Susan E. Graber begins Part 1 her interview by sharing some family background information such as her mother’s college education and the expectation that her children would also attend college. She explains why she chose to attend Pembroke College and recalls some difficulties she faced as a woman pursuing science. Graber remembers her ambivalence about pursuing graduate school and the overall assumption that Pembroke graduates would go on to a career or graduate work.
In Part 1 of this interview, Lucile K. Wawzonek discusses changing attitudes towards formal gender divisions on campus during the Pembroke-Brown merger. She begins by reflecting on the regulations at Brown in the late 1960s, including the male caller system and curfews. She speaks on the housing lottery and the advent of coed dorms, which she feels led to a looser social structure, especially in terms of dating.
Ferelene "Nan" Bailey begins by discussing her childhood, the benefits of living overseas during her childhood, her experience applying to Brown University, and her expectations of her experience. She spends a significant amount of time discussing the various and bountiful activist groups she participated in, and more broadly, social turmoil during the seventies surrounding issues such as the Vietnam War and birth control.
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.
In this interview, Anita L. Schell begins by discussing her family and the support she had from her parents to attend college. She then talks about her initial attraction to Brown University and her fond memories of the choir, which she participated in for all four years, and her group trip to India. Schell then discusses dormitory life and her various experiences at Brown both inside and outside the classroom, highlighting her involvement with St. Stephen’s Church, and religion on campus.
In this interview, Rita Duarte Marinho discusses her experiences pursuing a doctoral degree in political science at Brown University from 1975 to 1979.
Miriam Dale Pichey’s interview is an energetic insight into the politics of student life at Brown University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She describes both the campus atmosphere of gendered social rules and struggling for equal representation after the Pembroke-Brown merger, the founding of Women of Brown United, and the broader political environment of student activism during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement.
In this interview recorded on the eve of the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, eight Brown University alumnae discuss the factors that led them to found the women’s liberation student group, Women of Brown United (WBU) in 1970. They detail campus life and group activism in the midst of the sexual revolution, ongoing Vietnam War and wider political and societal upheaval across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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.
