At one time, it seemed to me that the number of Princeton math faculty who divorced their wives to marry their grad students wasn't so very far from the number of women that Princeton had ever admitted into its math graduate program. This was rather different from Harvard, where some of the math faculty had affairs with some of the secretaries.
John Tate knew I was interested in the history of the Harvard math department, and I appreciated his willingness to talk about it. In 1991, he told me that in his early days on the Harvard faculty, the math department admitted men to the graduate program with the idea that they'd become mathematicians, and admitted women with the idea that they'd become wives of the male grad students.
At Princeton, the faculty wives were understandably nervous about the idea of their husbands supervising female students. This made it hard for female grad students to find a thesis advisor.
My PhD thesis advisor's wife was unfailingly kind to me, and I'm very grateful for how nice she was. I think we always got along. She had nothing to worry about from me.
One evening at a department party she told me about a recent dream. In her dream, she and I were college students, taking a course taught by her husband. The class had an exam, and she was distressed that I did much better on the exam than she did.
I told this to a more senior student, and I wondered what it meant. He replied, "Alice, you know what it means. Her husband's colleagues are having affairs with their grad students. She's letting you know that she has some anxiety about her husband having a female student." I didn't (and don't) know this to be true. But I can certainly understand how the behavior of some of the faculty was problematic for both female students and faculty wives.