember who all else it was, but there were four of them, I think, who burned their draft cards in some kind of public whatever as a protest to the Vietnam War before I arrived in the fall of '68.  They were subsequently declared delinquent 1A.  Thornburn had a wife and three children and were approaching his 26th birthday and that was the magic number, then.  Now they'll take anybody, but in Vietnam, they only wanted grunts who were under 26, according to my former husband.  Only the younger soldiers were more bidable.  That the older ones might actually think for themselves and think this was nuts.  Even the younger ones.  I had a cousin who decked his lieutenant two or three times for trying to make them tie up on the edge of the Mekong Delta or on the river and he pointed out to the man that they would all be killed and his second lieutenant continued to give the order until he decked him and threw him in the river and then the man helped fish him out and changed the order.  But, that's one of the reasons we thought they may have hired a fair number of women, but then we found out that that didn't actually have anything to do with it either.  But, so there was -- at least with people like Marie and nobody expressing a whole lot of disapproval of these men on the faculty -- I don’t think there was a strong sense that one was going to be harassed \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=14700.0,15000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"for one's political opinions unless they were really way up there.  I'm not sure what a really out-and-out Marxist would have found.  That might have been a little much for them.  But I didn't have the sense that they were going to punish people for their politics.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou told me another lovely story about Marie and the SDS.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh, that was -- again -- I'm now trying to remember it.  I walked over.  Vincent Scully had, I think, just become the master of Morse College.  It was his first semester.  And there had been a ruckus in the dining hall or something.  The SDS had been looking for some kind of an excuse to get the Yale students energized to do something.  And they had found their cause -- there was some kind of flap in the dining hall.  I actually knew a student was being accused of being racist.  And it had to do with something really stupid.  It was a white male student worker and a black, probably female cafeteria worker.  And the student later said to me that she just wasn't doing her job.  I mean, it was pretty simple and straightforward and he reproved her and she got angry and this happened, that happened.  She -- I think -- wanted to file a complaint against him in some kind of disciplinary proceeding and the SDS saw this as their opportunity to create some kind of political --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCapitol of some sort?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- well, to get the students riled up.  Have a mass rally.  Have a march.  Do something.  Because Yale was pretty quiet, still.  Bart Giamatti had said to me and to David Thorburn as we walked out of the first staff meeting for the kind of Western World Lit. class.  David had also been at Stanford and Bart and I walked around the edge of the college green as we were coming out of that meeting and Bart looked out over the back of the old campus and out into the green and said, it can't happen here.  And David and I looked at each other and thought, this was a very unwise statement, Bart.  We didn't say anything.  We thought it was a bit overconfident, let's put it that way.  But, in fact, it did take a long time for Yale to react to anything, and it was because it wasn't on the west coast.  They weren't seeing people ship out to Vietnam and probably they were -- certainly around the Yale campus -- they weren't seeing much of the ravaged vets who came back.  Quite unlike when I came here to VCU they were actually students who were completely mad and collecting their student benefits and disappearing out of your class within two weeks, but they didn't want to be dropped because they got at least another semester of support.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was -- when -- to get back to the Marie story.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, what happened --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat happened then?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- what happened was Vince was a new master.  The SDS students and/or sympathizers when Yale was not taking due note of this incident and doing something reproving a student or doing something wonderful for the worker -- anyway, doing something -- it simply was an excuse for them and so they went and there was -- I think it was the provost or the associate provost's office was in that building that the post office was in.  It may not be there now, but it was a corner of the old campus.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  On the corner of High Street and --\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- whatever the other one is.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, somewhere down on that ground floor there was some kind of a provost's office or something and the kids had blocked -- because it didn't take too many of them to do it, either -- they blocked the office so that the provost couldn't go home.  Or the associate provost.  Whoever it was.  And they had a little bit of a rally going or something like that and I guess I was already a fellow at Morse.  I'm not really quite sure because it wasn't -- because before I was a resident fellow, I'm pretty sure.  And Vince Scully showed up.  He was the new master of the college and Vincent and I stood there watching what was happening, which was hardly anything, and there were freshmen \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=15000.0,15300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in the dorms hanging their heads out their windows overlooking the post office screaming, SDS sucks.  This did not seem like a very radical kind of situation.  But that was an indication of the kinds of language, trashy language, or bad language, however you want to put it, that radical students were perhaps beginning to import onto the campus and at some point, and it may have been in the resolution of that particular altercation and what was going to be done to the ring leaders or something like that, that the faculty had some kind of motion to think about this and whoever had made this motion was probably a senior professor who didn't know much about what was going on in New Haven or anywhere else.  And they wanted to -- some of them were really angry about this and terribly angry about the language that the students had used to the provost and it was incredibly impolite and they shouldn’t be allowed to use it and they wanted them suspended or something like that.  It was quite dramatic.  And they were particularly alarmed by the language that the students had used.  Not that they were holding the person hostage or keeping him from leaving his office.  It was the language that they were especially complaining about.  So Marie, and this was -- I remember this as one of the meetings in Spragg Hall, but I don't know that it was -- at any rate, Marie -- and I think that was the occasion and not a later one, but it's possible it was a later one.  At any rate, it was a very famous occasion in which Marie Boroff stood in front of the Yale College faculty and if it was Spragg Hall it's possible that it had to do with the later altercations and she gave the senior faculty a little lesson in linguistics and linguistic change and informed them that they were benighted in so many words and that there was no case to be made.  That the fact that they, when they were young, were not allowed to use this language did not mean that habits of speech and formalities couldn’t change and certainly in the context of the popular culture of the day and other things, there was no reason to punish students for the language they had used.  And, she ended the controversy.  They shut up.  They couldn't argue with Marie.  They wouldn't argue with Marie.  They might not have been entirely happy, but they certainly weren't going to cross her and she did make quite a little exposition of the linguistic principles involves.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there any -- did you know of any women's groups.  Because feminism would have really started to take off by 1970 in and around campus.  Did you have any experience of any of them?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI did go to either one or two groups.  I don't remember any other young English faculty going.  I don’t know why I knew about them and I don’t know why I knew who they were.  I can't remember.  All I know is that in one or two groups that I -- where I went to a meeting -- these were women who were really very, very angry in themselves and at the world -- and the kind of token that you had to present to really be accepted in the group is that you had to hate your father and you had -- they were telling stories about their fathers who really weren't very nice from what they said, but there was absolutely no way that I could participate in a group where what you had to do was trash your father because mine had been incredibly supportive and he came from a home where all of the boys learned to do every kind of women's work and all of the girls learned how to do every kind of men's work and they could all shift roles right back and forth and continued to be able to until -- most of them are dead, now, but they continued to be able to do that forever.  I mean -- you know?  I just couldn't fit in to groups for whom the issue was in the birth family and arguing that your parents had done you wrong.  I didn't think mine had.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=15300.0,15600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I didn’t find any groups that had any other agenda.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.  If there were any, I didn’t run into them.  And I frankly don’t think many of the junior faculty in English were involved in these groups.  I can’t remember who they were and I don’t remember any other person from English being in them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever teach any women’s texts with a – through a specifically feminist lens at any time?  Or did – or would that come later?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThat would have come –-\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tKind of feminist readings of -–\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI think that would have probably come later, and I don’t – I don’t think that it would have been much of an issue.  I certainly taught texts taught by women at some times, and peculiar texts.  I once taught the “Story of O,” which is very bizarre, written by men as far as one knows.  I think.  It says it’s written by a woman, but it isn’t.  I don’t think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI don’t think so either.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThat was pretty strange.  So while I may have been – I certainly taught the “The Wife of Bath” after all, but I don’t know that I ever set about specifically with an agenda to teach texts or courses that were strongly feminist in orientation, though not necessarily leaving out women’s issues.  I taught a lot in the History, Arts and Letters program, for which I was quite fortunate and maybe this is a time to talk about that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tGene Vance had been running the medieval seminar.  The whole program had been revamped sometime between the late 50s or early 60s and the time I arrived and it had been lengthened to a six-semester sequence fairly recently and the medieval seminar was the first.  They did them in chronological order, so the medieval seminar was for first-semester sophomores.  And Gene Waith, I think, had just taken over –- I’m not sure -– being in charge of history, arts and letters.  So it was toward the end of the first year I was there that Gene asked me if I would run the medieval seminar and I talked a bit to Gene Vance before he left.  And Jeremy Adams was going to do the history and for the medieval seminar it was the history and literature that were the largest part and then there was art history and music history and my -- I think my art historian that year was Walter Kahn.  But if it wasn’t, it was the visiting German art historian who did Roman [Askryland?], churches and stuff like that, and was very nice.  And I think Bill Waite certainly, who is one of the old school Yale professors, very charming, perhaps simplified things for undergraduates because he was very effective at dealing with them and knew how to demonstrate little things about music and music didn’t get that much attention, either.  And, I then, except for the year I was away, I think I directed the HAL seminar every year every fall after that, and I also worked out which students we could take in the fall semester and they had to be kids with pretty high -- we looked at board scores and first semester freshman grades generally speaking and they had to have an A, preferably in the more advanced English course, or some kind of history course or something they’d been writing for.  And they needed, really, to have at least a 650 verbal or they just didn’t make it through comfortably.  They could join the course later on, but they didn’t make it through that sophomore course.  It was too hard, too complex.  So, I taught for those several years with several people from other departments and got to know them and I liked that interdisciplinary work a lot.  Gene Vance was very supportive while he was running it, and then Bart was in charge.  And the year that Bart took over, one way and another a historian -- oh, no, I taught with Steve Osmond the first year -- but, the year that Bart took over, for one reason or another, either because they had left Yale or something had happened, I ended up with three Sterling professors on \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=15600.0,15900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"my history, arts, and letters staff and Bart was kind of worried about that and thought that I might find that difficult.  But I taught before with Crosby and Waite and they were very old school Yale professors who were -- knew how to handle young undergraduates and teach them a little bit and make it pleasant and make it clear and not give them too many variations so that they got confused.  Pelican was a little more problematic, because Pelican had a reputation already for refusing to order books for undergraduate classes.  He had been doing that in his medieval course and so the TAs sometimes in conjunction with Adams or perhaps Osmond ordered books to go with the lectures and required the undergraduates in the breakout sections to read the books.  But Pelican, again, refused to order any books, so I ordered some books, and Pelican was -- when you taught -- he was a funny man.  Very ambitious.  Very driven.  Very Central European in his tastes and sense of what one ought to be able to do.  He was eventually dean of the graduate school and very much wanted to be president of Yale or president of the University of Chicago, which may have been his alma mater and Hannah Gray was made the president at the University of Chicago and I’ve forgotten who got made president of Yale at that point, but it wasn’t -- it wasn’t Pelican and I think he felt really bad after that.  But, actually, I got on all right with Pelican.  I just had to deal with the fact that he was an egomaniac in this strange way and was very knowledgeable and he clearly didn’t write his lectures and probably somebody, I forget, maybe it was Jeremy Adams, said he must think about his lectures in the 15 minutes it takes him to drive in from Hamdon and the historians theorized that he didn’t assign any books because if he made a mistake, the kids might catch it.  So, I don’t know.  But, in the course of my working in that, I also taught with Craig whatever his name is, that I think is still there in music and I guess mostly Steve Osmond and Jeremy Adams.  I learned a lot.  It was like having a post-doc seminar and I needed that, really, or wanted it anyway.  So I found that a very satisfying teaching arrangement.  And then, I had -- my contract at Yale was really strange and I was trying to remember just how it went.  I think it was something like a one-plus-two-plus-one and in the end three or something like that.  If that adds up to eight years all together because the eighth year I really, and that might have been added on, too -- I wasn’t at Yale.  I was theoretically employed by Yale but the National Endowment for the Humanities was paying Yale to pay me.  But whatever it was, I got a Morse fellowship on the first round, largely because John Futaro liked my project and he was on the university committee and English either had to or did send up all the applications, though they had ranked Steve Barney’s first.  But John Futaro liked my project a good deal better and he persuaded the university committee to give me the fellowship.  And so no thanks to the English department, I got that fellowship before Steve did and that had something to do with why they then had to give me a one-year extension after that fellowship.  And then they gave me something else.  At any rate, it came up, toward the end, that they were going to be firing me early because of the way the contracts worked out.  And, they maybe even sent me a letter to that effect or something, that my contract was going to end at X date.  So I got rather upset.  It seemed really quite unfair.  There was no reason given for why my contract was being cut short.  And I was really quite upset.  So I went to Bart because he had just been \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=15900.0,16200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"tenured at that point or just been made a full professor I guess.  Maybe that’s what it was.  He had just been made a full professor or something.  So I went to Bart and I was really upset and I said, what am I going to do.  I think that was probably when Bart was running HAL or something.  And Bart said, ooh.  He said, this isn’t right.  I don’t think they know what they’re doing or something to that effect.  He certainly didn’t -- he didn’t seem to think that there was a lot of deliberation or something behind it, but he said, I’ve just become a full professor and it’s a rather traditional body and I think it would be a lot better if somebody else presented this.  Is there anybody else you could go to?  And I said, well, I think I could go to Gene Waith.  And he said, please go to Gene Waith.  Please go to Gene Waith.  But if he won’t do anything, come back.  So I went to see Gene and I -- again, I was really quite upset.  And in the course of talking with Gene, it became quite clear, and I understand this ever so much better now than I perhaps did, then, but even then it was understandable.  They had about, in any given year, 35 assistant professors in English.  And while some of them like me and Steve Barney and some others, Marge Garber, were around and participated in department things, not all of the same professors participated in those things and certainly not all the junior ones did.  So it became clear to Gene that he had no bloody idea who started when or how many years they had been there.  And he pulled out the list they had voted on, and there were mistakes all over the list, people who should have been in different categories.  So I pointed out what those mistakes were.  And, Gene was very nice and said, I will take this up at the next meeting of the full professors.  And so he did and they reversed their decision.  But there were several weeks of being really in a horrible tailspin because it -- you know, it wasn’t -- my marriage was on the line in ways that I wasn’t ready to deal with as well as my employment and as well as my -- I don't know -- losing out in some ways.  None of those things were attractive.  But Gene did take it up with the full professors and they changed my contract so that in the end I had whatever it was, 7 years at Yale plus an eighth year, I think, because the first year didn’t count against the seven years of the assistant professorship.  So I think that my year at the endowment was my eighth year, actually, technically on Yale’s payroll.  But that -- it was clear that the senior professors just didn’t keep their -- or the chair didn’t keep his records very well and they really couldn’t think or didn’t think very often about the effect that their decisions were having on the younger faculty.  And my silly former husband did not tell me until after all of this was resolved that he had already informed his law partners and they were standing by to take Yale to court.  It would have been very helpful if he had said that beforehand.  It was really, really stupid of him not to say that, if you need it, I’m lining up the support, and I have it.  And, indeed, there had been an earlier thing, a really dumb thing that Yale did.  When you were an instructor, which everybody up to my year and maybe even the year after was hired on, you weren’t eligible to collect retirement.  And, if Yale ever sent another notice about that in the second year, I couldn’t remember it and neither could most of my other junior faculty members.  And so Mitch said to me, well, you should pay up.  We have enough money.  You can pay your back pay back to when you were eligible.  So write a letter to whoever you’re supposed to write and ask about this.  So I did and it turned out to be the provost, and I got a letter back denying my request, at which point Mitch said, this is ridiculous.  He said, go to see the provost.  And he said -- and mention that your husband is a trial lawyer.  (laughter)  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=16200.0,16500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And so I did.  I don’t think I sent another letter to that effect, but I pointed out to him that I was certainly not alone among the junior faculty in not taking up this benefit because nobody was being reminded of it and people just forgot and didn’t sign up.  Well, I was reinstated and the back pay paid in and I think a letter got sent to everybody at that point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tReminding them that they could join up.  Not all of them did, but there was a reminder thanks to that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo really, by the time you were getting toward the end of your stint at Yale, you knew that that would be the end.  That you would have to find employment elsewhere. \r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt certainly seemed that way.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou knew that you weren’t -- you were highly unlikely to get tenure.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm-hmm.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOne didn’t like to face up to that.  And in fact -–\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd nobody ever -–\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- of course, they weren’t giving anybody tenure after that point anyway.  They were giving three-year associateships without tenure and it wasn’t so clear that I couldn’t have gotten one of those, something like that, because they weren’t making tenure decisions until you were 10 years in or 9 years in.  So I don’t think it was absolutely certain, but by the year they were making the decision, my marriage was coming apart, all sorts of things were terrible, and somebody -- either Marge Garber or Fred Nichols went and told Dwight Culler who was the chair that things were really very bad.  And Dwight was somewhat upset.  And whatever the point was, I think they wanted instead of waiting until the next day or something, they wanted to be informed that night after the meeting.  And, Marge and Fred were worried and they both lived in the same apartment house behind Pearson and Marge’s solution for problems in those days was mostly sort of to get drunk.  And so she and Fred, I think, had me at Fred’s place and cooked dinner and we made dinner and drank and Fred walked me home.  And as it happened, I don’t know whether I really told Mitch what was going on or not, but he was waiting in the dark for me to come in.  And, he heard Fred tell me goodnight.  I don’t know how much he heard.  And he had, I guess, become convinced that I was having an affair with Fred, which I never was.  He stayed a really good friend.  He used to come down here and housesit in the summer with his daughter.  But as soon as -- pretty much as soon as the door closed, he started screaming and berating and hit me and I got a black eye.  That was really charming.  And this went on almost all night.  It was just awful.  And, I think Dwight had called me at some point -- anyway, I had an appointment with Dwight sometime the next day, which was a good thing because I couldn’t get out of the house.  I finally said, I have to leave.  He didn’t go to work.  I have to leave.  I have an appointment with Dwight Culler, the chair.  I have to go see him.  And I was strong enough so that I got out of the house and Dwight had called -- it turns out that Dwight had called up Fred or Marge, I think Fred, to see if I was all right, and they had said, yes, because as far as they knew I was.  Dwight was horrified –\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen he saw you?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tMm-hmm.  So, it took a little while for all the legal things to get sorted out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  To have all of that happening all at once.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt still took a long time to get really undone.  I went off to Europe, I think off to England that summer.  I think.  And I came back and Mitch had gone down to see my college roommate whom he had seen friends with and Elaine said, Mitch, you have to explain.  He had gone down to see Elaine in the summer and she had just discovered or just had an -- I think she had just had an abortion.  Her second husband, she had called us up to ask for help and Mitch said, we don’t even know this man.  We can’t -- you know, if this were you, we’d do it.  But, not for somebody we haven’t even met.  But her former husband had gotten \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=16500.0,16800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"out of prison and she had gotten prison by mistake and had just had an abortion when Mitch showed up and so they kind of fell into an affair.  It didn’t really trouble me, because they were obviously not made for each other.  I mean this was -- so Elaine made Mitch tell me or call me up.  I think she made him tell me and then she called me up and actually that wasn’t a bad thing.  It was actually kind of a good thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid it free you in some way?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI didn’t know whether it actually freed me exactly, because after that Mitch and I started seeing each other again for a while.  And, in fact, he came to Washington after I was working at the NEH -- he came down a couple of times and I went up to New Haven and he rang me up while he was in Georgetown and he said, I think I’ve met somebody I might be serious about, but if you want to come back, come back.  But you’re going to have to make a decision, because otherwise, I’m probably going to pursue this and it seems promising.  And I said, have you noticed that we do very well for about a day-and-a-half and by the end of a weekend we’re back into some old patters that are really dysfunctional, really not good.  And I said, no, I’m not coming back.  So he then pursued this other person and married her and they’re still married.  And he’s lost his mind.  That is to say he can’t -- he’s lost his memory.  Or at least the short term memory so he can’t work.  He hasn’t been able to work for a long time.  Man, they had children and all sorts of problems.  They lost the first baby within hours of its birth.  At one point, Mitch got a telephone -- I was making calls for people to give money to Pembrook or something and my call was interrupted.  It was my mother-in-law calling to tell me that my former husband had tried to commit suicide.  Mary did not get along with the new wife, and does not get along with many of her children, really.  But she tended to like in-laws.  And she especially liked me.  And, for any things that I might have done that were a bit untoward, she clearly forgave me, the grouse that her own son was extremely difficult in her view.  But -–\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what were you going to do?  Your time at Yale was coming to an end and clearly your marriage was at an end.  How did you then figure out how you were going to stay in the profession?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I didn’t really, exactly.  I mean, clearly I needed to go on the job market at some point, but just at that moment, was it really that summer -- no, I stayed in New Haven for another year.  I had another year on contract.  And since I was the resident fellow, Mitch had to move up.  We had bought some property, so he moved into that place.  So I stayed as a resident fellow for the rest of the year.  I thought, oh, I’ll be a real grown-up.  I’ll eat in my own flat and after my own week I thought, gee, this is incredibly stupid.  There are really nice kids down there in the dining hall and they weren’t charging us anything to eat there, so I started eating in the dining hall with the students and I had a lot of -- some of the students from history, arts, and letters and some other things.  They were really a sharp bunch of kids and very pleasant and so I ended up eating in the dining hall.  Joe and Constance Lapalambaro lived upstairs.  Joe was the chair of poli sci, but he had had a divorce and a remarriage and he was out of money, and so he quite happily became a resident fellow and he had started his career in the Midwest.  He was always disgusted by his own children who got caught for being juvenile delinquents in Hamdon, Connecticut doing really stupid things.  Whereas he, at the age of 13, was running heroin for his Uncle Calico –-\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh my goodness.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\t-- who was eventually arrested while we were all living in Morse College and put away by the feds, finally.  Which was years later.  But Joe had been sent to college because the family had wanted him to become a lawyer and come back and defend them.  And he tried a semester of law school and he hated it and had gone to \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=16800.0,17100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Princeton and gotten a PhD and had first worked in the Midwestern circuit, so he wasn’t -- he wasn’t an old loo.  He had much wider acquaintance with America’s university system, not the south, but the Midwest.  He was very well connected and so Joe was a really helpful, rational sort of person to have as a neighbor.  As one tried to negotiate the next stages of the world.  And then a silly man, or at least a pompous man named Leeds Barrow was working for the NEH as the associate director of research grants.  And, in order to curry favor with Maynard Mack, he had an inter-personal -- no -- intergovernmental personnel and employee position to fill.  And, so he offered -- he called Maynard to see who Maynard would recommend.  I hardly knew Maynard, so I think what must have happened is that Maynard went to Dwight or whoever was still the chair.  It must have been still Dwight.  Dwight presided over all sorts of peculiar things.  Mine was only one.  Poor man.  So Dwight or somebody, I guess, called me in and asked me if I was interested, and since this would take me back to Washington and closer to home and it was clear to me that I needed to get out of New Haven and I needed some kind of transition away from all these things, including just being a member -- who was a member of the Yale junior faculty.  So I came down to Washington and Elaine’s closest friend from childhood was married and working in Washington and her husband had something to do with real estate.  Anyway, Julia, in fact, she didn’t actually rent the apartment or go there or anything, but she found out about it and one way or another, it was the apartment that Julia knew about that I took in Georgetown and spent a year working for the NEH and went on the job market.  I had been on the job market before but I hadn’t gotten anything.  Interviewed at the University of Montana, where one of my Pembrook friends was teaching or -- no, she was the -- her former husband -- she’s divorced from him but they had a kid so she was staying in Montana for at least a while and I’ve completely lost track of her since then -- but, I found out that she was there for reasons I can’t remember.  Maybe I just knew.  Anyway, I called her up and stayed with her when I went out there.  Her husband was on the English faculty at Montana at the time, although I don’t think he stayed.  And I had a bizarre interview.  They claimed, for instance, that one of the great perks of teaching at Montana was the winter ski trip, which people in New York paid $5 to $10,000 to get and the University rec office supplied all of the gear you needed and you could spend somewhere over Christmastime, I don’t know, snowshoeing across 20 miles or 50 miles or some horrible number of miles of Montana wilderness.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI could just see you do that.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I think they couldn’t see me doing that either.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tRight down to it, they didn’t, in the end, offer me the job.  But it was still pending when I got an interview at VCU and I almost missed the job ad.  It was in the late part of the thing.  Dewey Faulkner who was also from Virginia and formerly Yale junior faculty -- Dewey called me up from wherever he was and said, did you, or something -- did you see the VCU ad?  I said, no.  What’s that.  He said, it’s what used to be RPI.  I said, oh, what happened.  He said, well, they turned it into a university.  Hadn’t changed much.  But he said they have an ad in the late ads sections for a medievalist.  You ought to apply.  So I turned and went down and -- wherever it was -- saw the book and applied to VCU and got an interview and the chair at the time took me to lunch with nobody else and said, I need a faculty member here who actually understands what it means to do research.  He said, I have faculty members who think that they read a book in order to improve their classroom teaching \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=17100.0,17400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"or, you know, get their thinking up to date, that they have done research.  And you know and I know that isn’t quite what we mean.  He was an expert on comic books.  So, and he was one of three members of the department who grew up in Oregon Hill, which we didn’t really drive through, but a little bit of Appalachia in the city.  It was quite remarkable to have three people out of Oregon Hill, in those days, who had gone on, gotten PhDs and then ended up back at home, at least for a while.  Most of them staying.  And, it was lucky that they didn’t realize that I had much likelihood of getting an offer from Montana because it concentrated their minds and I think they were bringing people in one at a time and so they offered me the job and I took it but that didn’t end the problems here.  My tenure committee wanted -- voted -- 5-1 against tenuring and the only person, I finally figured out who voted for me, was the professor of African American lit, a middle aged woman from Charles City County, which one of my other colleagues says, black folks from Charles City County are superior to everybody else.  Daryl had done her PhD at UVA with Houston Baker.  Houston had stayed at Yale for a year.  He was among the 10 of us who were hired in 68/69.  So I don't know that Daryl -- I don't think she was taking any instruction from Houston.  She just read the stuff and she knew what her colleagues were worth and what they were like and so she voted against -- I mean, she voted for me.  And they all voted against.  The chair voted for me.  It went up to the dean and the dean was -- the associate dean was a professor of English and 18th century [men?] and he had come much earlier in the year and read my book, which had recently been published, and had deliberately come to me and said, I’ve read your book and I think it’s really good, which should have been reassuring, though I’m not sure that it was at the time.  But he really is the one who made the final decision because this place was very disorganized and to go up the line of procedures were not very refined or anything.  And then the department -- the people who were entitled to go to department meetings go furious with the chair and they held him -- I didn’t know anything about this.  They held him hostage in a department meeting or whatever they called it, the personnel committee meeting, which included all of the tenured people or all of the people who -- all of the tenured people I guess.  And they screamed at him for something like four or five others, berating him for his role in this.  And the husband of the woman who had chaired my committee puffed out, announcing that he was going to discover whether he had legal standing to bring a case to have my tenure denied.  None of this I knew.  I have to say that everybody who knew, and Tina knew a lot about this because although she wasn’t teaching at VCU at that point, there were at least one or two people who knew she was a good friend and who were feeding information to her which she never shared.  And the other person who didn’t share was the Africanist.  We had night classes together and we had been going out drinking with our students after class on that night class, all year, all semester.  And after I had gotten tenure, people’s behavior was so strange.  I was walking down the street with Prebie toward home on a particular street corner and I started to say something and he turned to me and he said, very loudly, shut up.  Just shut up.  I didn’t know what this was about, but I did understand that that was not an unfriendly instruction and that I better obey it and so it took a long time for my position in the department to really change but it has.  Completely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat do you think -- what lessons did you or insights did you take away from your eight years at Yale that you were able to use when you came down here, and then began your career as a tenured professor and you stayed here.  What were your lasting memories that were both positive and negative that you could bring to bear on \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=17400.0,17700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"your later professional life?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I did have some clearer sense of the standards of the profession than most of my colleagues.  Not all, but most of them.  I had, fortunately, done a lot of teaching at Yale at various levels, including Yale’s lowest level, which was probably a very good thing because the student population here was very mixed.  It included everything from people who were maybe not even literate.  I mean, literally not literate.  I mean, that’s what the students told me about one or two people.  But people whose literacy and whose mental capacity was a little slow.  All the way up to people who were absolutely breathtakingly brilliant.  And you could have them all in the same class, too.  It was like being in the second grade again.  And that was really very different from Yale.  It was a high teaching load.  It meant giving up being able to do all that much publication, because if you’re doing your teaching right, you really -- you really couldn’t do a lot of research.  There were no books in the library here.  Union Theological Seminary has been collecting since the mid-19th century so it’s a very useful adjunct to the VCU Library and VCU doesn’t college much in theological stuff but UTS was pretty helpful, especially in finishing up the last bits of the book or whatever it was I was doing down here.  Because they do have books.  Now, the VCU Library is heaving at the seams.  When I came, the bookshelves were at least five feet apart, I swear, and there were no books on them to speak of.  Now, the bookshelves are as close together as they can get them and still imagine that a person can get down the aisle and they’re full and books are falling off the shelf and they keep having to reorganize them and they put some books in storage.  So the people coming in now have a very different possibility that at least standard works, important works in the field published over the last 30 years or so, are very likely to be on the shelf.  Older books are not.  And, the proper editions are missing of some -- I mean, the critical editions or the one you’re supposed to site of 19th century people or early 20th especially are kind of missing.  The 18th century is good because that dean I spoke of earlier who liked my book was here early and he and a man who was I guess had retired when I arrived who was a medievalist, they had both done some back-ordering but there wasn’t much money for that.  So it was a very spotty -- very hard to do work here.  Your teaching took up all of your time and there weren’t any books.  So, I don’t know what I took away except a certain -- I did have a certain capacity for patience, but I don’t think this had much to do with Yale.  I think it had to do with growing up in the south and growing up in a small town and knowing that if you sat there long enough, they’d get used to me.  You became a piece of furniture.  You could be really (inaudible) but after a while they got used to you.  And, it wasn’t that the initial hostility from a certain number of my colleagues was going to last forever.  They were, after all, southerners and they get used to the furniture.  They expect it to be there.  And there would finally come a time when they expected me to be sitting there.  So I had some friends in the department, but there were others who I thought were friends -- those were the ones who were harder to deal with.  The ones that I had actually thought were friends who weren’t.  So I backed away from them.  I didn’t fight with them.  I just backed away.  It’s the only thing we can really sensibly do if you are in a position where you pretty much are dependent on the job and you don’t want to leave academia, you just have to back off and wait.  And I don’t know whether that’s true in other parts of the country, but it’s certainly true in the south.  They get used to the furniture and they miss it if it isn’t there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat do you think, looking back, you’ll regard as your best achievement in your professional academic life?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I suppose it would be finishing the first book.  That I thought, at least, perceived \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=17700.0,18000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"something that other people weren’t perceiving.  Relationships in the text and when I first told people like Steve Osmond, who is a professor of religious studies at Harvard, has been the dean of the college, you know, Steve worked and worked and worked -- he didn’t like being at Yale really too much and Yale wasn’t very too nice to him.  The senior people in history were awful.  They tormented -- I mean, they actively tormented their junior faculty, leaving nasty messages and just all sorts of horrible things that didn’t go on in English.  But Steve didn’t -- had never noticed this kind of connection.  Jeremy Adams hadn’t noticed.  And, once I started looking at it it seemed to me to be everywhere, the connections between adultery, idolatry and -- or sexual sin and judgment and so on.  So I thought that was really pretty good, and I think it was probably as well received in England as anything.  Jill Mann had good things to say about it.  That’s pretty good.  And it was certainly probably more read in England because more people in England were likely to be reading [Clenis?] whereas people here didn’t much read it, so I’m not sure that it made all that much of a splash.  And then nobody much cited it until the 1990s when there was a whole spate of books about the (inaudible) poet and so you know from 1976 until the 1990s, if people are really counting how many times you get cited -- but that’s the way it is in medieval literature.  You can have these gaps and spaces.  So –\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that I was struck by is I’ve noticed -- I noticed -- looking at the Yale University Library catalog on the ORBIS catalog that I think you’ve published four volumes which are indeed all essays and on or for (inaudible), for people in -- for medievalists, for people like [Colvy?] and I just wondered if there was -- if I should read anything into that.  That you’ve seemed to do very well at honoring people in your part of the trade.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, Judson had been so generous to so many people and the news of his illness was so awful and so I don’t know, Penelope and Jory and I got together.  Penelope and I were in graduate school together.  Jory was an undergraduate at Stanford at the same time and Jory stayed with my former husband and me in London part of the year that we were in London.  She had come from Stanford and France, which had been led by Dale and they had discovered drugs amongst the students who had, fortunately, flushed them all down the toilet before the French police came.  But Dale had been threatened with being locked up with these kids and he only liked four of them and one was Bob Jaeger.  One was Jory Woods and I don’t know who the other two were.  But Dale as beside himself.  He was very funny about himself.  But Glenning, Penelope and I were -- no, Glenning didn’t do his PhD, did he? -- I don’t know -- we were Dale’s first PhD students and Judson had just been so generous to everybody and we felt terrible for him and one thing and another and there were an awful lot of people who felt pretty strongly and the one thing we could do and let him know that we were doing it, although I can’t -- I don’t think he lived to see it finished, but he knew that we were doing it and that was really -- we thought -- important.  And there was no problem about getting people willing to get contribute and to contribute fairly big stuff.  It was a lot of work and I did almost all of it myself.  Finally.  Because Penelope -- I forget what she was doing and I forget what Jory was doing but I was the one who had to send it off to the publisher and try to finish a couple of articles that people had not really finished and tell some people they had to do some re-writing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat sounds like an editor’s job.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.  It was more work.  I have to say that I had been trying to sort out -- it was clear that [Colvy?] had to have a [feschrift?] \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=18000.0,18300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I mean, that was just stupid.  And I think Bob Jaeger was closer to [Colvy?] and more involved than I had realized for a long time.  I knew they were pretty close.  And Bob -- I talked to him a little bit and he’d indicated that he was willing to do something or to help out and he was running Pegasus Press then and whatever else was -- at one point in the works or in the thinking didn’t work out and I went back to Bob who said, oh yes, I’ll do it -- and then that coincided with a horrible situation that he got caught in with -- no, it was just awful.  And I don’t know how he managed to get the book out.  He took an awful lot of responsibility for that one.  And what’s the other one?  I’ve forgotten.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it John Burroughs who was the other?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tOh, what happened on that one was Stephen Metcalf.  Do you know Stephen Metcalf?  Frumpy Stephen Metcalf.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I don’t know him.  No.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, he -- I was visiting at the Burroughs on time when he was external examining and they were very funny about him.  And so I met him on that occasion and then I ran into him at the New Chaucer Society Conference in Canterbury.  He was the worst-dressed person at that conference.  Bar none.  But he knew who I was from there and he knew that I was close to John and so we happened to be at the train station at Canterbury together as we were leaving.  I don’t know how that happened, but -- anyway, we were, because we were going in different directions.  And he sat there and he said, you know, is anybody doing a [feshrift?] for John Burroughs and I said, not that I know of but I haven’t asked.  And he said, well, it’s time.  It’s time to get organized.  I said, oh.  I said, well, I’ll check with [Thorlack?] Peter and Alistair Minnis because they are the two most obvious people to me to be involved in such a thing and I’ll see what I find out.  And Stephen made it very clear he had no intention of having anything to do.  He would be willing to contribute but no intention of running this.  He just wanted to make it very clear that it had to be done.  So I then got in touch with [Thorlack?] and Alistair and neither one of them had started to think about this and so we started planning and you probably know the rest of that story since Alistair was involved.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tAnd in the end, I think I did the most work on the Judson Allen [feshrift?] because I think Oxford was publishing and a lot of the stuff was coming in from the UK that Alistair and Thorlack almost certainly did more work on the latter end of that and maybe all of that since most of the contributors were British.  And on the [Colvy feshrift?] I did some of the work, but it’s a massive book, if you’ve ever seen it.  It’s huge.  And Bob was about to be in the thick of all sorts of legal and other difficulties and there were financial problems with the press and somehow, miraculously, they got it all done and Andy Kelly decided that the way to present this was that they -- UCLA, which has a lot of money -- was going to have a conference in [Colvy’s?] honor and everybody was going to come to this conference.  All of the contributors who possibly could.  And read short versions of their paper and we all laughed aloud because, as we said, it’s the only conference that anybody knows of where Dale [Colvy?] had to listen to all of the papers.  He never stayed at conferences like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, right.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo, Andy Kelly put together quite a fine show and Jaeger just, I don’t know how he pulled it off.  It was stunning.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhy do you think there are so many women in medieval studies?  There do seem to be -- it seems to have a fair sprinkling of women, even going back to women like Helen O’Dell and others back in the 20s.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, it’s fair to say that the early literature in the early part of the century was privileged, that people didn’t do modern literature and modern started with the 19th century at least.  Yale had very big 18th century studies, mostly before I got there, but what with William [Whimsat?] and Maynard Mack and Ted Hillis, I think, and at least somebody else who was retired, I can’t think of his name, Yale had very big 18th century studies in the generation or so before I arrived and seemed strongest in 19th while I was there.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=18300.0,18600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But I really think that it has to do with what people understood the profession to be and it had to do with the influence of German universities and philology on the study of English, that that was what English departments did.  They were, from the turn of the century as English departments came into existence, they were initially kind of modeling themselves on German universities, especially in the US, and so philology was a big part of graduate work in English or in any other Germanic language at least.  Cornell and Chapel Hill, in my day, were really the best language schools I think, but Harvard, Michigan, Stanford had Chapel Hill people.  Fred Robinson and Herbert Merritt and then one Michigan person, Ackerman, that some of the earliest schools granting PhDs in English were quite strong in philology and I think that had something to do with the influence of German universities on US curriculum.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere women particularly attracted do you think to those things?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I think women still often are attracted to medieval subjects, in part because it’s different.  It’s now quite like the way gender relations shape up now.  That every now and again there is a woman either properly or improperly who seems strong to modern women, but I do think it has a lot to do with the number of people who were specializing in early literature, medieval to renaissance.  Rosalie Coley and Rosemund [Tuth?] were, I think, Renaissance people really, but that was kind of a continuum.  So I think until sort of the Hartman-Bloom generation, doing work in the 19th century wasn’t really on.  The 19th century had to be well and truly ended.  The 20th century has been much more interested in studying itself than was common in the early universities near as I can figure out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo a lot of those choices were really not particularly woman’s choices but choices of the whole profession.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I understand.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI was going to ask you something else about women but it’s just suddenly gone out of my head.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt may come back.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI can’t believe it.  I’ve forgotten what I was going to say to you.  What do you -- now that you -- are the places at Yale that still have a ways to go at having 50-50 male-female faculty.  I mean, it is getting there, albeit slowly.  I think the latest figures said something like 30 percent of the faculty is now women.  But women are now very, very much part of the furniture in terms of academic life really everywhere, and I just wonder if you had any views looking back through your own experience where that’s taking the Academy and how it has changed it?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tWell, I’m not sure I do, really.  One thing that’s happened in the American Academy is there is a presumption that almost anybody who is literate will have a college degree.  And I think the current economic downturn that we’re headed into may shift that a little bit, but it’s probably not going to shift it a whole lot.  The -- it’s really hard to tell because the students I’m teaching now are not the privileged -- not, by and large, super-privileged students, although the state of Virginia, according to recent things, holds on to its high school graduates at a very high rate, partly because it has a highly diversified system and has always thought that individual institutions should be individual.  Not all cookie cutter copies of one another.  And, VCU is probably doing pretty well because it’s in the city and it’s the only one of the Virginia state-supported schools in a proper city.  Unless you count Norfolk, and I’m not sure you do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  (laughter)\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tSo, we’ve been \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=18600.0,18900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"getting a bit of benefit from that.  And we see a lot of students here who go -- who come in, fart around, fail out, and then they come back several years later, a little more grown up and a little more aware that they really aren’t going to thrive in the world of modern work unless they pick up that piece of paper, whether it really means a whole lot or not.  But I think it does mean something in terms of one’s outlook and flexibility and one’s ability to teach oneself what one needs to know.  That university students get better at learning and at picking up new things and teaching themselves.  That’s my theory.  And they certainly improve their writing skills, if they’re English majors, which is really the only thing they have to sell, pretty much.  So, it’s an enormous shift in a place like Virginia to have such a huge proportion of the population assuming that their children need at least a four-year degree.  I was at a -- one of the reunions that my -- the high school class -- I think this was a multi-class reunion -- and it included all five years or so of the people who were first there or something like that.  And it was quite interesting to listen to them talk because many of my high school classmates, some of whom may later have collected degrees, assumed that graduating from high school was the real be all and end all in 1960.  They now assume, and they’re talking about their grandchildren now, that their grandchildren must have college degrees to survive in the current economic world.  And they were taking up money for a scholarship for students in Loudon County, graduating from Loudon County high schools or maybe LCH -- I’m not quite sure what it was for in the end -- and that’s just an astonishing shift.  But then Loudon County has completely changed, too.  And many people live close enough around to see the changes, even if they don’t live right in the country anymore.  So, there has been a real stretching out of education and sometimes I think that for those people who are able to finish secondary school say as early as my mother or a bit earlier, even, perhaps, they may have known almost as much as college students except they lacked the maturity of being 21 and they were not necessarily as self-motivated.  And for African American students, there can be even harder dynamics at work, that they’re not supposed to seem to be studying when they’re in school, but when they come to university it’s all right.  So the culture shifts for them.  So I don’t know.  I think it’s really pretty strange.  We’re keeping people in school for a very, very long time.  It’s not clear to me that people aren’t wasting a certain amount of that time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think having so many women on the faculty now is changing the culture of university life?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI’m not sure.  It may be changing the culture of work life, but it’s not just universities where there are a lot of women working and so relationships between the sexes have changed some.  There is the kinds of things that people weren’t sure how to negotiate when I was teaching at Yale and what the work relationships between the sexes could or should be and how you responded and just a whole lot of issues.  That’s, I suspect, gotten kind of ironed out and is not as -- it was sort of easy or loosey goosey and then when the power suits came in in the 80s, it got kind of rigid and tough minded and seemed adversative in some ways, and I think now the middle class has settled in to understanding that everybody, every family has got to have two incomes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tThere’s a kind of desperate need for everybody to have a job or something very close to it.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=18900.0,19200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And unless your husband is a corporate lawyer and then it’s not necessary.  So I think that it’s not just women in university, but women in the workforce in general has changed a good deal of the culture of working.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tIt’s still the case from my friends who work in corporate law firms, that corporate lawyers are nuts and they have had absolutely no training in managing their work schedules.  They are horrible to work for.  They scream and yell and swear and they are very awful to their assistants.  It’s better if you work with the younger lawyers than the older ones, on the whole.  It would be interesting to see how the culture of big law firms shifts because that’s one of the truly prestige jobs in a way, very high paid if you get in the right place.  And with the culture of men in those firms really not managing their work very well and abusing their under-staff as a result.  And for one, Richmond has a lot of corporate law firms and for women who got widowed or usually divorced and especially if they had children to take care of or something like that, one of the best jobs in town was working for a corporate law firm because they paid well and their benefits were excellent.  But I’ve heard a lot of stories.  So, I really think that in starting really, roughly, with my graduation year almost, which was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed, and that legally transformed but didn’t initially necessarily transform people’s habits very much, that legally transformed the way people can work and what you can exert and what you can do and unless somebody decides to tear up the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its implementation, it would take a lot to -- it would take a whole lot to change back.  On the other hand, one wonders what we’re going to do economically, that there seems to be a lot of tests down the road that could really cause massive changes again, not necessarily for the better.  There is a distinct possibility that the west will be impoverished or that the whole world will be, as we’ve used up the planet.  So who knows.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, that’s a rather depressing note on which to stop, Charlotte.  Thank you.  Thank you.\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOK.  It’s recording again.  OK, Charlotte, you mentioned just a little while ago something that we’d like to add as a little addendum to the interview.  We were talking about relationships between junior and senior faculty, which is something that a lot of women have brought up in -- that I’ve been in contact with and one of the things that I’m curious to hear from you is your experience in so how far did senior faculty take a real and vital interest in nurturing junior faculty research and writing and general kind of intellectual activities?\r\n\nCHARLOTTE MORSE:\tI think that’s probably -- that may be a little bit hard to answer.  About half the people on junior faculty while I was there were Yale PhDs and so at least some of the people on the untenured faculty had their mentors around.  I don’t know how much they helped, but they were there, and certainly knowledgeable about what the younger folk were doing.  But for those of us who came in from outside Yale, their often wasn’t really very much direct help.  And as I think as I may have already mentioned, John Futaro was actually quite helpful to me.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=19200.0,19500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"He didn’t actually read my work, but we talked about particularly some of the ideas that went into the pattern of judgment and he -- I’m not sure it would have ever had an Arthurian or grail quest dimension if it hadn’t been for Futaro.  So Futaro was important but he certainly didn’t have any real responsibility for me.  It’s also true that while I was at Yale, there was a real problem with senior medievalist.  Talbot Donaldson had gone off and he eventually -- he came back before I left, but the reason that John Burroughs was there the first year and of course John continued to read my work and to be helpful but he was only at Yale for a year and that was really because of personal friendship that began actually as he was on his way to the United States for the year and has continued forever until now.  And John has often read my work.  So I suppose you could say he was a substitute in a certain way there, but when Talbot and John Pope was an Anglo Saxonist and Marie, I never really got to know terribly well.  I think she did read something and gave me a bit of advice once, but I was a little bit afraid of her, really.  And, Talbot certainly -- I mean, he had a lot of problems at the time.  He really did have a very distressed period in his life and he was eventually to marry Judith Anderson and finally his life was settled down and things were good again and he was perfectly friendly and nice but he didn’t have anything to do with and didn’t, so far as I can recall, ever read any of my material.  Even Bob [Kaske?] was more helpful than that.  He -- when Talbot was away, Yale invited [Kaske?] down.  They didn’t like each other.  The fight over [Britta Marks?].  Another story.  But [Kaske?] was very nice and it was the first time I had read a paper in public and he was very solicitous and gave lots of his standard advice because he did nurture his students at Cornell far more than I think anybody at Yale took care of their students on average.  But the last -- just before my last year at Yale, I had been elected president of the Morse fellowship which was not a position of any great -- that had any great onerous duties attached but it was, I guess you talk to the master about things every now and again, organized a little bit, but it wasn’t very onerous.  However, I walked in to Dwight Culler’s office one time that spring and he said he was scratching his head and kind of lamenting that he had all of these people coming in visiting or doing something and he didn’t have any office space to give them and he had to find offices for them.  And I already knew that there was an office in Morse College that nobody much wanted.  It was kind of down in the basement and a couple of other people had offices there that they didn’t use very much.  So I said, well, I think we have a free office in Morse and I’m pretty sure that Vince Scully, who was then the master, would have no problem and the fellowship would probably have no problem with putting up some of the visitors in English.  So Dwight was quite pleased and pulled out his list and said, well, he said, who do you want?  And said, we’ve got two medievalists coming in.  One first semester and one the second.  It was Jimmy Krauss the first and Eric Stanley the second.  And I said, well, I’ll have the Medievalist and I’ll check and let you know to make sure it’s all right.  And so I went back and checked with Vincent and it was fine and nobody had any objections, including [Asgara Albo?] who was the historian -- history of mathematics, mainly, is what he did.  And, so in the fall, Jimmy Krauss appeared with his wife, which is probably fortunate because he behaved better when his wife was around and that was quite pleasant.  And, then, in January, Eric arrived and my first impression of him was he was -- it was an astonishing presence.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=19500.0,19800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285/transcript/31935/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"He does have that face that has parts that go in all different ways and he arrived in a black leather bomber jacket.  Quite a strange -- quite a strange -- strange gear for a man who was already quite distinguished and would become the Bosworth and Toll or whatever it is professor of English at Oxford before all was said and done.  But, Eric got on with the fellows of Morse College quite well.  They appreciated him and since they did lots of strange things themselves, the history of mathematics, Chinese, and Victor Erlich in Russia and so on -- Eric got on quite well with the folks at Morse and he asked me what I was working on and I explained and he said, well, has anybody read it.  And I said, well, no.  Nobody has asked or offered.  And he said, oh.  He said, well, do you mind if I read it.  Or something like that.  Anyway, I gave the manuscript to him and he made notes and offered crits and helped here and there.  It wasn’t in too bad shape when he got it.  But, Eric was astounded that the senior faculty was paying so little attention to their juniors.  Now, some of that was that about half of them were their students and maybe they had continuing relations with their own students, but they certainly were not paying much attention to the rest and I’m not sure they were helping their own very much.  Eric, certainly, as he looked around, didn’t think they were.  And he did have a very fine reputation coming out of Queen Mary for enabling his younger faculty to do well and being concerned for them.  And so Eric really essentially took me under his wing and has been a very supportive ever since in a way that -- or John.  John Burroughs and Eric Stanley are really the people that I would go to and not any of the regular people at Yale.  So, it was a happy coincidence that Dwight Culler needed offices because it did mean that I got to know Eric very well.  But that remains one of -- and Eric then stayed at Yale for a long time.  But that remains one of this criticisms, that the Yale faculty really didn’t pay very much attention and didn’t do much to nurture this younger faculty, many of whom they would be sending out into the wider world.  That it was a kind of post-doc if you -- I mean -- that would be a way that the senior Yale faculty could think of junior faculty positions, that they were really post-docs, but they didn’t treat -- they didn’t really treat people as if they were still in that sort of position.  So, I was just very lucky in the visit -- in the English visitors.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThank you.  That’s great.\r\n\r\nEND OF FILE","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48965/file/122285#t=19800.0,20096.4702"}]}]}]}