“The last thing I was going to do was teach or marry an academic,” she says, “and above all, I was certainly not going to marry someone I met in a seminar, which I thought was the most unromantic thing I’d ever heard of, and which my parents had done in a Sanskrit seminar.”

But at Bryn Mawr, she changed her mind.

“I can remember an epiphany I had that night when I went into the library,” she says. “There was something in the lights, and the creak of the stairs. And I came around to the view that I really wanted to be an academic after all.”

Several years later, after returning from a year at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship, she came to Harvard to pursue a doctorate degree in history. She met her husband there—Charles M. Gray ’49 was in her seminar on the early Latin works of Erasmus.

She began her teaching career at Bryn Mawr but soon came back to Cambridge as a tutor in History and Literature. Within two years, she was an assistant professor.

The culture at Harvard—where she was often the only woman in the classroom and the conference room—differed distinctly from her own college experience.

But even far away from her alma mater, she carried the confidence with her that had been instilled as an undergraduate.

“We had superb women faculty and administrators [at Bryn Mawr],” she says, “and so I really became used to the notion not only that women did these things, but also that women and men worked together as colleagues in such institutions.”

Those years made her “fairly independent,” she says, and aware of how “foolish” the treatment of women at Harvard often was.

“Given all that”—her Bryn Mawr background, together with the encouragement of her parents and her husband—“I had a lot of support,” she admits, “and maybe more confidence than I should have.”

MIDWESTERN MUSCLE

Though she had established herself as an academic, Gray expected she would have to give up her career when her husband accepted a post in the University of Chicago’s history department.

With job opportunities for a female Ph.D. scarce, the couple left for the Midwest in 1960.

She had a fellowship at the Newberry Library, an independent research collection specializing in Renaissance texts, and she even considered going to law school.

At the time, she says, landing a professorship alongside her husband in the history department seemed impossible.