"Women don't do math"

At Harvard in the 1970s, I was accustomed to seeing funding opportunities that were only open to men. It was unusual to see something open only to women. When I was a senior looking for funding for grad school, I noticed that I was eligible for the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship. I submitted an application to the Harvard committee responsible for sending a nomination to the national selection committee.

When I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee, I assumed that my file wasn't strong enough. 

Harvard encouraged students to find out why they were rejected for things, since the feedback might be helpful in the future. I was the good little girl who did what I was told, so I dutifully asked why I was rejected.

I was surprised to learn that it wasn't because my application wasn't strong enough. The reason I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee was that the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship is a scholarship for women. The committee reasoned that women don't normally do math, so the national committee would most likely choose among nominees in fields with many women, such as English or History. The Harvard committee thought there was no point in selecting me, since they assumed a mathematician wouldn't make the cut.

That afternoon, at tea in the math department common room, I ran into math grad student Lisa Mantini. I told her why I was rejected for the fellowship.

Lisa told me that an Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship had funded her first year in grad school. The national committee had awarded her the fellowship, even though she was a mathematician.

I was used to being discriminated against for being a woman. As far as I knew, this was the first time I was discriminated against for being a mathematician. 

Postscript:
By reading background for this story, I learned that Wellesley College tried to hire Alice Freeman as a professor of mathematics in 1877 (she turned down the offer to help support her family and/or care for an ill sister). The following year, she turned down Wellesley's offer to teach Greek, but in 1879, the year her sister died, Freeman accepted their offer to head the History Department. Alice Freeman became President of Wellesley College in 1881, the youngest college president in the United States, at the age of 26.

The Quincy Adams Wigglesworth Smith Scholarship

My recollection is that when I got into Radcliffe, students who were admitted to Harvard and Radcliffe were sent a thick booklet that listed endowed scholarships for Harvard students to use during their undergraduate years. We were instructed to read the list carefully, to see which scholarships we were eligible for. The expectation seemed to be that each of us would be eligible for some of these funding possibilities.

Dutifully, I scoured the list, hoping for something lucrative. My family could scarcely afford the Harvard-Radcliffe tuition and fees, so any sort of scholarship would be very welcome. 

My parents hadn't let me apply for financial aid, because they thought that would hurt my chances of getting in. I later learned that Harvard supposedly had need-blind admissions. My parents didn't know that, but if they had, they might not have trusted that it was really the case.

My optimism that I would find a nice scholarship began to fade as I turned the pages. I haven't managed to dig up that list, so here's my best reconstruction, nearly fifty years later, of a typical entry:

The Quincy Adams Wigglesworth Smith Scholarship was founded in 1792. The recipient, who should be fluent in Greek and Latin, must have the last name Smith. He must be a Harvard man who has at least three ancestors who came to America on the Mayflower, and at least one ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence.

I wondered if I should change my name to Smith. But there wasn't much I could do about some of the other requirements.

At first, I stopped reading an entry as soon as I realized I wasn't eligible. But eventually I read each listing in its entirety, for its comic value. The criteria seemed to get more specific and weirder as the booklet went on.

Surely there must be some scholarship for which I were eligible, however paltry? I got to the end of the list and realized there were none. 

I leafed through the booklet again, to make sure I hadn't missed something. I hadn't. It seemed a little cruel for Harvard to build up my hopes, only to dash them.

Before I arrived on campus, I wondered how many of my Harvard classmates qualified for a scholarship from the booklet. Happily, there were enough New York City public school students whose parents or grandparents were immigrants that I felt at home. (However, when I opted for the "literature" section of the obligatory Expository Writing freshman year course rather than vanilla "Expos", it was pointed out by the grad student who taught the class that he and I were the only people in the room who weren't preppies.)