A Classroom of One's Own

A CLASSROOM OF ONE'S OWN

By Charles Coe

In September 1964, Jackie Platt sat in her first class at Northeastern's brand-new Burlington campus. Her classmates were mostly women like her: in their forties, married, with children at home. Some needed just a few courses to finish degrees; others were being exposed to higher education for the first time and were a little nervous and unsure of what to expect.

Many of the women had been active in church and volunteer groups. But many had always felt that something was missing from their lives because they hadn't finished college. One night in the spring of 1964, Platt attended a meeting of the League of Women Voters in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Someone stood to read a notice, and Platt perked up her ears. Classes for Northeastern University's new Programs for Adult Women were soon to open at a satellite campus in Burlington, north of Boston.

Platt enrolled without a second thought. That first day, she filed into a classroom with other women who seemed familiar, yet who she knew not in the least. Into the room walked the lecturer, Tom Lester, decked out in porkpie hat, bow tie, and Harris tweed jacket. He looked at the gathering, took off his coat and hat, and carefully set them on the table at the head of the class. Then he stood silently for a moment and scanned the expectant faces. "I've been teaching for a long time," he finally said. "But I've never seen so many women's faces at once."

Of course, women's colleges were well established in the Boston area and across the commonwealth. By the mid-'60s, women were also fairly well represented in coed colleges and universities, Northeastern among them, and N.U. had long welcomed women into its full-time night-school program. What was fundamentally different about the Women's Program, as it was routinely called, was that it offered women the opportunity to take part-time day classes.

For Jackie Platt, a woman with children in school and a husband who enthusiastically supported her decision to become a student, it was a perfect arrangement. That first semester (in 1964, Northeastern was on a ten-week system rather than quarters), she signed up for two classes: American Literature and Introduction to Music.

Tom Lester taught the literature class, and the first book he assigned was Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. "I remember my first blue book and my first exam," Platt says today. "The night before, I underlined sections of the book, took out a map, and tried to figure out where everything was happening. I was ready to toss back any name or place the teacher asked for."

But Lester threw her, and the rest of the class, a curve when he strolled over to the chalkboard and scribbled the question: "Why did Hemingway write this book in four parts?" Platt hadn't even realized he had. "I absolutely froze," she says. "In my academic background, you just soaked up all the facts from your notes and then squeezed your sponge for the test. This was the first time a teacher ever asked me what I thought."

The next class, blue books were passed back and all flipped to the last page for their grades. One student, Gladys Cooper, an elegant woman with well-coiffed gray hair and a taste for Bloomingdale's dresses, looked Lester in the eye and demanded, "So why did Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms in four parts?" Lester looked a little surprised at the question, and then shrugged. "How the hell do I know?"

There was a second of stunned silence, and then the class erupted in laughter. For Platt, it was a liberating moment. "I realized then that being a student was more than just saying what was 'right' or 'wrong.' Tom didn't want a bunch of names and dates," she says. "And he didn't want you to parrot someone else's ideas. It didn't matter what your viewpoint was; if you could give a good argument, a good defense of your position, he'd accept it."

As N.U. president Asa Knowles had come to realize, nontraditional female students represented a tremendous untapped potential. Many of them had already distinguished themselves in their work with volunteer service organizations. And then, as now, any woman running a household was essentially managing a small business.

Because Northeastern's Women's Program offered unprecedented flexibility, women with varying needs and goals had access to a college education that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. The program served graduates, first-time students, transfers, teacher certification candidates. Women who were beginning or continuing degree programs, as well as those who were interested primarily in personal enrichment, made their way to Burlington. Women could take classes in current political issues, electronic data processing, history, literature, mathematics, and more.

What distinguished the Women's Program was not simply that it gave women access to higher education; there was already a healthy enrollment of women in N.U.'s day program, and many women attended classes at the night school. What made the program unique was that it offered part-time programs in the daytime. For women like Lucia Bequaert, that made all the difference. Bequaert had attended Wellesley College, but in her senior year, right after World War II, she had dropped out to get married. A year of classes still stood between her and a B.A. In 1964, divorced and eager to restart her career, she began classes in Burlington that would soon lead to a degree in sociology. "There was some resistance at first to setting up the program, because some administrators didn't like the idea of admitting part-time day students," she recalls. "They thought that 'serious' students should either attend a full-time day program or just stick with night school courses."

But the times were changing, and fortunately for Bequaert and her classmates, the university managed to change with them. This change was no revolution, though. Most women weren't throwing in the dish-towel for the sheepskin. As chief cooks and bottle-washers, they still had to be home for their families. The kids had to be packed off to school in the morning and urged on with their homework in the afternoon. Dinner had to be on the table in the evening and the housework done by bedtime. "We needed daytime classes so we could send our children off to school," Bequaert says. "Otherwise, most of us just wouldn't have been able to take classes."

For several years before the Burlington campus opened, N.U. had been examining ways to serve nontraditional female students. In April 1960, Knowles addressed the American Council on Education's Commission on the Education of Women, declaring, "There is a growing awareness that this nation and the society as a whole are seriously in need of the full potential of the brainpower available in both sexes."

Over the following few years, Northeastern worked to create a program that would serve the varied needs of women who wanted to begin or continue college-level work but were unable to attend night school or a conventional full-time day program. While the administration was busy designing the program, it was also considering the question of where to put it. Classes were held at Burlington High School while the university searched for an appropriate permanent site, a search that finally ended when Knowles learned of a beautiful piece of land atop a hill near the Burlington/Woburn line. The property, formerly a Nike missile site, became available when the federal government declared it surplus.

The university purchased the land and constructed a building divided into twenty-two classrooms, a cafeteria, an auditorium, and conference rooms. There were already two buildings on the site: an administration building which the university converted into a library, and a former firehouse which became a computer room (the mammoth computers of that day needed a lot of space). In February 1964, the Burlington campus officially opened for business. It was a success almost at once: by early 1965, around 400 women were enrolled in classes there.

Who were these women who took to calling themselves the "Original 400"? In January 1965, 244 of them responded to a survey that revealed the following: 96 percent were married, and 62 percent had four or more children. Four percent worked full-time, 12 percent worked part-time, and 5 percent had never held a job. Twenty-three percent had done no academic work beyond high school. About their reasons for returning to school, 70 percent listed personal growth and self-fulfillment as the primary motivation, 19 percent listed preparation for future employment, and 7 percent intended to earn degrees.

Susan Keats was as representative as any member of this diverse group could be. The Women's Program was her second go at higher education; the first had ended after her sophomore year, when she dropped out at age nineteen to marry a Navy man. "My husband and I made a pact that as soon as we got settled down a bit I'd resume my education," she says today. After moving around for a few years and having children, she and her family returned to Massachusetts in 1965, and she began classes in Burlington. "What I really liked about the Women's Program was its flexibility," she says. "There were women of all ages and backgrounds in the program, and whatever your situation you could count on your classmates' support." Keats would bring her baby to class and set her on the floor in a basket, and often brought her older son along as well. "No one minded any of this," Keats remembers.

The passage from domestic to academic life wasn't always easy. In September 1964, Gladys Bishop, who had enrolled in two classes, was a wife and a mother of two and was already working almost full-time at Polaroid Corporation as a personnel assistant. Writing in the third person, she prepared an essay for her English class that illustrated just how difficult it could be for women in her situation to balance the competing demands of their lives:

While cooking dinner she thinks about the human brain, or the predicate adjective she discussed in class. During homework assignments she thinks about the pudding she should have prepared instead of the cookies she hastily picked up at the supermarket. She begins to think of herself as not a very good wife and mother, and certainly not a very good student if she doesn't even know how to study!

But like many of her classmates, Bishop caught a second wind. The key was learning how to focus on the job at hand.

When undivided attention begins to develop in each area, dinners are prepared with only dinner planning in mind, and study periods are spent as they should be . . . on homework assignments. Her frustrations begin to diminish because each of her responsibilities are placed in proper perspective and she finally recognizes that she is, indeed, capable.

The "Original 400" had a sense that they were pioneers. Many of the women in the program had read Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, or were at least aware of what Friedan had to say. They were intelligent, resourceful, and taking the first tentative steps away from the restrictive roles many of them had occupied during the postwar years.

Eugenia Kaledin taught English at the Burlington campus from 1964 to 1968. "It was one of the liveliest teaching environments I've ever been in," she recalls. "It encouraged women to develop their minds, to take courses that helped them achieve some real goal-either a job or a real degree that would let them go on to graduate school. They were terrific students, because so many of them felt they'd missed out on a lot in life when they'd been steered into early marriage."

N.U.'s administration helped by being innovative-for example, accepting credits from other schools, even if the courses had been taken years before. "One of my students had dropped out of another college some years before," Kaledin says. "When she tried to go back, they told her she could only go full-time. And she'd have to take gym!"

"Most schools had all these arbitrary ideas about how a school should 'test' you for life. The prevailing idea was that the academic elite should have to go through different rituals that tested your seriousness of purpose. They wouldn't let people, especially women, go back to school part-time," Kaledin says. Once given the chance, however, the women in Burlington showed just how serious they were about scholarship by capturing most of the top academic awards given to University College's class of 1969.

Inspired by her students, Kaledin went on to write a book, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s, which examined the strategies many women used to "extend the traditional values of nurturing and caring into other spheres of activity." She dedicated the book "To my students in the Programs for Adult Women: Northeastern University, Burlington Campus, 19641967."

The Women's Program became a professional and academic springboard for several. Jackie Platt, UC'70, MEd'72, became the program's assistant director and went on to get a master's degree from N.U. in women's education. Lucia Bequaert, UC'69, earned a master's degree from Harvard University, worked as an academic administrator, and, in the late '70s and early '80s, was executive director of the Boston YWCA. She later taught a course at Boston College on the sociology of women and wrote a book, Single Women Alone and Together, exploring the ways single women could enrich their own lives and the lives of others. Susan Keats, UC'77, earned a master's in history from N.U. in 1980. She has since taught history at University College and Northeastern's graduate history program. She's now vice president of corporate records management for Fidelity Investments in downtown Boston.

For many of the Women's Program participants, the spiritual benefits equaled the academic and professional ones. As they worked to re-create themselves, these women discovered a community of shared interests and enthusiasm. They saw each other through divorces and deaths, children leaving and grandchildren arriving. After classes they'd meet in the cafeteria-students and teachers together-to talk about ideas and families and life in general.

"We were all very close and a lot of us are still friends today," Bequaert says. "I had a sad death in the family while I was at the Burlington campus, and all those women showed up for me. We all looked out for each other." Platt reflects that "the Women's Program changed my whole life. I knew I could learn, but to get a chance to use that learning, and to have a job, a title, and a paycheck-for me that was an amazing achievement."

Sometimes those cafeteria discussions could get lively, especially when they involved local police officers who took classes at the Burlington campus to earn promotions. "They were bright, ambitious fellows," Keats reminisces. "It was often tough to engage them in intellectual conversations. You had these uppity women arguing against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and town cops who adamantly opposed anything that sounded like 'liberal opinions.' "

Ironically, the Women's Program fell victim to its own success. It did so well in meeting its main goal-introducing women to the educational mainstream-that within a few years it was no longer needed. As the program's participants began to gravitate toward non-gender-specific professional and degree-track courses, the women-only courses were subsumed into University College's continuing-education programs for both sexes. In 1968, the Women's Program was phased out.

But the lives of its participants were forever changed. The Women's Program enabled a generation of intelligent and energetic women to put down their aprons and become anthropologists and lawyers and social workers. And in the words of Lucia Bequaert, "It really demonstrated to us that sisterhood is powerful." Once again, Northeastern had addressed a new educational market and, in the process, performed a valuable human service.

Charles Coe, formerly a writer/editor in Northeastern's Office of Publications, is a program coordinator at the Massachusetts Cultural Council in Boston.

Related links:

The Centennial Celebration
University College, Northeastern's adult education program
University Libraries Archives and Special Collections Department
The Massachusetts Cultural Council