Phoebe S. LeBoy Lecture, University of Pennsylvania, October 25, 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust
It is a real pleasure to be back at Penn and to be speaking in honor and memory of Phoebe LeBoy. Phoebe was a force, a figure in Penn’s history whose service and commitment profoundly changed the landscape for women at the university. A biochemist, she joined the Dental School faculty in 1967. In 1971 she became the first tenured woman there—and remained the only one for the next 21 years. It seems that she took on every committee and leadership role possible across the university during those two decades—from a task force created to evaluate the Student Health program to a crucial role on University Council to the Chair of the Faculty Senate and more. Her name is ubiquitous in the Almanac and the Daily Pennsylvanian (DP) during that time. And in every one of these positions, she worked assiduously, strategically and effectively to advance the place and the interests of women at Penn.
I am a half generation younger than Phoebe. I arrived at Penn as a graduate student in 1970 and received my PhD in 1975. These were critical years for the Women’s Movement and for Phoebe’s leadership at Penn. For me, Phoebe modelled what might be possible; she expanded our imaginations and aspirations as she showed us that women could be respected members of the Penn community, could find faculty positions, could join with other women to make change. During my graduate years, I cannot claim to have been at the heart of this movement. I did participate in various demonstrations—including the famous anti Rape sit in of 1973, about which I will tell you more later, and my sympathies were certainly aligned with the activists. But I spent most of my time in those years studying, and it is only now looking back that I see the import of what was happening during that remarkable time. The work done and the risks taken by Phoebe and others transformed Penn. But they also transformed my life—creating an opening door that I could walk through to a job and a career and a life that would have been unimaginable without their dedication and accomplishments.
So today I would like to share with you a brief chronicle of that half decade in tribute and gratitude to Phoebe and a handful of other women who led the charge and the change for women at Penn between 1970 and 1975. I would also like to remind all of us, at this troubling moment for women in our country, that the rights we enjoy as women did not just happen; they were not inevitable. It was not so very long ago that words were said and actions taken that seem unthinkable. But they did happen a half century ago and became unthinkable only because of the struggle by women like Phoebe. We have been forcefully reminded in recent months that we cannot take equality or justice for granted. To quote an anthem of the civil rights movement, “freedom is a constant struggle.”
In 1970, 12 percent of Penn’s fulltime faculty were women: 2.5% of full professors, 7% of associates and 12.7% of assistants. But these women were very unevenly distributed with the bulk of them concentrated in Nursing, Education, and Social Work. In what was then called “the College,” now Arts and Sciences, there were no full professors at all—and there would not be until 1973 by which point there were 2. Three associate professors were in 1970 the only tenured women in the school. In a wide range of dimensions beyond employment demographics women were absent or marginalized. To give one example: in 8 lecture series during the preceding 5 years, 300 speakers had participated. Four were women.
When I was considering applying to the Graduate School in 1970, I was interested in two programs: History and American Civilization. I wrote to both for information, explaining that I was then married to a medical student and inquiring whether after two years on campus to take classes I would be able to contemplate writing my dissertation from elsewhere in case my husband got an internship away from Philadelphia. Having come from Bryn Mawr and its supportive atmosphere for women scholars I was surprised when the History Department Graduate Chair wrote back saying I shouldn’t bother to apply because the department was not interested in women who had to make adaptations for husband’s careers. Happily, AmCiv felt differently and awarded me a fellowship. But I now know I had collided directly with a justification that was invoked repeatedly by Penn faculty resisting women’s academic presence: they would ultimately waste their education in deference to husbands’ careers.
In 1969 the University Council, comprised as you know of elected faculty, students and staff, created a Committee on the Status of Women. Chaired by Mildred Cohn, a professor in the Medical School and a distinguished biochemist, it released its findings in early 1971. Significantly, it began by acknowledging that women’s issues at Penn were much broader than the faculty questions on which it would concentrate, but the bulk of the report did focus on the unacceptably small numbers of female faculty and on what it called the “myths relating to the scarcity of qualified women.” It concluded that “Because of the inequitable ratio of men to women on the faculty, not changed significantly in the last decade, we feel that if a man and a woman are equally qualified, the women should at this juncture, be chosen.” With admirable optimism, the report asserted that this policy should be reviewed in five years to see if the inequities had been resolved. This was, of course, a call for affirmative action in faculty hiring. Then as now, it aroused controversy.
But the early 1970s were quite a different historical moment. Supreme Court cases like Bakke, Grutter and Fisher had not yet revised and refined affirmative action’s meaning into the focus on diversity that prevails today. The language of the Cohn Report, with its notion of compensatory action and preference, was at the heart of a set of government policies and initiatives that provided both a backdrop and a fuel for what was unfolding at Penn. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson had issued Executive order 11246 declaring that any entity that received significant federal funding had to take “affirmative action” to ensure that equal opportunity was provided racial minorities in all aspects of employment. Two years later women were added to the scope of the measure. If the available pool of qualified workers had a higher percentage of minorities or women than an institution employed, the employer would be required to submit a plan to mitigate the inequality. Penn rapidly attracted scrutiny. In the fall of 1970, a delegation from the department of Health, Education and Welfare, the forerunner of today’s HHS, visited the campus for a compliance review and charged the university with submitting an Affirmative Action program for HEW approval by the spring of 1972. It is worth stepping back for a moment to note and remember that although the Executive order had been issued by a Democratic president, the enforcement efforts Penn confronted through the early seventies came from a Republican administration—that of Richard Nixon. These early affirmative action commitments were bipartisan.
When Provost Curtis Reitz noted in fall 1971, that there seemed to him to be a “sharper sense of urgency” on campus about women’s issues in recent years, he was reflecting not some abstract change of heart and attitude but the twin pressures of government enforcement and women’s rising demands for change.
President Martin Meyerson, who had taken office only in 1970, recognized their force—acknowledging that hiring of women and racial minorities was both a legal burden and a moral imperative. The university did not meet the initial HEW deadline, and produced a draft report that was greeted with scorn by women faculty. Only belatedly did it provide a plan acceptable to the community and the government. But Penn did not follow the path of resistance pursued by some of its peers. The Columbia president told an audience that the university would “blow sky high if independent department were forced to consider race and sex when hiring.” For a time, HEW froze its contracts with Columbia.
But opposition persisted among male faculty at Penn. In 1973, a University Council subcommittee sought to overturn the preferential language of the Cohn report, declaring the policy would “lead to an almost certain deterioration of the quality of the faculty.” Phoebe LeBoy spoke out eloquently against this assertion and against the subcommittee proposal. “Unless positive action is undertaken to overcome the effects of systemic institutional forms of exclusion and discrimination, benign neutrality in employment practices will tend to perpetuate the status quo indefinitely.” A paucity of Black and women faculty, she argued limited the experience of “all of our students.” Meyerson reinforced her objections, observing that the faculty proposal was “inconsistent” with federal policy. “Universities,” he declared, “should be concerned not just with half of humanity but with all of it.” The language of preference remained in force.
HEW’s requirement that Penn create an Affirmative Action Plan had another significant outcome as well. It produced an organization called WEOUP, Women for Equal Opportunity at Penn, founded in 1971 – – with Phoebe’s leadership – – as a “legal action and research group” to ensure implementation of anti-discrimination laws and pressure the university to develop a “vigorous affirmative action plan”. It would become much more, developing a powerful voice on every aspect of women’s experience at Penn, and it would become a kind of platform for another hero of the emerging women’s movement at Penn, Carol Tracy.
WEOUP—the acronym began with WE. And from the outset the group was committed to including not just faculty but all women at the university. This breadth was empowering – – by 1972 WEOUP had 500 members – -and it opened the door to an extraordinary young leader. Carol Tracy was working as a secretary in the veterinary school while she pursued her undergraduate degree in the continuing education school. She became the uncompromising and brilliant voice of WEOUP—demanding an affirmative action plan that included specific timetables and goals. These were, she wrote “nothing more than the yardstick by which we measure… good faith.” She insisted that “tokensim will not work in place of affirmative action.” Carol never minced words, believing that making knowledge about discrimination public was the first step in eliminating it. As part of a panel for the Trustees on the subject of Penn women, Carol would boldly declare that the university nurtured an “atmosphere which is not congenial to their particular needs, and at many points openly hostile.” To emphasize her point, she recounted the story of a class she had recently taken with a prominent historian who felt moved to comment on “how well stacked Dolley Madison must have been.” (I wonder if I might have encountered the same historian. I remember once in a wide ranging seminar discussion, I suggested that a different interpretation might be more persuasive. My professor responded, “So what do you think the answer should be, smarty pants?”)
WEOUP – – and Carol – – played a critical role in relation to a tenure case that spanned almost my entire graduate years. Among their most important contributions was their insistence that the details of the case be public—indeed that the case materials be published in the official University publication, the Almanac. This gave the Phyllis Rackin controversy an impact that stretched well beyond the individuals and department involved. The case was, WEOUP stressed, “a unique tool for study.” It became a symbol of injustice, a warning about the consequences of treating women unfairly, and an inspiration to women about what struggle might achieve. The story is worth retelling in some detail—partly because it is shocking to recognize what it was permissible to say and do a half century ago, but also because it reminds us of what it can take to make change happen.
Phyllis Rackin was hired as an assistant professor in the English Department and given an 18-3 positive tenure vote by her colleagues in the fall of 1969. The Chair of the department forwarded the recommendation to the next levels of review with a statement of his own opposition to the appointment and his negative evaluation of her qualifications. Unsurprisingly, given the Chair’s intervention, the Provost Staff Conference, the ultimate level of review, turned her down. Students were outraged, and 119 of them submitted a petition detailing her virtues as a scholar and teacher and asking that she be reconsidered. In the meantime, additional information about her credentials had been added to the Departmental file, so the chair felt compelled to call for a new vote—on one day’s notice and by secret ballot. This time it was closer, but Rackin was still approved by a narrow margin. The Personnel Committee of Arts and Sciences and the Provost staff Conference now delivered their approval, but, undaunted, the English chair called for a third departmental vote and this time succeeded in securing a majority against her promotion. As WEOUP would later point out “not one of those who determined her fate [at any level] at Penn was female.”
Rackin appealed to the University Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. Here at last there were some women—Professor Helen Davies of the Med School was chair and Phoebe would soon follow her in that role. They judged that because of the glaring irregularities in the process, Phyllis Rackin should be tenured. But the English Department Chair was having none of it. “My complete conviction,” he wrote is “that if Mrs. Rackin is allowed to remain on our faculty in any capacity. . . we shall have steady disruption as a result of her campaigns of one sort or another.” There was no place for unruly women. Indeed there could not even be a mailbox for an unruly woman. In the fall of 1970, when Rackin was on a year’s leave as a visiting professor at another institution, the chair informed her, “Since you are not included in the budget of this Department, I see no reason for the department to furnish you with a mailbox.” This who endeavored to reach her received their letters back marked “Return to writer: unclaimed.”
The Chair then upped the ante, writing the dean in late September that he would serve another term as chair only if Rackin was not included in the English budget or in departmental faculty listings, was denied an office or mailbox at the English department and was forbidden to teach English department courses. His justification was that the negative departmental vote he had secured on the third try meant that any attempt to install Rackin in the English Department was illegitimate. Twenty-three members of the department followed up with the dean, informing him that their Chair’s resignation would be “the gravest blow to the department.” In closing, they underscored their vehement support for their leader – – and perhaps revealed more than they intended: “we stand behind him to a man.”
The dean seems to have tried to square this circle. He assured Rackin she had tenure, but told her attorney in early 1971 that she was no longer a member of the English department, Instead, her tenure was in “General Honors.” Her two courses would be offered in this program for undergraduates; she would not be involved in graduate training. WEOUP assailed the “vindictive…behavior” on the part of the Department and the absurdity of the supposed solution: “Dr. Phyllis Rackin is our only… Professor of Nothing!”
Rackin was unbowed—even invigorated by this treatment. Looking back, she has said she was not a feminist when this controversy began. But by the end of it she had become, in her words from an interview in 2013, “a feminist crusader.” She submitted a complaint to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and another to the AAUP (American Association of University Professors), which lodged an official objection with the Penn provost about her harassment. And at the urging of a friend who was a lawyer at the prestigious Philadelphia firm of Pepper Hamilton and Sheetz and who offered to represent her pro bono, she sued the university. In 1975, the case was finally settled: Both sides agreed to “deal with the future rather than the past and.. not attempt to assign fault to any party.” Phyllis Rackin would join the graduate group in English, teach graduate courses, and receive a 70K settlement from the University. In 2002, Rackin retired from Penn after 40 years of teaching, her departure marked by a conference organized by former students and scholars from Penn and beyond. One colleague observed that it was “the greatest expression of gratitude toward a former teacher and mentor that I’ve ever seen.”
The Rackin case represents a signal moment in women’s progress in the early 1970s– an indication that a number of forces were converging to demand equal employment opportunities for women. These forces included the law, students, and of course, women themselves.
In the spring of 1973, another crisis mobilized Penn’s women. On March 21 at about 11 in the evening, the Philadelphia police learned that two Penn nursing students had been pulled into an alley and gang raped by five young men at 33rd and Chestnut, about a block from their dormitory. This was an especially horrifying incidence of a crime that was not unfamiliar in the university environs. A half dozen stranger rapes were in fact reported over the span of the several days surrounding this event and the DP noted that some 20 students had been raped on or just off campus in the preceding 2 years. But this particular event proved a trigger. On April 3, hundreds of members of the Penn community rallied on College Hall Green. Young women declared themselves “enraged” by the university’s failure to provide adequate security. “I will not be told to stay home at night,” sophomore Tory Henley proclaimed. “I must be free to function here, just as any male, who does not have to contend with the fear of being raped..” She continued tellingly, “In the past I have not been involved in any women’s group at Penn . . . I [now] realize my responsibility to join one . . . . Women at Penn are being ‘raped’ as it were in far too many ways.” When the Director of Safety and Security warned in a response to the attack that the women students should not wear provocative clothing, a freshman minced no words: “It is my right to walk buck naked down the middle of campus and your responsibility to protect me.” The rape crisis was radicalizing Penn women.
As the speeches and chants of the rally neared their conclusion, participants marched into College Hall and announced they would be sitting in until their demands were met – – demands for significant improvements to campus safety—lights, nighttime buses, emergency call boxes, improved security presence topped the list. But the protestors – – who declared that only women could join the sit in—sought more. Self-defense classes, a women’s center, the right to bring leashed dogs anywhere on campus they were not prohibited by public health laws. (Dogs of all genders, by the way, were welcomed at the protest.) Two hundred women students, faculty and staff lined the corridors of College Hall; 50 or so remained through each night. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, a recently appointed professor of history, became the chief negotiator for the protesters, insisting that the demonstration didn’t seek to “place the women of the University in an adversary position with the administration.” After four days an agreement was reached. Smith-Rosenberg reported “We got everything we wanted, plus more.”
College senior named Donna Lamb offered an insightful reflection on the meaning of the protest. The Sit-In represented, she wrote “a new breed of activism.” She observed, “you must find a lever, you must create a situation in which it becomes apparent to your adversaries that it is in their interest to concede to your demand because the cost of retaining their control is now too steep.” Penn’s administrative leaders seem to have recognized that the rape crisis put them in that situation from the outset. The horrific event required a meaningful response, and they needed to keep the women on their side. The women, in turn, seized the initiative and the opportunity the crisis offered them.
Lamb went on to explain some aspects of the sit-in that had provoked questions from the wider community. The demand for self-defense classes had aroused comment. “It is necessary,” Lamb responded, “for women to learn that our bodies are not attractive packages that are essentially passive and helpless, but that they are in fact powerful and can be used effectively against an attacker.” Self-defense classes would be about much more than just self defense. Lamb wrote as well about the all-female characteristic of the sit-in: It was about building community and self-awareness: the protestors became “conscious of ourselves as a group with certain experiences, frustrations and desires in common . . . we share a political consciousness.” Many students had taken part in rallies and protests before. But, Lamb noted, it was different not to be protesting on behalf of others, but yourself. “When it happens to you, you know it.”
The sit in was transformational—for the community of women who participated and for the university more broadly. Penn kept its promises—and more. In addition to the negotiated women’s center, the administration acted at last on a set of stalled proposals for a women’s studies program. A group of students and faculty, calling themselves the Penn Women’s Studies Planners had been meeting for more than a year, and a pilot grouping of courses about women had been created for inclusion in a program called “Thematic Studies.” President Meyerson had charged a committee to spend the summer of 1972 surveying women’s studies programs across the nation to produce a report and recommendations. The Summer Project Report, published in the fall of 1972, became a widely read and influential document in the evolution of women’s studies nationwide. Although further action on women’s studies was not an explicit part of the sit in demands, the cause was swept up into the protest’s aftermath.
By fall 1973, less than six months after the sit-in, the University had made three new appointments: a Security Specialist to plan and oversee the many public safety improvements being introduced to the campus; a Coordinator for the new Women’s Center located in Logan Hall, and a “faculty-rank” Coordinator for a new interdisciplinary women’s studies program. New self-defense classes were oversubscribed as were expanding offerings in women’s studies. When I was completing my required graduate course work during the first two years of my PhD studies, there had been no courses at all about women in the American Civ or History departments, so when Carroll Smith-Rosenberg offered the first women’s history survey the following year, I sat in as an auditor, hoping to at least gain an introduction to this new field. Women were changing the discipline of history, just as they were changing Penn.
The programs and structures put in place after the 1973 Sit-In provided an institutional foundation for women’s place and women’s activism at Penn for decades to come. The Founding Mothers—Phoebe LeBoy, Carol Tracy, Phyllis Rackin, Mildred Cohn, Helen Davies, Madeline Jouille, Carroll Smith- Rosenberg, and many others had in half a decade revolutionized the university.
But there was another set of dramatic changes underway for women at Penn in these years that seems to have attracted scant attention from these feminist pioneers. That was Title IX. I have not undertaken what would be considered exhaustive research in preparing this talk, so there may be links I have not uncovered. But progress for women in the realms I have so far described and progress in women’s athletic opportunities seem from what I have uncovered to have taken place on parallel rather than intersecting tracks.
Title IX of course refers to the 37 words of the 1972 amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 prohibiting discrimination based on sex in any education program that receives federal funding. Although the measure made no explicit mention of sports, its enforcement came to focus on athletic programs. Official guidelines did not go into effect until 1975, but the looming threat of enforcement drew attention and action from colleges almost immediately after the amendment’s passage. In 1974, Penn women had 11 varsity teams, but there were only 3 full time women’s coaches. There were no trainers or equipment managers; women’s teams did not have access to the premier venues on campus for their contests: the Palestra, Franklin Field, the Scheer pool were available only for men’s competitions.
But legal issues and pressure from women students began to bring change—nationwide and at Penn. Four new women’s varsity teams were added at Penn in 1974 alone. Between 1974 and 1979, the budget for women’s athletics tripled, although it remained only a third that of the men. As women’s field hockey coach Anne Sage observed, pressure from female students was a key factor in the change. ‘They rattled enough cages . . .” She continued: “Women’s lib prepared the way and Billie Jean King broke the ice in athletics.”
In 1978 the legendary Penn Relays at last scheduled an entire day for women’s competitions. The DP hailed it as a “Women’s Explosion.” As a leading coach explained what had made this possible, “We owe all our progress to Title IX. Financing has come from having the law to back us up.” Women’s athletics, as the DP noted, was “on the Move.”
The report of a Committee on Athletics appointed by the Faculty Senate at the end of the decade offers some possible clues into what I have seen as the distance between Title IX activism and progress on the other women’s issues during these years. Penn, the faculty group advised, should limit the number of athletic recruits and freeze or reduce the athletic budget. Sports were not a core concern of the university. In a time of considerable financial austerity, athletics, not teaching, research and scholarship should feel the pain. The Undergraduate Assembly decried the faculty recommendations. Athletics were a central component of student culture. Indeed it was 1979 when the Penn basketball team electrified the campus with its one and only – – so far! – -advance to the Final Four for what we now know as March Madness. But the report made clear that for faculty, athletics was not a popular or compelling issue. At best, it was irrelevant to what mattered at Penn; at worst it was a costly, resource-guzzling distraction from the university’s academic mission. In all likelihood, it would not have been front of mind with the Founding Mothers, and to the extent it was, they would have regarded it as divisive, a poor organizing issue. It was students who pressed Title IX as a feminist question. Looking back, I find it interesting that we celebrate Title IX today with a degree of unanimity and enthusiasm we may not have manifested then. It would, I think, have been hard to anticipate the enormous impact Title IX’s changes would bring.
And there is another important milestone of the early 1970s that I have not yet mentioned. And that is, of course, Roe v Wade, decided, as you know, on January 22, 1973, making abortion legal nationwide. Penn women were active participants in the National Abortion Action Coalition. The DP and women across the university hailed the Roe decision as emblematic of progress in advancing women’s rights. A Medical School professor declared it “a major step towards the acceptance by both men and women that women should have the right to determine what happens to their own bodies.” But abortion had not yet been made into the fracturing and defining issue it has since become. The Republican party had not yet adopted it as the lever of polarization and power it became in the decades that followed. In the early 1970s, abortion, like affirmative action, had widespread bipartisan support. Although it certainly was on Penn women’s agenda, it seems not to have been at the center of their push for change.
The early 1970s were heady years. The Affirmative Action plan, the Rackin Case, the Rape Sit In, the establishment of women’s studies and a women’s center, Title IX, Roe v. Wade. Both nationwide and at Penn a series of events and new policies introduced dramatic changes in women’s roles and opportunities in ways I see much more clearly looking back than I did at the time. I spent a great part of those years buried in the library—much of it literally in the dark on the second floor of Van Pelt at an antiquated device called a microfilm reader, doing the research for my dissertation. But when I emerged with my PhD in 1975, there was a door open for me that would never have been there in 1970 when I began my graduate studies. My own department, American Civilization, offered me a fulltime job which turned into a tenure track position the next year. I spent 25 wonderful years on the faculty at Penn. I owe a great deal to Phoebe Leboy and all the Founding Mothers and their many allies.
The AmCiv Department had a job to offer me because they had no women and were authorized to add a position as part of Penn’s affirmative action efforts – – even in the 70s environment of great budgetary stringency. My professors, soon to be colleagues, could imagine me as a member of the department because the very notion of women faculty had gained a legitimacy—a thinkability—it had lacked even half a decade before. Life had not become perfect for women at Penn, far from it. There remained—and remains – – an enormous amount of work still to be done. Women were at the end of the 1970s still a tiny percentage of Penn faculty; Phyllis Rackin’s case was far from the only tenure suit that has been lodged over the past half century nor was it the last injustice that would be inflicted on a woman scholar. But important changes had occurred that would serve as a foundation for more changes to come.
Are there insights or lessons to be drawn from those years that can help illuminate or own perilous time? Let me conclude with a few reflections.
First of all, I am wistful as I note the importance of government actions and policies in setting the stage for change during those years. And these policies came from every branch of government: Affirmative Action from the Executive, Title IX from the legislative, and Roe from the judiciary. Wistful because the very measures that mattered so much then are being eliminated or eroded around us. Roe overturned, affirmative action challenged this very month—and likely also overturned soon by the Supreme Court. The bipartisan commitment to women’s issues that I now can hardly believe I witnessed in the 1970s is gone. As I look back, I ask myself, were things in some ways actually better then?? It is clear there has been a determined conservative backlash, a concerted effort to overturn the advances and momentum of those years.
But I reassure myself that things are better today even so by looking at the numbers of women around this university – – three presidents in a row! – – by the careers and opportunities students pursue, by the progress in understanding represented by the transformation of women’s studies into Gender Sexuality and Women’s studies, by the emergence of LGBTQ and non binary communities. And yet the challenges persist and in some ways strengthen. The battle is in no way over; the strife not won. Dobbs has made it impossible to forget that.
Penn women of the 1970s knew they had to struggle for a place in the university. That is the fundamental lesson they can teach us. For many years it was perhaps too easy to take for granted the changes in women’s lives, just as many celebrated a “post racial” America after Obama’s election. But now, with Dobbs, with the affirmative action cases, with the many other forms of pushback and backlash so evident before us, we must see it plain. The arc of the moral universe does not just bend toward justice by itself. It has to be pushed. Freedom is a constant struggle. Continuing that struggle is how we can best honor Phoebe LeBoy and all the others who fought at her side. Pass It On.