Susan Lyman: A Portrait

Susan Storey Lyman '49 entered Radcliffe with two children. She gave birth to her third in her junior year. She was not the typical Radcliffe girl for 1949; but she now chairs its Board of Trustees and is one of its most effective advocates.

In fact, Radcliffe was somewhat confounded when, at age 25, she decided to go to college. She had been admitted as a senior in high school but had chosen marriage instead. Then, in 1944, with her husband in the Marines, bored with wartime volunteer work, she remembers, "I began to think, this is ridiculous. I've got to do something more constructive with my time. So I went over to Radcliffe, and they were not particularly responsive. It was pointed out to me that I had made my choice, that indeed I was a wife and mother." Lyman stood firm, however, and was finally admitted on the basis of her previous admission several years before.

Lyman joined the Board of Trustees in 1958, and returned to get a degree from the Ed School in 1963. At this time, she says, she began to see "a tendency towards a group who was assuming Radcliffe should merge with Harvard and be distributed in it. This concerned me because I wasn't sure whether this was quite the way we should go...I realized that money was a major problem, and that lack of money seemed to be the real threat to Radcliffe's survival." So Lyman became interested in fundraising, and it soon became evident that she was good at it. "This is reality, money's a reality, and we should talk about it...I think it's not fair, it's one of the problems with women, that we haven't talked about these realities, and it's important conditioning."

Lyman believes that Radcliffe's priorities now are initiative and advocacy on behalf of women in the university, and to undergird its existing programs with appropriate funding. But, she cautions: "I wouldn't want Radcliffe to be rich. There's always a need to be a bit hungry...Radcliffe is a flexible unit, and flexibility has to do with being a little insecure. You listen better when you're anxious, and I think that Radcliffe shouldn't be enormously wealthy. It would get a little fat in the head."

Lyman sees her efforts on Radcliffe's behalf not as altruism, but as testimony to the usefulness of her own education. "It has truly helped me," she says, "in solving the problems of my own life. I don't know what I would have done without it. I only hope we can continue to fulfill the same role in the lives of young women."