Maggie Doherty

“Dancing the Jig”

He was strong, handsome, and energetic, the kind of man who spoke easily at rallies. Together, they took on a slew of projects—leafleting, organizing, and registering voters. (In his later years, Jack befriended all the sex workers who walked his neighborhood streets in San Francisco; he registered each of them to vote and
talked over every ballot issue

They eventually learned a lot from each other—what books to read, what kind of literature to write—but first they had to learn to trust. This was no easy task in the late 1950s, a time when suspicions ran high.

The writer Janet Malcolm remembers this as an era of “duplicity,” a time when women in particular became so used to lying—about their desires and about their actions—that deception became integral to their identities. “
We were an uneasy, shifty-eyed generation,” Malcolm recalled. “We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become.” To bare one’s true struggles—one’s true self—was to run counter to all the edicts and habits of the time.

Bunting suggested that the NSF committee begin their research by identifying the smartest kids who weren’t going on to college, those who were, somehow, being dissuaded from fulfilling their potential. To answer her own question, she looked up a study done by Donald Bridgman, an education researcher who had broken down his data by gender. Bridgman was studying extremely bright students whose IQs put them in the top 10 percent, and he identified the students in this percentile who had not pursued a college education. Of these bright students who didn’t go on to college, at least 90 percent were women.

The nation was going to lose the Cold War to a country that relied on both men and women for research and innovation. The women of the Soviet Union demonstrated their scientific acumen: they made up 30 percent of Soviet engineers and 75 percent of the nation’s doctors. Meanwhile, American women made up only 1 percent of the nation’s engineers and 6 percent of its doctors. The United States was wasting a precious resource, what Bunting would later call “
educated womanpower.”

Despite all her activism on behalf of women, Bunting didn’t identify as a feminist. For her, as for many women in the 1950s, feminism seemed radical, even sinister; it smacked of communism, bohemianism, and radicalism. What’s more, women like Bunting had a different idea of social change from self-identified feminists. Whereas feminists wanted to change the rules that governed the social world, Bunting and reformers like her wanted to help individual women learn the rules more quickly and be more at ease within them

As they got to know each other better, as women and as thinkers, Bunting grew wary. Friedan was outspoken. She was angry. She saw women’s problems as a result of male interference in women’s lives; to Bunting, it seemed that Friedan was thinking “
in terms of men against women, and was feeling very bitter about men and what men did to women.” Bunting—a humanist, a happy wife, and the descendant of a Quaker—found Friedan’s polemical style and vitriolic tone unappealing. (It was not atypical for a WASP to find a Jewish woman overly emotional.)

Educated women need not be unruly activists. While the pioneers of women’s education had been “crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate, but also, at times, loud,” today’s women didn’t have to conform to this stereotype. After all, the brochure announced, “the bitter battles for women’s rights are history.” The Institute, like so many other women’s education reforms of the era, was framed as a gentle corrective to a life course that was already moving in the right direction

Others hired housekeepers or babysitters, usually women of color. At the time, black women provided the bulk of domestic labor in America. In 1960,
one-third of all employed black women were domestic workers. (Although the economy and labor force have changed greatly since this date, black women remain overrepresented in low-paying and low-prestige jobs. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “
Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely to work in ‘service’ occupations as White women”; these jobs tend to be low paying, irregular, and precarious.)