Challenging History

Her mother's words got recycled a lot last winter after Harvard announced her appointment.

Indeed, if you were a biographer looking to exemplify the almost ungraspable way women's lives have changed in the decades since the advice was offered, you could hardly find a better subject than the former Catharine Drew Gilpin.

The biography would start with a 1950s childhood spent in the kind of Shenandoah Valley family in which the husband breeds horses, the wife is usually identified as a "socialite" and children are taught to say "ladies," not "women."

It would note that most male Gilpins attended Princeton, an option denied young Drew (she never went by "Catharine") because the university did not then admit women. Instead, she ended up at Bryn Mawr, where she would join in civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and lobby successfully for the elimination of that all-female institution's protective curfew.

Next up: grad school. Is it true, Faust is asked, that the University of Pennsylvania's history department kissed her off because she was married?

Yes, it is. Faust's first husband was a medical student. Thinking he might not find an internship nearby, she asked whether, after spending two years in residence at Penn, she could finish her graduate work at a distance if necessary. Back came a letter, she recalls, from John Shover, the history department's chair of graduate admissions:

"We're not interested in women who are following their husbands. Don't bother to apply."

"He was a very nice man," Faust says, "but he had certain assumptions." She ended up in Penn's American civilization department instead.

Women historians of Faust's generation all have stories like this. Faust seems to have considered hers so commonplace that good friends like UCLA's Lynn Hunt, Iowa's Linda Kerber and Penn's Stephanie McCurry have never heard it.

McCurry is 48, a dozen years younger than Faust. She thinks she's led a " charmed life" compared with those who went before her.

In Faust's day, McCurry says, you'd arrive in grad school to find that "there weren't very many people like you." Certainly there were no senior women to serve as scholarly mentors, let alone to ask -- as McCurry could later ask Faust, when combining work and motherhood began to seem impossible -- "How the heck did you do this?"

Faust's second marriage, to historian Charles Rosenberg, had brought her a daughter and a stepdaughter. She was okay with the work-motherhood thing. But at 40, she found herself facing another female-specific hurdle: