Education: For Happier Housewives

When Mills College (for women) in Oakland, Calif, began hunting for a new president in 1942, the trustees hoped to find a sedate, older woman for the job. What they finally got was a brash and breezy young man. Lynn White Jr. was a San Francisco minister’s son who had studied at Union Theological Seminary and had taken his Ph.D. under Harvard’s famed Medievalist Charles Homer Haskins. He was an expert on wine and cooking (“anything with garlic in it”), on 13th Century clocks and chivalry (“the culture of the horsy crowd”). And somewhere along the line, he had also become an unabashed expert on women’s colleges.

Last week, as Mills alumnae launched a $2,000,000 fund-raising campaign to celebrate Mills’ 100th birthday, the college which started out as a young ladies’ seminary back in the gold-rush days could count itself a senior dowager among U.S. women’s colleges.* But under President Lynn White, it was acting more like a sprightly debutante than ever.

“Fantastic Notion.” “The trouble with Smith, Vassar, and the others,” White once declared, “is that they don’t go ahead. They merely confirm each other’s prejudices.” And the worst prejudice, White decided, was that women’s colleges should remain a feminine imitation of men’s, accepting the “biologically fantastic notion that to be different from men is to be inferior to men . . .” When a woman marries, she feels ashamed to find herself “just a housewife.” And when her children are old enough to leave her, she finds she has nothing to do. Educated women in the U.S., insisted Lynn White, are not only a lost sex, but a wasted one—and their colleges have made them so.

Lynn White started right out to change all that. To make Mills students successful housewives, he set up a major in “Family Studies,” which concerned itself not only with keeping house and raising children, but with attitudes—”a vision of the family and the rewards it offers to those who devote themselves to it.” He also set up a course in family law so that Mills graduates would be able to cope with the normal business and legal problems that many women face—taxes, insurance, adoption proceedings, annuities and investments.

To give them an idea of what to do in middle age, he organized a course in community services (“Women need to know how to work for symphonies, art centers and museums”). He also set up B.S. degrees in merchandising, personnel, business and interior design.

“Between the Lines.” Mills students still spend most of their time in a solid liberal arts program, and White made his own contribution to this, too. Today every freshman is required to take the new course in the main moral and intellectual currents of U.S. thought, reading such odd combinations as a novel of Horatio Alger and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in the same week. Says White: “We’re trying to turn out the kind of citizen who can read between lines and listen between words.”

To help them read and listen, Mills has such top teachers as Sociologist George Hedley, Novelist Jessamyn West, and Composer Darius Milhaud. And this year more students than ever before are reading and listening—548 girls, 15% more than in 1950.

* Among the more elderly: Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, chartered 1830; Mount Holyoke, 1836; Wesleyan College (Macon, Ga.) 1836.