{"id":14305,"date":"2020-03-16T16:45:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T20:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/?page_id=14305"},"modified":"2021-03-29T11:33:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T15:33:14","slug":"womens-history-month-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/news\/womens-history-month-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Women’s History Month"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In MIT\u2019s 1887 annual report<\/a>, former Institute President Francis A. Walker included a section titled, \u201cWomen as students in the Institute.\u201d He predicted: \u201cThe number of young women attending the Institute of Technology is never likely to be large, considering the nature of the professions to which our courses lead, and the severity of our requirements for admission and for graduation.\u201d More than 100 years later, it\u2019s clear Walker was sorely mistaken; today, women comprise<\/a> around 40% of the student body and 58% of the students in the Department of Biology. But, for decades, only about 5% of MIT\u2019s students were female.<\/p>\n In 1958, decades after Walker\u2019s report, Marilynn Bever was one of 28 women in her first-year class of 652 students. \u201cI was aware that MIT women are often regarded with suspicion, as being somehow \u2018different\u2019 from normal coeds,\u201d Bever later wrote. She was so fascinated by this attitude that she wrote a thesis<\/a> for her bachelor\u2019s degree in anthropology in which she catalogued early female MIT students and documented their experiences. Bever reported that Caroline Augusta Woodman was the first woman to obtain a Course 7 bachelor\u2019s degree in 1889, and that Helen Louise Breed became the first woman to earn a PhD from MIT\u2019s Department of Biology in 1937. In honor of Women\u2019s History Month, meet these two women who helped set MIT on a path toward gender equality.<\/p>\n Woodman (pictured above, second from the left) was born in 1844<\/a> in Minot, Maine near a textile manufacturing center<\/a>. After graduating from high school in nearby Portland, Maine in 1866, Woodman taught at Portland\u2019s Center Grammar School for Girls. By 1874, she\u2019d moved from the coast of Maine to the banks of the Hudson River and earned a bachelor\u2019s degree<\/a> from Vassar College, which had recently opened as an all-women\u2019s institution.<\/p>\n According to the Vassar Registrar\u2019s Office, early Vassar students took a prescribed set of courses rather than declaring a major, so Woodman studied art, science, languages, and religion, netbet online sports bettingamong other topics. Her transcript indicates that she supplemented these classes with \u201cspecial courses,\u201d which the 1870-71 course catalogue described as \u201cintended only for ladies of maturity,\u201d as the college\u2019s faculty felt that students should complete the usual curriculum before venturing on to these more complex topics. Vassar\u2019s faculty must have seen Woodman as an accomplished scholar, as she was allowed to take extra classes in German, chemistry, math, astronomy, and geography.<\/p>\n The foreign language skills that Woodman learned in these special courses must have served her well after completing her degree, as she traveled around Europe<\/a> before moving to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, where she taught at a high school for girls for about twelve years. But in 1889 she found herself back in college and earning a second bachelor\u2019s degree, this time at MIT.<\/p>\n Just as Woodman joined Vassar during its incipient years, she came to MIT when the Institute consisted of only a handful of buildings near Copley Square<\/a> in Boston\u2019s Back Bay. Graduate degrees had only been established a few years earlier, and the first dormitory wouldn\u2019t be built for another decade. Today\u2019s MIT undergraduates can choose interdisciplinary programs<\/a> in Chemistry and Biology (Course 5-7) or Computer Science and Molecular Biology (Course 6-7). But in Woodman\u2019s time, even the name \u201cBiology\u201d was new to the department, which had been previously called \u201cNatural History<\/a>\u201d and re-named to encompass modern aspects of the expanding discipline such as techniques for preserving food safely.<\/p>\nCaroline Augusta Woodman<\/strong><\/h3>\n