While growing up in Brooklyn, Mary I. Bunting-Smith’s mother would sometimes tell her, “Thee is a funny little girl.”

This statement would prove to be prophetic. Educated at home until the eighth grade, Bunting-Smith went on to pursue traditionally male-dominated disciplines, receiving an undergraduate degree in microbiology from Vassar College in 1931 and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1934.

“I grew up believing, gratefully, that the doors of educational opportunity in this country were wide open,” she said during an address to Southern Methodist University on Jan. 28, 1966.

Bunting-Smith continued her career as a microbiologist, teaching and conducting research at Bennington College, Goucher College, Yale University, and Wellesley College before serving as dean of Douglass College. In 1960, Bunting-Smith became the fifth president of Radcliffe College and the third woman to hold the position.

“She was very no-nonsense. She didn’t look like she spent all of her time putting on her make-up and doing her hair,” Mary H. Metz ’60 said. “Her very appearance and demeanor was serious. She was validating the idea of a woman who was serious.”

For Bunting-Smith, the dearth of women in intellectual, social, and political arenas was “a curious thing.” In a 1961 address to The University Women’s Forum in Philadelphia, she said educated women were underappreciated.

“Their high ability has been amply demonstrated in our schools and colleges, but this has seemed to carry little commitment on their part, or interest on anyone else’s in their later higher achievement,” she said. “Rather we all seem to be content to let them serve as intellectual pace setters, useful during training but not expected to run in any important races.”

During her first year in office at Radcliffe, Bunting-Smith began to overturn this prevailing attitude about women’s education, implementing policies that increasingly integrated Radcliffe with Harvard and encouraged female students to be leaders outside the home.

“CLIMATE OF UNEXPECTATION”

Although Radcliffe women had begun attending classes at Harvard after a 1943 agreement formally instated joint instruction, some female students prior to Bunting-Smith’s inauguration said that they felt they were not full members of the Harvard community.

“Women were marginal, seriously marginal,” Metz said. “We were not allowed to step inside Lamont Library because we were thought to distract the men from their studies. That meant that you had to go back to Radcliffe dorms after class, and then you had to go to the Radcliffe library if you wanted to study. You were really separated from the men.”

Metz added that this sentiment permeated her interactions with faculty members, as few made themselves available to assist the women enrolled in their classes.

“I remember one humanities professor that I had who was wonderful,” Jill Kneerim ’60 said. But when a male friend asked him about her, the professor responded, “Well, she’s sort of that junior-league type.”

At the time, Kneerim didn’t know what it meant, but she said that it “really shows that there just weren’t that many ways to think about a young woman who was outspoken.”

Although Metz said that her dedicated senior year tutor helped her with her thesis and eventually inspired her to become a sociologist, he was a rare exception among the teaching staff. “There were very few faculty members who didn’t treat their female students like afterthoughts,” she said.