Women, Powered by Persistence

“What Harvard does, for better or worse, becomes a model for many other institutions,” Mary Jean Fuller Farrington, a member of the Women Employed at Harvard organization, wrote in a 1973 letter. The letter, now housed in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, is part of the group’s archival collection, and stands as proof of their short-lived but fiery fight for better working conditions.

Women Employed at Harvard emerged as an organization in 1973 amid rising tensions and frustrations with the Harvard administration as the University’s implementation of a non-discriminatory hiring process stalled.

Following executive orders in 1970 and 1972, Harvard began an effort to establish an affirmative action plan for employment that aligned with federal guidelines. For three years, however, their efforts proved unsuccessful: Every proposal they submitted to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare failed.

Through determined advocacy and organizing, WEH fought for input and transparency in the process — and for greater gender equity across campus.

Harvard’s slow progress stoked frustration across campus, with the delay costing the University an estimated $250,000 in federal funding. “Impatience, especially among women in the faculty ranks, has gradually turned to distrust,” The Crimson wrote in a 1973 article.

A group of women faculty members — unified in their discontent — met with Harvard administrators, including President Derek C. Bok and affirmative action coordinator Walter J. Leonard, to protest the policy’s delayed development. Dissatisfied with the administration’s response, the faculty members collected 33 signatures and officially organized as Women Employed at Harvard.

In a tactical move, WEH opened up membership to other women employees, such as kitchen staff, office workers, and laboratory technicians. The organization, 150 members strong and largely composed of middle-aged employees, prided themselves on their inclusivity and offered a sliding scale for dues. WEH was not of the “general rag-tag graduate students pissed off at something” variety, as Margaret A. Mills, president of the Graduate Women’s Organization, told The Crimson in 1973.

The organization submitted a request to join the affirmative action policy’s draft process, but received no response. Adopting a more assertive stance, the women compiled seven pages worth of grievances and discrepancies with Harvard’s final proposal, which the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare accepted in the fall of 1973. “The plan contains many pious words, but almost no mechanisms for turning these words into action,” Delda H. White, the group’s original chair, wrote.

In back-and-forth correspondence with University administrators, WEH persistently called for accountability and transparency — outlining demands for improved hiring processes, fair and equitable compensation, and publicized affirmative action requirements. But the women did not limit their scope to affirmative action; they also advocated for improved child care and adequate retirement benefits.

In a tense exchange between Leonard and Alice Hutter, the WEH coordinator, the organization adamantly pursued changes for “hiring patterns in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”

Hutter expressed WEH’s discontent with Leonard’s “uncooperative, condescending attitude” toward their efforts to help the University’s more than 4,000 women employees. “We depend on you, our advocate with the Federal government, to see to it that your women constituents receive just treatment under law,” she wrote.

Leonard did not respond for several weeks. Hutter wrote to him again, expressing the group’s regrets that Leonard had “little support” in Harvard’s administration and condemning the further oppression that would “rule the day” at Harvard.

This time, she received a response — one directly from President Bok. “Let me assure you that you have been given a highly distorted and misleading version of my remarks on affirmative action,” he wrote.

The record of correspondence halts soon after, and Harvard’s non-discriminatory hiring policy joined Bok and Leonard’s legacy of affirmative action policies across the University. Beginning in 1969, the pair implemented race-conscious application processes at the Law School and later the College.

The so-called “Harvard Plan” later appeared in the landmark 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which declared affirmative action constitutional. The ruling opinion cited the Harvard Plan as a model of fair and open practice for higher education admissions processes. In 2023, two Supreme Court decisions — including one against Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy — overturned this precedent.

WEH’s archival footprint, confined to four folders of letters and meeting minutes, does not explicitly outline the organization’s influence on the University’s eventual adoption of an equal hiring process. The organization itself appears to have faded out of existence in 1974. Yet the archive — full of typewritten letters and handwritten notes — captures the perseverance of this group of women, devoted to a cause that outlived their time at Harvard.

— Magazine writer McKenzie E. Lemmo can be reached at mckenzie.lemmo@thecrimson.com.