The English department didn’t hire women as a matter of principle, though it was happy enough to teach them but this was not mentioned in polite company. There were a lot of things to which you were supposed to pay no attention. These attentions were viewed by the authorities as minor annoyances, like midges. There was one communal phone, and any incoming call was likely to be an obscene one. You’d look up from your desk and there would be a pair of men’s feet, right on your window ledge.
Toms, creeping and peeping, decorated the building like barnacles on a whale. I lived in a large, wooden three-storey graduate women’s residence on Appian Way that I later used as a quasi-model for the Commander’s house in The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d been told by a male poet that you really had to be a truck driver so as to understand life, but there wasn’t much hope of that for me, so teaching it would have to be. But everyone knew you couldn’t support yourself that way, so I disguised myself in tweed and set out to acquire some credentials. What was I even doing there? I didn’t want to be a professor I wanted to be a writer. In the fall of 1961, when I was 21, I entered Harvard-Radcliffe as a graduate student. Title: The Equivalents : A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s.
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