found that universities with generous maternity leave programs were far more successful than their competitors at retaining female expertise and so recouping the investment in their training.īut children are for life, not just for Christmas. Today, the greatest single obstacle preventing talented, qualified women from obtaining top positions is the cost of bringing up a family.

The mythology surrounding Marie Skłodowska Curie emphasizes her poverty and motherly self-denial, yet she recruited her father-in-law as the live-in help and had enough money to hire Polish nannies and send her two daughters back to Warsaw for a few months every year. Like Strachey, many of the women I wrote about were able to pursue independent careers even though they had children (and often a demanding husband as well). But although she died long before anti-discrimination laws were passed, she enjoyed one great advantage denied to most modern ambitious women: money for child care. She never gave up her fight to secure equal pay as well as equal voting rights for women. Technically a 'leaky pipeliner,' Strachey played a leading role in making it possible for female scientists to carry out research, to serve in hospitals, to lecture in universities. 'I find this sort of work almost too fascinating,' she enthused in a letter to her mother. She set up a welding school, organized medical care, and sat on countless committees. 'The fashionable suffrage meeting in New York was very aggravating,' she reported, 'because the smart ladies were so remarkably silly, and yet thought they knew all about the subject.'īack in England, as soon as the war broke out, Strachey temporarily relinquished her campaign for the vote and dedicated herself to finding work for women. She took advantage of her aunt's position as president of Bryn Mawr to examine the situation in America. After leaving Cambridge in 1908 with a degree in mathematics and an ambition to become an electrical engineer, Strachey decided that political activity was more important. One of my favorite characters is the suffrage leader Ray Strachey, who married into the fashionable Bloomsbury set but was scathing about the ability of Virginia Woolf and her colleagues to get anything done. These buried resentments crystallized while I was carrying out research for my new book, A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in World War I. On the contrary: I was offered full funding for a Ph.D., but had been so chronically bored for the previous two years that I had no intention of continuing with a subject that to me - an idealistic 21-year-old - seemed eminently doable but woefully unmeaningful. The other concealed insult is the inference that I was squeezed out.

Patricia fara