During a vacation to her rural Wisconsin home in the fall of 1974, Frances Hill watched television interviewers talk with farm women about the dispute then raging between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Farmer's Organization. The women on TV were all middle-level farm organizers, Hill said recently, who in the past had worked beside their husbands, providing crucial economic services. But they had been expected to remain ladylike at the same time, and had never been permitted to participate in decision-making or public affairs.

"Here they were, women who had just jumped off their tractors to be interviewed," Hill said, "and it intrigued me greatly, for there had been a publicly visible change in the socio-cultural attitudes toward women." Hill has rejected the easy explanation for this change--that it is a derivative of women's liberation--explaining that Gloria Steinem's influence was felt most strongly among urban women, and almost not at all by their rural counterparts. And for Hill the question remains as important today as it was two years ago.

Hill is one of the 36 current fellows at the Radcliffe Institute, each of whom will spend one year pursuing an independent project in her own field, funded either by the Institute or, as in Hill's case, a foundation grant. The program is designed, Patricia A. Graham, dean of the Institute, said last week, "to support women who are likely to make a major contribution to their field and to improve professional mobility." And she emphasizes that the program is not designed to encourage women to pursue women's studies alone, explaining that "it is not a good idea to ghettoize women's scholarship and to push women into research on women."

Women today are not reaching the highest professional echelons, Graham says, and the Institute is providing them with an opportunity by giving them "time to do good work. We put them in the midst of a bustling artistic community such as Boston, help them to make contacts, and to deal with some socialization factors. They have been low in status, heavily expected to go into the nurturing business, and not scholarly work. We are trying to reverse that, with high scholarly expectations," she says.

Hill seems to have come to the Institute for just these reasons--to meet and work with women who are scholarly and diverse. "I knew it would be serious but not just scholasticism--people may interact or just work as they see fit. It's intellectually comfortable here, almost like being freed up of all administrative work and being a third-year graduate student again," Hill says. And the absence of telephones in the offices of the fellows indicates clearly the atmosphere of hard and individual work the Institute hopes to provide.

The fellowship program has not always had the same emphasis--many people look back to the days when it served as a place for women to get started in their field, rather than to pursue their interests after they had proven themselves scholastically. When then-Radcliffe president Mary I. Bunting initiated the program in 1960, and for years afterward, money was given away in small stipends of about $3000--it was called "baby-sitting money"--to women who wanted to continue serious education and return to the work force.

When Graham took over the deanship three years ago, though, the emphasis changed radically, with the program becoming a more competitive one, carrying fewer and higher stipends and greater academic distinction. Graham said last week that in the "old days, the sixties, it was avant garde" to enable women to return to the work force, adding that the fellowship's former role is now carried out by other programs within the Institute itself.

One of these newer attempts is the Radcliffe Seminars Program, a collection of courses designed to provide a "second chance," Nancy Downey, administrative director of the program, says. Created for students who have never completed their undergraduate education, have received their bachelor's degree but have found a new direction they want to pursue, or have married but are seeking a career, the program was established in 1950 after the privileges of older women in the Radcliffe community were curtailed by the merger of the Harvard and Radcliffe classes after World War II.

The seminar office has recently moved across the Radcliffe Yard from the Institute-Schlesinger Library Building to Fay House because, Downey says, the Institute building was "bursting at the seams" with its numerous projects. From the original eight offerings, such as "Japanese Culture Expressed by its Art" and "Ancient Greek with Readings," the number of courses has grown to 84, and the number of students has almost tripled in the three years Downey has headed the program. And since the first seminar was offered for extension school credit in 1963, the number of accredited courses has risen quickly; about one-third of the students each year now receive that type of credit.

The seminars also provide an academic community where instructors, most of whom hold teaching appointments at colleges in the Boston area, may try out new or innovative courses. The instructors are asked to teach the "most exciting, non-traditional course they've ever taught," Downey said, and a brief glance at the catalogue of courses indicates that the program has somehow avoided selling out innovation to trendiness. As the program has grown, so has the number of male instructors and students increased. Some of these are men who hold bachelor's degrees and, in trying to determine what they want to do with their lives, are participating in offerings like the Landscape and Environmental Design Program. Others, Downey says, are professionals like physicists and chemists, who love poetry and take advantage of the writing workshops the program offers.

The seminars are self-supporting, charging $160 for each course, and paying instructors $1300 for their services. But the program cannot attempt to attract the working women of the area--the women who were at the heart of the early fellowship program--without financial aid for those who cannot meet the costs. "There is not too much scholarship money," says Downey, who was herself a seminar participant in the '60s. "There's a little, with some $50 and $75 scholarships and then an installment plan for payment of the remainder. We've written thousands of letters asking for funds for scholarship aid, but there is no money," she whimpers. She is now tentatively planning a series of fund-raising lectures to be given by instructors this fall, to start a scholarship fund.

Even without that resource, the seminar has created two new time shifts for seminar offerings, "in order to help out working women who can get some release time," Downey says. But despite changes like that, and new services like a counseling program, Downey stresses that the program has not lost its original purpose as it has expanded--the courses are taught now, as they were 25 years ago, at the level of college seniors or first year graduate students, and it has even retained the initial structure of two-hour courses with limited enrollment.

And for the women caught in between, the non-tenured faculty women in the Boston area, the Institute is sponsoring a fellowship program, funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. "Most women in academic life are not tenured, and power of course, is tenure," Dean Graham says. "You have to get tenure to make a difference, and that is difficult with the shrinking job market. If you are going to make a contribution to the community, you ought to lead with your strongest suit, and we think that is a program with access to libraries and facilities," she adds. The Institute has asked institutions to nominate faculty for the program, in addition to accepting direct applications; and this request has succeeded in bringing both bright faculty women to the notice of the school and, also bringing the notion of fellowships to the notice of many untenured men and women.

The Institute has raised almost $1 million in the last 12 months, a sum Graham said she would never have believed possible several years ago. Nationally, outside groups are bankrolling the Institute, among them the Lilly Endowment, which this summer announced its backing of a new $386,000 program for research on women in American society. Unlike the other two fellowships supporting women in their own studies, this is a program designed for individuals--both men and women--to work on a specialized project dealing specifically with women. Graham said last week that books published recently have pointed out the lack of monographic materials on women, and that "we have to do the basic work to help others to larger things."

Another project oriented toward this goal is Notable American Women, a three-volume biographical dictionary first published in 1951 and providing scholarly data on women who have in some way played an important role in American history. The work now underway is sponsored by Radcliffe College itself, and will update the earlier work to include women who have died between 1951 and 1975. The original volumes had 1300 articles on women who had lived between 1607 and 1959, and the update will add another 400 articles, with such candidates for inclusion as Eleanor Roosevelt, Marilyn Sanger, Marilyn Monroe and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. And although the administrators of the program are located in the Radcliffe Institute, the biography is purely a Radcliffe project--the College's contribution to national women's studies.