Sisterhood Was Powerful

...To capture the moment, Peckinpan puts a wide-angle lens on his camera and positions the camera on the edge of the ear's seat...

...The great college presidents such as Alice Freeman Palmer of Wellesley and Martha Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr were products of the days when women on college faculties were at an all-time high--something less than forty percent in 1879...

...In the MARGARET MLtLVEH1LL CULLEY, a graduate o/ Manhattanville College, is an Assistant Pro/essor o/ English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...Two of the five women served only as acting president...

...It is always to rub our noses in violence, to protract violence so that we can have the experience of it, can examine and contemplate it, more fully even than those who experience it first-hand...

...The language is revealing, as is the language used by Elizabeth McCormack in discussing the appointment of the first male president in the century and a quarter history of Manhattanville College...

...full professors teach many freshman courses...

...McCormaek--who has served in the distinguished tradition of the women before her, Grace Dammann and Eleanor O'Byme--explained that the search committee reviewed hundreds of candidates but "found the right man in our own backyard...

...one-ten faculty student ratio...

...The reality, perhaps only obscurely sensed by these gifted undergraduate women, was that within the religious life was one place where a woman might live out a life-long commitment to a profession...

...Thus while sixty men are presidents of women's colleges, no woman is the president of a men's college...

...The d6tente between big business and higher education, in addition to raising awesome threats to academic freedom, does not bode well for women...

...At least two more, including Jacqueline Grennan Wexler of Hunter, are ex-nuns...

...it seems paradoxical and yet is apparently true that the women of early Christendom fled from the constraint of the home to the expansion of the cloister...

...This head bouncing across the seat at us in its bag has very much the same effect as the shoot-outs in The Wild Bunch, the siege of the farmhouse in Straw Dogs, and the blast aimed in our faces from a shotgun filled with dimes in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid...

...Colleges facing financial difficulties seek leadership with "business sense...

...i SISTERHOOD WAS POWERFUL MARGARET MULVEHILL CULLEY The overwhelming majority of women who are college presidents are also nuns When Elizabeth McCormack stepped down as President of Manhattanville College this August to be replaced by Harold Delaney, the number of women college presidents in this country was reduced to ninety-five...

...In 1939 nearly thirty percent of college and university faculties were women but ten years ago only nineteen percent were women...

...Patterns among the undergraduate population, at leaast at the initial stages of coeducation are apt to be similar...

...what this means is that they bring men to positions which might have been held by women...

...Already undermined by the conviction that having men in positions of leadership equals educational prestige, the precarious situation of women in higher education became even more so in the face of the hard financial facts of the last decade...

...The search committee, charged with finding a president for this small, private college which has recently become coeducational and which suffers the financiai stresses of all such under-endowed institutions, apparently felt they needed a-man-for-the-job...

...It allows us to spend an hour in the presence of all those ruptured arteries and detached members which Peekinpah's earlier films could only hold on the screen for a few, exaggerated minutes...

...Though creating an awesome picture of new battles to be fought in the financially difficult years ahead, the above statistics and reflections offer some personal illumination...

...Chosen for their scholarship, but primarily because they are first-rate teachers...

...The very few women who do hold positions of highest leadership in our colleges are almost entirely at institutions which the culture devalues: women's colleges, church-related colleges and vocational schools...

...What was true in the Middle Ages apparently has remained true for some in the twentieth century...

...words of Emily James Putnam: "We think today of the cloister as a refuge from the distracting liberty of secular life...

...The person served less than a year before retiring.] No woman president in the CUNY system has yet served a term of office in excess of three years...

...HEAD GAMES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN In Sam Peckinpah's new film, Bring Me the Head el A l[redo Garcia, Alfredo's part is indeed played by the mere part mentioned in the title...

...It's a moment done in that inimitable Peckinpah style...

...Even Wellesley College which was founded with the intention of hiring only women administrators and faculty and which had over ninety percent of its faculty women in 1940 had only sixty-two percent women in 1960...

...Some of these women such as Abbess Hilda, who presided over a monastery for religious of both sexes, were not only influential figures in their own estblishments but also significant figures of state...

...Of the women college presidents who are not nuns or ex-nuns four are at private women's collegesmBamard, Cedar Crest, Radcliffe and Wellesley...

...Between 1960 and 1972 152 of the nation's 298 women's colleges closed or became coed...

...a third woman served twice as acting president at Hunter College before becoming the first woman to be appointed president of a CUNY college...

...Peckinpah begins the trip by having Benny open the door of his car and throw the bag containing the head onto the seat...

...The number of women college presidents has followed the same pattern--in the 1950's there were twenty percent more women college presidents than there are today...

...For years I have puzzled over a remark made to me by the director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University of Michigan...

...In fact, of the 49 different persons who have served as presidents of CUNY colleges since 1939, only five (12.5 percent) have been women . . . three of those have served at Hunter College, a liberal arts school for women which became coeducational in 1961...

...Margaret Mary under the thumb of the monsignor at the parochial parish school...

...A report called The Status oJ Women at the City University of New York presented to the Chancellor at CLTNY in 1972 states: In the fall of 1971, women were only two of 20 (10 percent) college presidents [One of these retired in June of 1972 and was replaced by an acting president who is a man...

...This is why Peekinpah has so often used slow motion at the climax of his films, to draw out for us the supersensory, otherwise ungraspable moment, and the purpose in making Alfredo's head into Benny's baggage is comparable...

...After catching a glimpse of Alfredo's classic Latin features in a locket photo during the opening scene, we don't lay eyes on him again until about half way through, when his head is being carried around in a burlap bag by an amateur bounty hunter named Benny (Warren Oates...

...Bennington, of course, has been until recent years a woman's college...

...But we should be aware that the erosion of two preserves of women's power--the Sisterhood and the sisterhood of the women's college--may seriously reduce the number of women college administrators...

...There has never been a woman college vice president or provost in the history of CUNY...

...Here we have a crucial foomote to the popular /mage of Sr...

...When educators begin to talk to big business, they do not talk o r 4 October 1974:16 think in terms of women...

...Young women who held leadership positions as undergraduates in these institutions regularly entered the convent upon graduation...

...At the turn of the century, Martha Carey Thomas remarked at the inaeguration ceremony of the first Dean of Pembroke College: "If we seek for the cause of misunderstanding of the conditions of girls' education, we shall find it in that educated women are not yet in control of women's education in either schools or colleges...

...The chairman of the search committee, Peter McCulough, is the president of Xerox...

...Such attitudes were by no means unique to Smith College as is evidenced in the nationwide decline in the percentage of women on college faculties between the years 1940 and 1960...

...But now I think I understand it all: in those days I also wanted to be a college president...

...male undergraduates assume leadership positions such as student body president or editor of the newspaper in excess of their numbers...

...When a woman's college becomes coed, it is likely tha twomen administrators will be replaced by men even though a small fraction of the student population is male...

...Affirmative action efforts of the last few years have increased that figure by less than 2 percent...

...That the overwhelming majority of women who are college presidents are also nuns is an important sociological fact...

...fifty percent of iH the classes have fewer than twenty students...

...In a way this makes Alfredo the perfect antagonist for a Peckinpah movie, and the very character whom Peckinpah's work has been striving to create for years...

...A Smith College handbook documents the widespread assumption of the sixties--that the excellence of an educational institution was evidenced by the number of men it could boast on its faculty...

...close and friendly relations between faculty and students...

...we therefore put this in because we are trying to advertise the superiority of the faculty...

...It is difficult for men to look at women independently of the relation of wives and sweethearts, and this view unconsciously keeps them from treating the educational standards of women with sufficient seriousness...

...two are at teachers' colleges, one at a business college, one at a music institute...

...The same point might be made for health-care institutions in America...

...And the Catholic college was one of the few institutions where women could win positions of the highest responsibility and influence...

...over haIJ of the faculty are men...

...In fact, this severed head seems in many ways just the ultimate logical extension of all those slow-motion eruptions of blood and gore in earlier Peckinpah works...

...The head also reduces Peekinpah's argument to an Commonweal: 17...

...Benny is hoping to collect a large reward that has been offered privately for Alfredo's head, and now that he has exhumed the head from Alfredo's grave in his native village, his only problem is getting it back to the man who put the price on it...

...A class president might well return to her alma mater after ten years, if not as its President perhaps as its Dean of Students...

...The other place where women have figured prominently in higher education in America is in the handful of prestigious private women's colleges...

...Coaching alumnae in effective recruiting of new students for Smith, the handbook reads: Points to Stress about Smith (italics mine) Superior faculty...

...We would not want to argue that a young woman who aspired to a leadership role in higher education should enter the convent, nor that the women's college should necessarily be revived...

...Virginia Woolf knew that when she contemplated the state of women's education in A Room ot One's Own: "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us...

...The 1973 World Almanac lists 1500 persons who a r e presidents of four-year colleges in the United States and of the ninety-five who are women eighty-four are nuns...

...Ironically, it was under the guise of improving standards of education for women that colleges began to deny, and continue to deny, positions of leadership to women...

...has always remained divided upon this issue at our best-known, private women's colleges: Wellesley ColCommonweal 15 lege has had only women presidents since its founding in 1875 while Smith College, endowed by Sophia Smith in th: same year, has recently announced the appointment of its first woman president, Jill K. Conway of the University of Toronto, whose term will begin in July, 1975...

...The culture's reluctance to place women in positions of "real" power and influence is compounded by the apparent impossibility of placing women in positions of authority over men...

...She "does not recall that students ever thought it was unusual to have a male president at a female college" and as for the high percentage of men on the faculty-"It was viewed as a positive ad,vantage of the college...

...The lens distorts the action, making the head balloon out at us at it falls, making it loom large in our cringing consciousness...

...For men have access to the money...

...The head becomes an emblem of violence, a fixed symbol that at last arrests the fleeting process which earlier films could only slow down a little...

...When questioned about the intent of such a statement at a Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination hearing in 1973 a witness from Smith said: "This is what the students think, this is what their mothers think...

...Have you ever thought about becoming a nun?' It was not that the remark was made by a non-Catholic at a large secular university that startled me, but the fact that for some years I had been considering entering the convent and I wondered how he knew...

...This in addition to the well-documented discrimination in salary and rank against women college faculty suggests that the century and a half struggle initiated by Mary Lyon in 1837 to make women full citizens of the academic world has far from achieved its end...

...P u t - nam's observation that "the impulse toward leadership which kept the men in the world sent the women out of it" could be confirmed by any graduate of a Catholic women's college in this century...

...The intention never varies from one Peckinpah film to the next...

...You seem serious about your studies, Margaret," he said...

...Opinio...

...Defending the small class size to business interests at a meeting of academic and business leaders, Peter Armacost, President of Ottawa Univerity, Ottawa, Kansas, argued: "We're in the business of producing growth and learning, and it could be one man teaching a small class is much more productive than one man teaching a big class...

...Gloria Steinem, quoted in the Smith College student paper in April of 1974, recalls her days as an undergraduate at Smith and confirms this statement about mothers and their daughters...

...Mary Lyon began the century and a half struggle to obtain quality higher education for women when she opened the doors of Mount Holyoke in 1837...

...We rejoice in the new order that allows Elizabeth McCormack, as she leaves Manhattanville and the religious fife, to accept a handsomely paid job with a national foundation...

...The point is, of course, that as long as women administrators and academicians are not full citizens of that world, women undergraduates never will be either...

...And with the exception of Hunter, all the colleges headed by women are small: most with enrollments of under 2,000...

...The only woman in the country not a nun or an ex-nun who is the president of a college where men are students and which is not primarily a vocational institution is Gall Thane Parker of Bennington...

...no graduate students teaching...

...The colleges where women were in leadership roles--the small colleges and the women's colleges--began to close or to become coeducational in order to survive...

...It's quite a trip...

...The head is thrown right into our laps, as it were, while the camera gives us a lap's-eye view...

...The Sisterhood has been one route for women to the positions of leadership in institutions of higher education in this country, positions otherwise largely closed to women...