She lived at Edmonds House, a cooperative where women who had at least a B average could cook for one another.

“I call that extracurricular,” she says. “Trying to cook for a bunch of students is a lot of work.”

By her own account, her career at Radcliffe went more smoothly than her grandfather’s rocky two years as a Harvard student.

Frost, who never graduated, had a particularly bad experience in first-year English, where one of his poems received a B-, and he found Harvard students too driven by grades.

“He didn’t like the people having to take all these notes and having to feed them back to the professor,” says Francis, who published an article on her grandfather’s experiences as an undergraduate in a 1984 Harvard Magazine article.

Although she enjoyed Harvard more than her grandfather, she insists, “I’m not one to go into sentimental raptures about school, about any school.”

Throughout her years of schooling—until, in fact, she earned her doctorate—she did not feel recognized as an academic because of her gender.

Applying to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where she applied to be a teaching assistant, she was told the school simply would not allow women to be teaching assistants—because that would mean a woman would teach a classroom of men.

So she turned away from North Carolina and went to Duke University, where she received a fellowship for graduate studies in Romance Languages.

With her degree from Duke, Francis took up teaching at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. But halfway through the 1961-62 school year, her employers found out she was pregnant with her first child. They promptly fired her.

“There was nothing subtle about that,” she says.

Tenure and Teaching

By 1974, after another decade of teaching, Francis joined the staff of AAUP, which studies the state of higher education and advocates for professors nationwide.

Having been twice denied teaching positions, she now tackled academic women’s issues directly. She served on the association’s committee on academic freedom and tenure and on another committee dedicated to the status of women.

She recalls the mindset of higher education administrators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who would tell female tenure candidates, “You only need one breadwinner in the family. Why do you need tenure?”