Virginia Gildersleeve, 1912
Columbiana

When Gildersleeve took over the stewardship of Barnard College, the woman's movement was in full flower and both parents and trustees were anxious about the movement's possible corrupting effects on young women. Dean Gildersleeve had barely settled into her new office when the distraught mother of one student arrived at her door. The mother implored her to forbid Barnard students from participating in a planned suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue. To "march in a parade would be a shocking and shameful thing" for the students to do and would "injure the college greatly," the distressed mother warned. Nor was this mother alone in opposing student support for woman suffrage. At Vassar College administrators so feared adverse publicity should their students become involved in the unladylike world of political activism that student supporters of the suffrage movement had to hold organizational meetings in the local graveyard to avoid detection. And at Barnard itself, members of the Board of Trustees opposed Barnard students having anything to do with woman suffrage. Foremost among these opponents was Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of the college and a member of the Board. Although Meyer had challenged convention by seeking admission to Columbia many years before, and then, when rebuffed, by mounting a campaign to open Barnard, she drew the line at demanding a place for women in the political world -- a world that she and many others at the time regarded as too sordid for a refined woman. Despite Meyer's outspoken views, Gildersleeve refused to interfere with student suffragists; indeed, she encouraged faculty and students to engage freely, not only in the fight for suffrage, but in all the political movements of the day. In contrast to Vassar, with its ban on all suffrage activity, Gildersleeve's Barnard had an openly acknowledged Socialist League. And in the area of campus known as the jungle (where Lehman Library now stands) many a stump speaker defended a controversial cause.

New York in the 1910s fairly burst with political, cultural, and economic energy. For women this energy produced unprecedented opportunities in such fields as journalism, publishing, law, medicine, and social work. Determined that her students should be prepared to take advantage of whatever chance might become available, Gildersleeve worked steadily to open Columbia’s professional schools to them. The Schools of Journalism and Library Science admitted women when they opened in 1912, and the School of Business did the same when it opened in 1916. Winning entry sometimes took more, however, than a simple decree that women might take classes. The School of Journalism, for instance, required a course in government as a prerequisite. Barnard did not at that time offer government courses, government being a subject thought suitable only for the male students at Columbia. But taking advantage of the Board of Trustees' desire to win admission for Barnard women to Columbia professional schools whenever possible, Gildersleeve quietly hired a young Columbia instructor in 1914 to teach Barnard's first course in American government. The young man was Charles Beard, and his wife Mary was one of the city's leading young reformers.

Gildersleeve saw a chance to press her case further in 1915, when the Columbia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa asked her to be the first woman ever to address them at their annual convocation. In welcoming her as that year's speaker Professor Harold Webb of the Columbia Physics department sent her a list of the subjects of prior addresses to serve as a guide. These subjects included "Competition in College," "New Humanities for Old," and, most recently, "The College Man's Opportunity in Public Life." Having reviewed these titles, Dean Gildersleeve selected her own: "Some Guides for Feminine Energy." Gildersleeve's address was a genteel, but nonetheless clear, declaration of war on the male-led university. She began by pointing out that 1915 was not only the year of the Great War in Europe, but that it was also the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Barnard's founding. And therefore, she declared, "Speaking . . . as a representative of a feminine college on a feminine anniversary, I feel committed to a feminine subject, and for this I crave your indulgence."

Politely, no doubt, her largely male audience listened, as she took up her theme of female energy. As most of her listeners would have been aware, she was playing with an idea that had long plagued women scholars in America. Back in 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke of the Harvard Medical School had published a book in which he claimed that the higher education of women would kill off the middle class. Basing his dark prophecy on a view, widely held among physicians at the time, that the body is a closed energy system, he explained that energy available for one task -- the development of women's mind -- would not be available for another -- the development of women's reproductive organs. In short, the mental strain of higher education would inevitably render women students infertile. The prospect of infertility raised, in turn, the specter of "race suicide," which was the belief that middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were marching toward extinction as a consequence of their declining birth rate. According to President Theodore Roosevelt, there would soon not be enough sons to go to Harvard. Angry, but undaunted, talented young women had been flooding the colleges ever since, distinguishing themselves academically and, in due course, maternally. However, concern about the limits of feminine energy lingered, especially in the minds of male academics. Could women really be expected to excel academically, given the reproductive and domestic demands on their energies? This was the question that Dean Gildersleeve was implicitly addressing in her speech.

And her answer was a simple yes; women had plenty of energy; indeed, their energy sought new outlets, since the technological change of the previous generation had removed the great bulk of domestic work from the home. A learned woman could read by an electric light, rather than having to devote winter afternoons to making candles. A learned woman could even, with a clear conscience, abjure motherhood now that improved public health and declining infant mortality made it unnecessary to breed as many children as once had been the case. In the modern world women could have the same ambitions as men. Having laid down the gantlet in her Phi Beta Kappa address, Gildersleeve began to move on several fronts: scheming first to open the medical school and law schools to women, second to create opportunities on the faculty, and finally to press for broader opportunities in the world.

As one of the members of the University Council, Dean Gildersleeve met regularly with the deans of all the schools that comprised the university, and at every opportunity she mentioned the importance of extending greater educational advantages to Barnard students. The Dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Samuel Lambert, seemed sympathetic, but insisted that change must await the school’s move to larger quarters. In 1917, unwilling to wait any longer, Gildersleeve told the dean that "a brilliant young Swedish woman, Gulli Lindh," was about to graduate from Barnard and attend Johns Hopkins Medical School, but that she would rather stay in New York. The Dean responded that he would be happy to have her and others, but that, at a minimum he had to provide additional laboratory space and a room where women students could hang their hats. Gildersleeve, assisted by the American Women’s Medical Association, offered to raise the $50,000 needed for such a project, and the medical school took Gulli Lindh, as well as five others to keep her company. Four years later, Lindh graduated first in the class, and two of the other women graduated third and fifth.

Dean Harlan Stone and his Law School faculty proved more resistant to Gildersleeve’s blandishments. In 1915 President Butler lent Gildersleeve his support by calling a meeting at his home of the Educational Committee of the Columbia Board of Trustees and several of the more senior members of the law school to discuss the matter of women’s admission. Butler and the trustees favored the change, but the law faculty, fearful that admitting women would cause their best male students to flee to all-male Harvard, flatly refused. Gildersleeve’s wry suggestion that the two schools hold hands and take the dangerous step toward coeducation together did not receive a favorable reply. Indeed, in a letter the following week Dean Stone advised her that the majority of his faculty viewed coeducation as "unwise" and warned that further "agitation" on the matter would not be helpful. Although Yale Law School’s decision to admit women in 1917 drew favorable notices from the press, Columbia Law School refused to follow its example.

By 1924, the year Virginia Gildersleeve lay the cornerstone of a dormitory to help house Columbia’s exploding female graduate population, women’s enrollments at the university outpaced men’s by 18,000 to 15,194. But still Columbia Law School refused to open its doors. It took another two years of determined effort, including a Barnard faculty petition appealing to the law faculty’s sense of justice, before Columbia Law School grudgingly and narrowly agreed in December 1926 to admit not women in general but only those Barnard students who were particularly recommended by the Dean of Barnard College. Law School Dean Huger Jervey warned Dean Gildersleeve against giving any publicity to her victory. He did not want "the appearance created that the Law School had determined at this time generally to admit women equally with men." Gildersleeve complied, and sent only her best graduate, Helen Robinson, for admission in the fall of 1927. But word of the law school’s action got out, and two female Columbia graduate students, one with a master’s degree, the other with a doctorate, sought admission. Dean Jervey found them too well qualified to turn away. Margaret Spahr (Smith A.B. 1914, Columbia A.M. 1919, Ph.D.1926) was the first to graduate. She did so in two years, and in the process became the first woman to serve as an editor of the Columbia Law Review. In 1942, the last professional school hold-out, the School of Engineering, succumbed to the Gildersleeve treatment in the midst of World War II and admitted female students.

Scholars have written a great deal in the past two decades on the importance of World War II in opening up jobs in war industries to women; this was the era of Rosie the Riveter. Much more important in the long run, though, was the chance created by the war to open science to women. Predictably, Dean Gildersleeve played an important role in that effort. In articles, radio broadcasts, and speeches she hammered away at her favorite wartime theme: to win the war the nation needed highly trained scientists; to have enough scientists, the country would have to turn to its women.

Gildersleeve did everything that she could to keep her students in school, to dissuade them from quitting to take a job in a factory -- no matter how glamorous wartime propaganda made the job seem. She also did everything she could to keep from losing her students to marriage. She seems to have accepted the fact that, given the wartime pressures, marriage to departing soldiers would occur; she simply drew the line at students following their new husbands to wherever they might be sent. In her view young wives were far better off at Barnard, completing their education than they were staying near some military camp on the other side of the country.

The war offered Barnard an unprecedented chance to turn out physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who could have their pick of good jobs. Gildersleeve was aware of the Manhattan Project across the street at Columbia and the fact that women were being hired to work on it. She knew that there was a crying need for engineers, and she used this knowledge to win women admission to Columbia's School of Engineering in 1942. She housed one of the country's foremost code-breaking programs at Barnard. She found jobs for anthropologists with the Army and Navy, which were desperately seeking specialists who could advise their aviators how to get along with the peoples of the South Pacific. She established one of the country's first programs in international relations to prepare women for the foreign service. And she won a place for women in the armed forces by helping to found the WAVES, the Navy's female reserve officers' corps. The WAVES, under Gildersleeve's leadership became a military branch of the Seven Sisters. Gildersleeve served as President of its advisory board. Its highest-ranking officer was the much younger President of Wellesley, Mildred McAfee; its second in command was Gildersleeve's close friend, English Professor Elizabeth Reynard; its officers – 85,000 at one time – were all college graduates or had at least two years of college with two more years of professional or business experience.

Gildersleeve had no illusions about what would happen to women’s opportunities after the war: they would shrink, perhaps even disappear. But, she insisted, where opportunity remained, her students were going to have as big a competitive advantage as she and the educational resources at her command could assure. More than a decade before the National Manpower Council was to publish its path breaking study Womanpower on the need to train women in America for science, Gildersleeve was leading the way.

The opportunity to build on the accomplishments of the War came in February 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt named Gildersleeve to the U.S. delegation to write the United Nations Charter. Shortly before Gildersleeve was to leave for San Francisco, a celebration was held in her honor at the Commodore Hotel. There she was feted by, among others, William Allan Neilson, past president of Smith College, who noted that Gildersleeve's appointment gave recognition to two important facts: first, the increasing importance of academically trained experts in politics, and, second, the increasing influence of women in world affairs. Neilson regretted that Gildersleeve would be the only woman on the U.S. delegation, "but that will not matter," he concluded, "if only the men will listen."

When the delegates from around the world assembled in San Francisco a couple of months later, they accepted the instructions worked out for them the previous year at Dumbarton Oaks, outside Washington D.C., and reaffirmed at Yalta in February. They were instructed to write a Charter that addressed two issues. The first was the need to prevent future wars. This they were to accomplish through the creation of a Security Council. The second issue was the need to enhance human welfare, which they were to accomplish through the establishment of an Economic and Social Council. Gildersleeve sought and received drafting responsibility for the work of this second Council -- the one, as she put it, in charge of doing things rather than preventing things from being done.

What did Gildersleeve accomplish at the Charter Conference? By her own account she was able to insert into the Charter's statement of purpose the following goals for people around the world: "higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development." She also persuaded the delegates to adopt the following aim for the United Nations: "universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." These were goals she endorsed not only for their importance to the enhancement of human welfare, but also because she saw them as providing job opportunities for all the women who had been training to be health professionals, research scientists, lawyers, teachers, and social workers. She was advocating nothing less than an international Works Progress Administration for educated women. To carry out its work the Council was given the power to appoint whatever commissions it deemed necessary, but Gildersleeve insisted that the Charter require the appointment of one in particular: the Commission on Human Rights. This was the commission that, under the direction of Eleanor Roosevelt, would write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later. This declaration, in turn, has served as the basis for all of the United Nations' work on behalf of women throughout the world over the past two generations.

Gildersleeve’s battling on behalf of her students was of a piece with her cosmopolitanism. Though born and raised in the comfortable confines of New York’s Episcopalian upper crust, she gained a far broader perspective on the world as a student at Barnard. She later credited her mentor, social historian James Harvey Robinson, especially, for teaching her tolerance and the capacity through careful scholarship to put herself in the place of others from very different cultural backgrounds. Gildersleeve helped found the International Federation of University Women, insisted that the WAVES be integrated, counted academics of every race throughout the world as her friends, defended political dissent at Barnard, and took pride in Barnard’s diversity. By diversity, Gildersleeve did not mean religious or racial diversity so much as diversity of talent, without regard to background. Gildersleeve insisted, on liberal principle, that Barnard keep no record of the religious affiliation or ethnic background of its students. It is therefore difficult to be certain of the religious and ethnic makeup of its student body or how that makeup changed over time, but in the 1930s the percentage of Jews at Barnard appears to have been at least 20 percent, significantly higher than the more typical five percent of other women’s colleges.

For all her cosmopolitanism, however, Gildersleeve’s strategy for opening doors to women at Columbia was rooted in class and ethnic prejudice. She hand-picked the students she anointed as pioneers. They were superior students, of course, but they were also white, well-bred, Protestant, and well-spoken in the faintly Anglo-inflected manner of the New York upper crust. Barnard had a few black students during her tenure, but Barnard’s tuition, high academic standards, and reputation as a college for the affluent barred most candidates from even thinking about applying. Pauli Murray, who would go on to be one of the outstanding civil rights lawyers and feminist leaders of her generation, was turned away in 1927 for want of funds and the inadequate preparation she had received in the segregated schools of Durham, North Carolina. Novelist Zora Neale Hurston attended on a full scholarship provided by her literary mentor Fanny Hurst, but she lived in Harlem. In the 1930s, civil rights activists, including the Reverend James Robinson (whose church was at Morningside Avenue and 122^nd Street) apparently persuaded Gildersleeve of the need both to recruit talented black students and to provide full scholarships to enable them to attend. Pressed by students in the early 1940s to do more, the dean paid for the full scholarship of at least one Negro student from Harlem out of her own pocket. But by the time Gildersleeve retired Barnard had only eight students in its student body of 1400.

Barnard attracted far more Jews than blacks. Indeed the numbers rose so rapidly that Gildersleeve worried that the reputation of her school would suffer. In 1924 she took the initiative to form the "Seven Sisters" association of women’s colleges, which included Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Barnard. Her aim was to reorient Barnard away from its ethnic, urban setting toward the more genteel and gentile image of the other Seven Sisters. It was very difficult as a Jew in the 1920s and 1930s to compete with WASPs on an equal footing for job opportunities, medical or law school admission, or graduate training, for anti-Semitism appears to have permeated the Barnard staff. When future sociologist Mirra Komarovsky (BC ‘26), a Russian immigrant, sought support for graduate school from her favorite professor, William Ogburn, he warned her, "You are Jewish, a woman, and an immigrant. I suggest some other occupation." When Doris Milman (BC ’38), an outstanding student and future professor of medicine, sought support from Chemistry Professor Marie Reimer for her medical school application, she was met "with sympathy and the caveat, ‘You’re Jewish, you know.’" She was accepted at New York University Medical School but not at Columbia.

Despite these obstacles, women of every background capitalized on the efforts of Gildersleeve and others to open opportunity in Columbia’s graduate and professional schools. Between 1910 and 1950 Columbia dramatically outpaced other universities in the production of female Ph.D.’s, both in raw numbers and in the percentage of degrees awarded. This productivity tapered off for a time after World War II, when Columbia mirrored the pattern of the rest of post-war America. As GIs flooded the universities and as the age of marriage fell, women lost out to men in graduate education at Columbia, as elsewhere. But in the 1960s Columbia surged ahead once again, dramatically outpacing its rivals. 

From the start, Barnard had one of the highest ratios of female to total faculty in the country, and the faculty prided itself on offering opportunity to talented women not available even at most other women’s colleges. This concentration of women scholars gave many women students the confidence to think that they too might pursue academic careers, and many of them later did so at Barnard, which favored its own. To keep standards high a 1922 agreement reiterated the right of Barnard professors to teach in the graduate faculties and gave Columbia departments an important say in Barnard tenure decisions. This policy increased the status of those women professors on the Barnard faculty who won promotion to tenured positions, but at a price. Dean Gildersleeve was perfectly frank in keeping women relegated, disproportionately, to the lesser ranks. To maintain close relations with Columbia she needed to be able to attract top-flight male scholars and pay them more. She knew that she would always have an ample pool of talented women to fill the lower ranks. Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky had published two books before she could persuade Dean Gildersleeve to promote her to the position of assistant professor. Komarovsky always felt that the reason for the long delay had as much to do with her being a Jew as being a woman.

Gildersleeve may have discriminated against the women on her faculty in promotion, but she was entirely supportive when it came to marriage and motherhood. In the 1910s, when the New York Public Schools still barred married women from teaching, Gildersleeve insisted that a woman’s marital status was entirely her own business. This had not always been the case. When Barnard Dean Emily Smith had married in 1900, the Board of Trustees had encouraged her to continue her work, but under her successor, Laura Drake Gill (1901-1907), married women were not so fortunate. In 1906 Gill demanded the resignation of physicist Harriet Brooks, when Brooks announced her intention to marry, over the vehement protest of Brook’s department chair, Margaret Maltby. Gildersleeve, in contrast, gave married female faculty members became common under Gildersleeve’s tenure. Some were even mothers. In 1931 her faculty mothers were suddenly much on her mind. At about the same time that she agree to grant a paid leave of absence to a male professor who was in the hospital, a female member of the staff asked for the usual leave of absence without salary because she was going to have a child. "It suddenly struck me as unfair that you should receive full salary if you went to the hospital because of illness but that if you went in order to provide another citizen for the community, you should lose all your pay." She raised the matter with President Butler, who "looked a little startled." But when Gildersleeve mentioned to the Francophile president that France was providing such a benefit to its female teachers, Butler readily agreed. "We should have women teachers with fuller lives and richer experience, not so many dried-up old maids," he opined. Gildersleeve recorded this remark in her memoir without comment. Her victory, evidently, trumped the implicit insult from her boss and old friend. With the help of Barnard Trustees and staunch feminists Helen Rogers Reid and Alice Duer Miller, Gildersleeve persuaded the Barnard Board of Trustees to enact a maternity policy that provided one term off at full pay or a year off at half pay for all new faculty mothers. In the first year three women took advantage of this new policy.

Curiously, the policy was reduced in 1953 under the leadership of Millicent McIntosh, the mother of five, in one of Barnard’s periodic budget reduction efforts. The revised policy allowed for leave at half pay, with the time off to be determined in consultation with the dean of the faculty. Although students later remembered McIntosh, rather than Gildersleeve, as the champion of the working mother, Gildersleeve deserves the greater credit for initiating policies that helped make the combination work. By the 1970s, faculty women who gave birth in those years later recalled, the pattern was 10 days leave with one course reduction. But even so, Barnard remained rare among institutions of higher education in acknowledging that it had faculty who might be mothers and who had special needs.

Barnard also had many women on its faculty and administrative staff who were neither mothers nor even wives. In her 1954 memoir, Gildersleeve poignantly protested the "particularly cruel and unwholesome discrimination against unmarried women," like herself, who chose to spend their lives living with other women. She attributed this trend to "the less responsible psychologists and psychiatrists of the day," who voiced "disrespect for spinsters in the teaching profession as ‘inhibited’ and ‘frustrated.’" Gildersleeve never identified herself as a lesbian, preferring instead the adjective "celibate." Many students recalled her as "austere" and "aloof," although some thought her simply very shy. Since she spent about half of every year on international work, which culminated with her serving as the only woman among the American delegates at the 1945 United Nations Charter Convention, she was not well known to students in her later years. And as American culture became increasingly sexualized, she found that she ceased to fit in, even at Barnard. For several decades she lived with Barnard English Professor Caroline Spurgeon. Later she lived with Barnard English Professor Elizabeth Reynard. She was hardly lonely, or, as Butler would have it, a woman without a full or rich life. Indeed, her freedom from conventional family life gave her enormous freedom for her international work. To the end, however, she tried to create opportunity at both Barnard and Columbia for women, whatever the condition of their private lives might be.

Despite her many efforts on behalf of women, Gildersleeve did not like to identify herself as a feminist. It was largely a matter of style. She rejected the confrontational tactics of those like Alice Paul and her followers who courted arrest during World War I as they castigated Woodrow Wilson for not supporting women’s right to vote. "I was not battering at the doors from without, but working from within," she later reflected. She thought it important "to avoid as far as possible creating antagonisms" for "most of my colleagues outside of Barnard had to be handled rather gently." Hers was, by modern standards, a timid course, but one that produced dramatic advances for women.

Barnard’s relationship with Columbia, together with Columbia’s situation in New York, helped produce an unusually high concentration of female academics on Morningside Heights, compared to the numbers of faculty elsewhere in the country. This concentration, in turn, had two consequences. First, it helped fuel a revolution of rising expectations that insured that Columbia women would play a pivotal role in a movement that emerged in the 1960s to protest the limits on the opportunity available to them both at the university and in the society beyond. Second, the concentration of women at Columbia facilitated research over many decades that was then considered outside the mainstream of scholarly endeavor: research on women, families, and children, as well as interdisciplinary research on a wide variety of fields. This research played an important role in creating the distinctive point of view from which the modern women’s movement would eventually develop, at the same time as it gave women academics fields of research in which they encountered virtually no competition from men

When Gildersleeve began her academic career at the turn of the twentieth century, American women had barely established a toe-hold in higher education, and that toe-hold was by no means secure. By insisting that women could succeed at the very pinnacle of academic and professional life, she swam against powerful currents of public prejudice. Many parents sent their daughters to women's colleges like Barnard with the expectation that they would be sheltered from such corrupting influences as feminist ideas. But Gildersleeve did not see herself as a surrogate mother. She aspired to be a leader of a new generation of American women -- women who deserved to be prepared for every opportunity that they might be able to claim.

Through her work Gildersleeve and other pioneers like her provided the essential conditions necessary to winning for women full equality with men in American society and throughout the world. In gaining for women access to medical school, she began to change the face of American, and later world, health care. In gaining for women access to law school, she opened the way for full participation in politics, a calling for which a law degree, if not essential, has nonetheless become the single most important qualification. In broadening women's scholarly horizons, Gildersleeve laid the groundwork for some of the most innovative scholarship of the twentieth century. And in helping to draft the Charter of the United Nations, Gildersleeve assured that the issues to which she had devoted her career on Morningside Heights would be addressed throughout the world in the decades that followed. By insisting that women have the right to every educational opportunity open to men, and by fighting her whole life to secure that opportunity, she helped establish the bedrock on which feminists have been building ever since.

Sources: Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (1954) and the Gildersleeve papers in the Barnard Archives.

Rosalind Rosenberg