"I can do it."
I was the first person in my family to go to college. My father went to law school at night at a time when a college degree was not a necessary prerequisite. My mother was a brilliant woman, but she was frustrated all her life because lack of education kept her from doing things she knew she could do. They raised my sister and me in Brooklyn, where I learned a lot from excellent public schools and more on the street. Our high school was one of those legendary huge New York public schools where they computed student averages to the fourth decimal place.
I came out pretty well, and though I knew little about the differences between colleges, I did know some fancy names. So, in the spring of 1948, I applied to and was accepted at Radcliffe and Swarthmore. During a reconnaissance trip to Cambridge, I noted the heady atmosphere and saw that Radcliffe was not Harvard and that the Cambridge city streets seemed, after all, just more city streets. Then I came here. I got off the train at the bottom of the hill, and by the time I reached the Parrish steps, I had made up my mind. Before that walk, I had no idea that you could actually live in such a beautiful and peaceful place. That was enough for me.
But it wasn't enough for the principal of my high school. Only a few others from our school had ever gotten into Harvard or Radcliffe. Not too many had gotten into Swarthmore either, but that didn't seem to worry him. Harvard, even Radcliffe, was a feather in his cap. It wasn't just that schools like Radcliffe favored private school graduates. They also discriminated against Jews. As the principal explained at length to me and to my bewildered parents, I had no choice&emdash;I had to go to Radcliffe. If I was accepted and didn't go, Harvard or Radcliffe might, in the future, take even fewer Jews or applicants from our school. He seemed quite sure that his admonitions would be accepted. He didn't know me well&emdash;or, more pertinent, my father. When we left the principal's office, my father said, for the first of many times to come, "Do what you think is best." My mother, for the first and only time, held her tongue.
And so I came.
Like Radcliffe and other schools in those days, Swarthmore had its own reservations about Jews. The quota for Jews was, I recall, 10 percent (others remember 14 percent). Actually, in 1948 the discriminatory practices of the College seemed a small transgression compared with the fate of Jewish children of my age in Europe. That my grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe early in the century was the accident that saved me from the Holocaust.
We Jewish freshman were all clustered in the same halls, and all our "big sisters" were also Jewish. When Dean Susan Cobbs was asked about this some years later, she said it was because she thought we would all be happier that way. It took me many years to admit it, but she was probably at least partly right.
Nowadays, diversity in the Swarthmore student body is considered to be an essential component of a good education, and Jews are simply included in the general category of Caucasians. As far as I know, no one is counting us anymore. Maybe someday colleges can give up such counting altogether. We're not there yet, but we can hope it won't be too long. The truly interesting point is that Swarthmore, in our years, was amazingly diverse. You wouldn't know it looking at our yearbook photos, but the range of talents, interests, and outlooks was enormous.
Diversity is, in a very real sense, my business. I evolved from a chemist to a geneticist of the molecular variety. The study of genetics deals with genes, chromosomes, and DNA molecules, the sources of biological diversity. At Swarthmore, I inherited values and inclinations that complemented the biological inheritance and other cultural foundations that I had brought with me to the College. The Swarthmore experience prepared me to join the scientific community and sustained me in it through these long, and never easy, years.
How was it that in the 1950 Swarthmore environment&emdash;with its American middle-class roots, its deep ties to a religious tradition, and its commitment to a liberal education, in the classical meaning of that term&emdash;a young person could acquire the culture of modern science? How could this civil place impart the iconoclastic skepticism, the will and skill to challenge received wisdom, that are essential to the scientific enterprise? More to the point, how could this happen to a young woman at a time when the scientific community was itself hardly congenial to female participants?
The answers to these questions are partly general and partly specific.
For the general, two aspects of life here were important in nurturing a young scientist: freedom and optimism. For most of us, Swarthmore meant our first freedom from family, from the communities of our childhoods. It also meant the first real intellectual freedom to think on our own. And we all quickly learned that to share thoughts meant subjecting them to criticism.
Optimism can follow on freedom, but it also requires a level of self-confidence. It is not enough to think, "It can be done"; it is also necessary to believe, "I can do it." The path, even at Swarthmore, was not smooth. Eventually, it dawned on me that to go from the "I think I can" stage to the more optimistic "I can do it" stage requires a certain level of arrogance. I began to recognize that arrogance can play a constructive role in scholarship. Competition presents related quandaries. It's only a small slide from "I can do it" to "I can do it sooner and better than anyone else." Competitiveness, like arrogance, is not always attractive, but both often motivate good science.
When my generation of women left Swarthmore, most of us were neither fully free nor completely optimistic. Now, 45 years later, most of us have still not achieved the level of freedom and optimism typical of the best male scientists. It is likely that my most-accomplished male scientific colleagues had no need of being taught about freedom and optimism. Unlike women, they grew up with these attributes as part of their internal environments. The social science research of Carol Friedman Gilligan '58 [see p. 47] documents this difference be-tween American boys and girls. Perhaps this is beginning to change, but that is another story.
In our class the core group of serious and gifted science students was overwhelmingly made up of women. (We would have said "girls.") Six of us in particular were friends. We were colleagues. We were competitors. We talked. We fought. We borrowed sweaters&emdash;and ideas&emdash;from one another. We lived together in
shifting combinations as roommates in the same dormitories. In the preceding and following classes, there were other scientifically inclined women who figured importantly in our seminars, discussions, and lives&emdash;people like Ursula Victor Santer '53 and Lisa Steiner '54.
The men in our science and math classes were themselves wonderfully talented, but there was never any reason to assume that they were more important to the highly interactive student group, or to the professors, than were the women. And as the four years progressed and the classes and seminars became smaller and more advanced, the women predominated. There was not for us, as there apparently was for so many young women of our era, any reason not to take ourselves and each other seriously. No one told us that we couldn't do what we all dreamed of doing. The invisible walls around this place shielded us from a fact that most people knew and we were to learn: that there was little space in the outside world for women as scientists. It was this core of students that really educated me. Thanks to the group, the rest of the world began to seem manageable.
Was our confidence simply a construction of ambitious young women? The first evidence came our senior year. Sue Carver Buchanan, who became a successful cardiologist, was accepted into a great medical school even though she ruined her chances at another by telling her interviewer that his questions about her plans for marriage and family were out of order. That took guts in the spring of 1952. The other five went on to graduate school, with National Science Foundation fellowships. That was the first year such fellowships were available. Six hundred were awarded nationwide; 32 went to women; five of those women were members of Swarthmore's Class of 1952; a sixth was Rada Demerec Dyson-Hudson '51.
Some of us were fortunate enough to find ourselves in graduate departments that were hospitable. Others encountered more typical troubles from their male professors. One way or another, we prevailed. We did all the things we weren't supposed to do as well as those we were: We got degrees, we worked, we broke new ground, we published, we married, and we had children. Joan Berkowitz, an inorganic chemist, heads her own successful company in the field of hazardous waste removal. Laura Maurer Roth became a professor of physics. Vivianne Thimann Nachmias is a professor of cell biology. Barbara Wolff Searle went back to mathematics and wound up working on education for the World Bank.
Swarthmore has been and remains a place where young women can get an extraordinary start in science. Swarthmore graduates older and younger than we have made important contributions to the modern understanding of the natural world. It is a marvelous surprise each time I encounter one of them&emdash;astronomers like Nancy Grace Roman '46 and Sandy Moore Faber '66, biologists like Jane Kellock Setlow '40 and Carolyn Walch Slayman '58, professor of linguistics Barbara Hall Partee '61, and seismologist Ines Cifuentes '75.
All of these women have been able to contribute to the incredible scientific discoveries of the past decades. Swarthmore made it possible. And in doing that, it has played a critical role in advancing freedom and optimism for all. It is a role to celebrate! n
Maxine Frank Singer '52 is president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. This essay was adapted by Roger Youman '53 from Singer's address to the Alumni Collection during Alumni Weekend 1997. Youman is married to Singer's sister, Lillian Frank Youman '57.
Swarthmore College. All rights reserved. 1998