Unambitious women, therefore, don't suffer; the burden falls on women like the Institute Scholars who want careers, as well as families. And here the Institute comes in. Since most of the Scholars have to adjust their schedules to husbands and babies, the instigation where they study or work must be flexible. And the Institute is flexible: it allows the Scholars to study and produce, as they would in graduate school, but on a part-time basis, as they could not in graduate school. Provided with the amount of money she needs, each Scholar works out her own budget and schedule. She can use the money to buy time, by using it to hire a babysitter. If she's an artist, she can use it to buy the supplies which would otherwise be too expensive.
The Institute, though, benefits the Scholars more significantly just by choosing them. To become a Scholar means to be recognized as a talented woman. This recognition is a key to new associations, and eventually to career openings. (Since this recognition is so valuable, it seems very important that the Institute choose as Scholars women who are as yet "un recognized.") But most of all, the recognition gives the women the confidence that encourages them to keep taking risks.
For instance, if a married woman has to help support children, it might seem extravagant to give up a job to try to make movies, since she would not know whether or not she would be successful. But the Institute, by choosing her as a Scholar to make movies for a year, not only boosts her financially, but proves to her and to the world that it things she's doing something worthwhile. Also, given the year for her projects, she will presumably complete a movie within that time, and have tangible proof of her talent.
Perhaps, in America, where most people think women belong in the home and on PTA committees, women need extra boosts, when they want to try careers, because they lack self-confidence. One of the directors at the Institute remarked that the Scholars seemed to need encouragement more than anything else. Certainly they get his at the Institute. When I asked her how the Scholars were chosen, she said that the women who needed the Institute most, including some who would benefit greatly from a boost in confidence, were usually the ones picked.
SINCE IT opened in 1961 through a vote of the Radcliffe Trustees, the Institute--though it remains a rather elite organization--has gradually influenced and financed more and more women besides the Scholars. More than 20 women in universities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are able to do part-time graduate work through fellowships of up to $3000 per year from the Institute. In Greater Boston hospitals, about 25 women physicians are finishing their medical training with the help of Institute grants of up to $4000 per year. All these women have similar problems: since they have husbands and babies to care for, they need extra money and flexible schedules in order to continue their studies.
The Institute has reached an even greater number of women through the Radcliffe Seminar program which it coordinates. When the Seminars program began in 1950, independently of the Institute, about 75 women, representing 70 colleges, are taking one, two, or three of the 17 seminar courses. Women used to join the seminars as a leisure activity--they joined only one seminar each year. Now, though, the women who take two or three of the seminars at a time two or three of the seminars at a time see them more as a bridge to jobs. Some of the seminars, in fact, are specifically designed to prepare women for jobs. A number of women have participated in a series of seminars on landscape design to become city planners, and some have been employed by the Boston Dedevelopment Authority.
Other seminars--"The Practice of Politics" and "Color and Culture: The Study of Racial and Ethnic Relations"--are intended to help volunteers in fields such as education and civil rights. Creative writing, history of art, and American literature seminars, taught on a first-year graduate level, remain for those interested in the humanities. Any women is eligible to apply to these seminars. Applicants are accepted on a first-come-first-served basis. But most of the applicants are college graduates between thirty and fifty years old who want to rekindle old interests, having sent their children off to school.
PERHAPS the Institute's greatest service to American women all across the country is through its Guidance Laboratory and Research Center. More and more women want to combine marriages and careers. Many factors contribute to this desire for a combination: early marriages; longer life expectancy, which leads to an average of 30 years of life after the last child is 21--as compared with 14 years in the 1890's; automation; more college educations. Since educational institutions and employers haven't yet adjusted to this new resource, women are finding it difficult to get proper training, and find flexible jobs.
The Guidance Laboratory serves women with these problems by suggesting job opportunities and ways of adjusting family life to jobs. Information from the Guidance Laboratory is shuttled to the researchers who are carrying on numerous studies through special grants on "the woman in America." They're trying to answer questions like: How many American women are working today and for what reason? What effect does a woman's having a career have on family life? What kind of women become highly motivated and why? Some studies currently underway are: woman's role (a survey of married women in suburban Boston); changes in female students' attitudes from freshman to senior year (a survey at Cornell); women in medicine (a study in Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia). The Institute communicates its research findings through publications, extensive correspondence with other educators, conferences, and counseling.
With its staff of 16 women headed by Dean Constance Smith, the Institute has become the center of a great network of studies and programs designed to encourage women to continue their education and find worthwhile jobs. It acts as consultant on women's education to universities all over the world. In a sense, the Institute is the torchbearer of a movement, the movement by women to combine an impressive career with marriage.