MIT's history of misogyny

MIT's History of Misogyny

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December 2024

We went down this rabbit hole while writing about the award we started to honor Katherine Franck Huettner, described here.  Ms. Franck earned her master's degree at MIT in 1948, but suffered from MIT's culture of misogynistic abuse, causing her to drop out of her PhD Physics studies. But what contemporaneous accounts exist to corroborate the claim that MIT was a hostile environment for women, you ask?  The answer is, "plenty."

MIT's Voo Doo comic magazine, circa October 1944

MIT has taken some steps to examine gender discrimination and sexual harassment, and in 2011 held an entire symposium on the subject.  If you have spare time on your hands you might want to watch the video recording on this page.  It provides an excellent oral history of stuff that went down in the 1960s and 1970s, and includes a lot of statistics:

  • First female admitted in 1871
  • By 1916, 600 degrees had been awarded to women.  Which was only 1% of the sheepskins...
  • First female PhD awarded in 1922
  • First female PhD in chemical engineering awarded in 1937. This proved to be a popular degree for women in the 1940s, compared to other majors.
  • Between 1940 and 1950, 180 degrees awarded to women, including 23 PhDs.
  • First female professor, 1952 (economics and social sciences)
  • First female science professor, 1959
  • By 1964 the percentage of women awarded degrees was still just a few percent
  • First female engineering professor, 1965
  • Thanks to a lot of social-political factors outside of MIT, the percentage of women earning undergrad degrees rose to 45% by 2011

Here's an anecdote from one of the conference speakers.  Professor Nancy Hopkins, now the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the MIT, recalled the first time she met Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick.  In the early 1960s she was studying (as an undergrad) at Harvard and sitting at her lab desk.  The door opened, and in walked Crick, 27 years older than Ms. Hopkins.  He walked up behind her and grabbed her breasts, while asking what she was working on.  She noted that at the time, she did not consider this sexual harassment, but came to realize later that Crick was probably not all that interested in her lab notes.

According to an article in the MIT Technology Review in December1955 titled "The MIT Coed - Then and Now", for the forty-year period ending in 1953 the percentage of women students was between 1 and 2%, which seems remarkable because this includes the war years. Note that only four PhDs in Physics were awarded to women in the 1940s, and zero PhDs in electrical engineering. Are women not up to the task, or was something else going on?

For the longest time, women had no place to stay on campus, so most of the students were local, from Massachusetts.  In 1943, MIT opened a house for women's room and board that had a maximum capacity of 17 women and was located off-campus at 120 Bay state Road, across the Charles River.  Not until 1963 did MIT build a proper dormitory on-campus.

What was MIT like in the 1940s?  Who left us a trail of misogynistic bread-crumbs? Hundreds of pages of Voo Doo!  Voo Doo is billed as "MIT's oldest surviving journal of all things relatively funny, since 1919."  It is pretty obvious that it was the product of what we would call "incels" today. We found an issue from October 1944 that is especially relevant.  Here is an article titled "Postwar Tech" written by someone with the initials R.M.A, who might be Richard Adler that is listed on the masthead, and died in 2019.  Pay attention to the word "murgatroyd".

I COULD hardly believe it, but it was perfectly true. I had come back to Tech after the Navy was through with me at the end of the duration and didn't know the place. It had become, of all things, a coed school in the true sense of the word. There were none of the horrible Murgatroyds that were seen in Technology's hallowed halls during and before the war - no, there was none of that prewar stuff. Instead of the only faces on the Great Court at lunch time worth looking at belonging to Radiation Lab girls and Professor Weiner, there were dazzling beauties - luscious female students - all over the place!

My old roommate, Jones, had come back with me to Tech. He is somewhat of the brownbagger type and was quite disgusted with the change. "They've ruined my alma mater!" he sobbed sentimentally as he chewed a hole in the rug, Hitler fashion. I, being of the fun (i.e., sex) loving type, had a decidedly opposite reaction....

The article gets a little more "penthouse" but we will skip R.M.A's fantasy. Voo Doo was rife with misogyny, it is almost like a version of the Harvard Lampoon that was written by 12-year-olds. Whoops, maybe Harvard Lampoon has been taken over by 12-year-olds recently...

Here's a sample "joke" Voo Doo published in the October 1944 issue:

New WAC motto: "Have you relieved a soldier today?"

Would you want your daughter to go to a school that published that?  

Here is a website dedicated to archiving all of the Voo Doo back issues.  It seems to have been updated only sporadically over the past two decades, and is incredibly slow, which is a surprise since it's at mit.edu.  Maybe they are not especially proud of the past issues of this publication.

Murgatroyds?

Back in the day the first MIT coeds were called "Murgatroyds", a term meant specifically to conjure up images of ugliness and overall bitchiness. Murgatroyds endured considerable abuse in the Voo Doo publication.  The above article is not a one-off example, check out this Murgatroyd "comic" from April 1946.  In case you can't read it, the first panel says "This is Murgatroyd.  She is a Tech Coed.  See the maggots!"  By the final panel we find out that the "Harvard man Flaubert" is gay, and has fallen for "Johnny Long", which goes to show you that MIT was well ahead of the gay-porn-star naming curve. You can get your own copy of the April 1946 issue of Voo Doo, here.  This comic was published while Ms. Franck studied at MIT, but I doubt she sprang for the $0.25 purchase price.

As far as we know, MIT has never been held to account for the behavior that is well documented in Voo Doo.  In spite of her experience during the 1940s, Ms. (Franck) Huettner was a lifetime subscriber to MIT Technology Review and was proud of her Master's degree.  Family legend holds that she was working toward her PhD when a professor moved a grading curve to put her just below passing, and her father lost patience with funding her education.  She was a very modest person and would not approve of this on-line discussion about the dark side of MIT, but unfortunately, she gave birth to someone who does not take crap from anyone.

As a non sequitur, an article in the MIT Technology Review inspired me 20 years ago to rant about the Difference between an Engineer and a Scientist. The premise was understanding why a shower curtain might blow onto your legs while showering, versus how to stop it from happening. By the way, if anyone can find the MIT shower curtain article I will pay the first one to send it to me $100! I think it would be dated in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Now what?

MIT has come a long way, their current president is Sally Kornbluth.  Why don't they do a little more research on how shabbily they treated women and then apologize for it?  Perhaps they owe an honorary PhD to some of the women that left discouraged? MIT students, feel free to take up the mantle here.

Let's not stop at MIT.  Maybe some other tech colleges could take a look back at past behaviors and offer apologies. For example, Stevens Institute of Technology didn't admit female undergraduate students until 1971.  In my own experience at Stevens in the 1970s, people used to call the minority of women there "co-techs" which of course is a word play on a tampon brand.  But would they be stupid enough to use that misogynistic term in their venerable campus newspaper, the "STUTE?" If you guessed "yes", you were right.  I found a letter to the editor from 14 April 1972 in which Karl Karnay '75 used the phase a half dozen times.  He was complaining about shower privacy for misplaced male students due to the need for newly-admitted female students to have their own washroom. Yes, we also had incels in the 1970s.

Tell me about your micro-penis without telling me...

Karl Karnay went on to become staff editor for the STUTE, and graduated before I arrived.

Come to think of it, the only female professor I recall at Stevens Institute when I was there taught humanities. One thing I remember was that she took our class on a field trip to see the play Equus in New York City.  That play features full nudity.  I definitely got an A in her class, but then again, I got mostly As...

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