This interview was donated to the Pembroke Center Oral History Project by Lily Cohen, class of 2012. Cohen conducted an interview with her mother, Barbara E. Ehrlich, class of 1974, to discuss the history and future of women in science. At the time of the interview in 2017, Cohen was a scientist at University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Ehrlich was Professor of Pharmacology and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University. Cohen was considering leaving the sciences because of glaring gender inequities.

This interview was conducted with Ruth Cserr on behalf of her mother Helen FitzGerald Cserr who was a professor of biomedical sciences at Brown University and who was one of four plaintiffs in the Louise Lamphere vs Brown University sex discrimination lawsuit.

In this interview, Karen T. Romer, a Brown University administrator of 29 years, describes life for women on campus between 1972 and 2001, as well as her own experiences in postwar Europe in two separate years before college during the 1950s.

An assistant professor of Anthropology and the only woman in her department when she was hired in 1968, Louise Lamphere was denied tenure in 1974. The Anthropology Department claimed that her scholarship was theoretically weak. Lamphere claimed she was the victim of sex discrimination and argued that the small number of women on the Brown faculty was evidence of a larger pattern of discrimination. After unsuccessfully pursuing an internal appeals process, on May 10, 1975 Lamphere filed a lawsuit in United States District Court.

In this interview, Ruth Elizabeth Burt, Pembroke College class of 1953, discusses majoring in Psychology at Pembroke, conducting research for the Education Testing Service, and serving on Brown University’s Corporation.

Burt begins her interview by describing how she decided to attend Pembroke and how Professor Harold Schlosberg encouraged her to pursue the psychology concentration. She notes some of the research she did regarding assessments of talents and reminisces about meeting her husband in Dr. Smiley’s astronomy class.

In this interview, Chair and Professor of Visual Arts, Wendy Edwards, describes her journey to becoming a professional painter and discusses her 40-year tenure at Brown University.

Edwards begins by briefly mentioning her parents’ educational backgrounds and then detailing her early life living on a farm in Virginia outside of Washington, DC, and visiting her grandmother in New York City. She describes the influence these two different experiences had on her interest in art and explains why she decided to attend the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts.