Female professors during the 1970s at Boston-based colleges faced many difficulties from lower pay, to being hired in lower numbers, to not getting tenure as often as their male colleagues.

These women worked to overcome these difficulties to change the landscape of academia for future women.

We invite you to put yourself in the shoes of a woman in academia in the 1970s. There is no right or wrong way to explore, so please navigate the website however you'd like!

We acknowledge that this project largely focuses on white women, and recognize that there was and still is a long way to go regarding intersectionality with this topic.

Our Methodology

Suffolk University Moakley Archives

• When looking through the Margaret Collins Weitz collection in the Suffolk University Moakley Archives, we became interested in the topic of female professorship

• We found a wealth of primary sources written in the 1970s, leading us to narrow our focus to this decade

Scholarly Articles

• • Much of our research came from reports out of Suffolk University, Harvard University, and Boston State College

• The article “The Historical Role of Women in Higher Education” by Patsy Parker gave us numbers and statistics to ground our primary source research

  • shows us how Boston fits into the bigger picture

University Reports

• Reports on the status of women from various universities in Boston in the 1970s, including Suffolk University, Boston State College, and Harvard University

Historiography

What research has been done on this topic before now?

• Research has been done on our topic, but we are interested in a fairly specific geographic location and time period, and we see the need for further research on this specific topic

• Beginning in the 1970s, people were researching women in academia, especially in Boston

  • “Report of the Committee on the Status of Women at Suffolk University” (1975)

  • “1970 Preliminary Report on the Status of Women at Harvard”

  • “Report on the Status of Women Faculty at Boston State College” (1972)

• These reports only look at one school, and we are aiming to bridge that gap by acknowledging women from a variety of colleges and sharing the multitude of experiences

• This topic has been revisited over the decades, such as with “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT”, published in 1999.