Mary Ingraham Bunting: Her Two Lives

In this fascinating debut biography, Elaine Yaffe tells the life-story of Mary Ingraham Bunting, the remarkable 20th century scientist, educator and feminist, who was president of Radcliffe College during the tempestuous sixties, dean of Douglass College, and special assistant to the president of Princeton. As a respected microbiologist, Bunting also did groundbreaking research at Yale. Above all, she’s important because she was one of the first to perceive, and come up with remedies for, the ways in which American society was stifling women’s aspirations and thwarting their achievements. She coined the phrase “the climate of un-expectation” to describe the atmosphere in which females of all ages lived and grew, surrounded by the pervasive assumption that they would never accomplish anything. She worked tirelessly to push back the barriers and to expand women’s opportunities. Now her ideas are accepted as commonplace, but in the 1960s they were revolutionary.