Affirmative Action

It was 1968, and I had applied to graduate schools in the field of French literature. Someone from Tufts University—a male dean or department chair, I can’t remember—called to say the faculty had accepted my application. In fact, he chatted on, they had wanted to award me a National Defense Education Act fellowship (of which they had just one or two), but since I was a woman, they feared I might “go off and get married” without finishing my degree, and so they had given ...