The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike *****

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, …by Kate Zernike is my second book for Women’s History Month. I found both books disturbing and discouraging. Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis told of privileged men taking advantage of poor and black women. The Exceptions focuses on different privileged men (some with Nobel Prizes) taking advantage of women scientists (some with Nobel Prizes). In both cases, the books celebrate small victories. Regardless, the underlying problems still exist today. The bottom line? Being a female comes with challenges and obstacles independent of race, class, education, or position.

I attended MIT and recognized some of the details, like roast beef sandwiches from Elsie’s in Harvard Square and the 10-250 lecture hall.

“In 1959 that the Russians graduated more female engineers in one year than the United States had in its entire history.”

Title IX helped. Annamaria Torriani-Gorini, who had labored as a research associate for thirty years after receiving her doctorate in biology, was elevated to the faculty in Biology at MIT, as was Vera Kistiakowsky in Physics. /// MIT offered her a position as an associate professor, on the tenure track. Her job offers elsewhere were one level below, for assistant professorships. She thought it was as nice an apology as MIT could offer for the form letter rejecting her first application.

“Gerty Cori worked as a research associate at Washington University in St. Louis for sixteen years before she was made a full professor in 1947, the year she and her husband won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries about how sugars are metabolized. She had earned one-tenth of what her husband did, even though they had earned the same degree from the same medical school and worked side by side.”

“One would have assumed that all tenured women would be treated exceptionally well—pampered, overpaid, indulged,” she wrote. “Instead, they proved to be underpaid, to have unequal access to the resources of MIT, to be excluded from any substantive power within the University.”

A landmark report in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female faculty members had experienced sexual harassment, and that the biggest complaint was not “sexual coercion” but put-downs about their intelligence, exclusion, and the kind of marginalization that the women of MIT had described twenty years earlier.

Lisa talked about salaries, how some women realized they were underpaid only after they got sudden raises.

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Women Race & Class by Angela Y Davis *****

For Women’s History Month, I read Women Race & Class by Angela Y Davis. This book was written 40 years ago, but it reminded me of several contemporary civil rights campaigns. Me too. Black lives matter. $15 minimum wage. Women, Race, and Class. If you’re interested in the history of these struggles, I recommend this book.

In the pre-Civil War South, it was illegal to educate enslaved people. One of the things educated people could do was write their own passes which were required for travel.

Prior to the civil war, men and women worked side-by-side in the fields promoting equality of the sexes.

There was always racism in the North, just not enslaved people. Miss Crandall opened a school for black girls in Connecticut. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

Woman’s suffrage was promoted as  a way to assure white supremacy at the polls (coupled with a literacy requirement to vote).

The women’s suffrage movement excluded blacks so as not to offend the Southern state, but the Southern states refused to ratify the 19^th amendment anyway.

Did they know that “a colored man once said that if he owned Hell and Texas, he would prefer to rent out Texas and live in Hell…”?

Lynching pre-Civil War was reserved for white abolitionists. Black rapists did not exist until reconstruction when the myth was created to justify black lynchings.

Before birth control, there was voluntary motherhood.

Sojourner Truth’s famous speech against the idea that women were fragile and weak: I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

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