Gender Evolution in History

In 1984 when Sally McMurry began teaching history at Penn State, there were no females heading departments in the College of the Liberal Arts and only two women held tenured positions in the department. Today McMurry is one of nine female department heads in the College and women represent more than 50 percent of the thirty-one tenured faculty members in her department.

Such changes are emblematic of the evolution McMurry has witnessed in her years at Penn State. When reflecting how women’s roles in academia have evolved during her time at University Park, McMurry sees maternity leave as perhaps the most dramatic, and symbolic, change. As she remembers it, when she started her job, maternity leave was generally dependent on the munificence of your department head, who, once you found out you were pregnant would hopefully allow you to keep your position while taking time off to have a child.

Now a department head herself, McMurry no longer needs to negotiate such leave with members of the faculty. While the university has had a maternity leave procedure on the books since 1971, clearer policies have been institutionalized since then, making practices for maternity leave standard across the University.

Despite these types of challenges, from McMurry’s view, the College of the Liberal Arts has long been ahead of the curve in terms of being a welcoming work place for women.

“Lots of my colleagues at other universities have horror stories. Maybe I was treated like a niece or a granddaughter at times, but there were never the misogynist things you heard about at other institutions,” she said.

All of McMurry’s observations about women’s roles at Penn State are made with a historian’s keen awareness of the roles women have played in society through the decades. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gender bias limited women’s opportunities to hold professional, highly esteemed jobs. This was as true for occupations like medicine or law as it was for academia. That reality created unexpected situations in institutions of higher learning. For instance, women interested in the sciences learned chemistry through home economics. MIT graduate Ellen Richards was a pioneer in this field, lauded for helping to establish the first ever water quality standards, as well as writing books like The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for House-Keepers.

These days, McMurry applies her awareness of gender roles to her work interpreting ways rural properties fit into the state’s agricultural history. She is in the midst of developing a resource for the state that will help evaluate the historical significance of Pennsylvania’s rural agricultural properties.

“You can’t really interpret a farmstead without understanding the gender roles in labor,” said McMurry. Take chicken coops for example. Maintaining the family flock was long a women’s responsibility, meaning coops often were built close to the house. Once men started returning from World War II, the care of chickens became increasingly mechanized and managed by men, so chicken coops were built further from the family home. Knowledge of such trends can help evaluators understand where a property fits into Pennsylvania’s long agricultural history.

The evaluation project started in 2003 and since then McMurry and her colleagues have cataloged twenty-four of the state’s sixty-three counties. They hope to finish all the counties by 2010.

As they study farms around the state, McMurry said she is consistently surprised how diversified agriculture was up until the 1960s. Generally, until that time, no single crop accounted for more than 50 percent of a farm’s sales. Today many farms are dependent on one or two crops for their success, putting them at much larger risk.

This tenuous, homogenous position is reminiscent of the issues McMurry encountered when she first entered the male-dominated world of academia. Clearly, in academia, as in agriculture, diversity has its benefits.

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