Virginia Gildersleeve - Women’s Equality

Women’s Equality

Gildersleeve was an early advocate of paid leaves of absence for female faculty members. In 1931 she raised the matter with Columbia President Butler, who "looked a little startled." But, Butler agreed, saying "We should have women teachers with fuller lives and richer experience, not so many dried-up old maids" Gildersleeve recorded this remark in her memoir without comment. She persuaded the Barnard Board of Trustees to enact a maternity policy that provided one term off at full pay or a year off at half pay for all new faculty mothers. In the first year three women took advantage of this new policy.

In 1915, in a speech to the Columbia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa she challenged the commonly held belief that the education of women was a detriment to society, arguing that improved public health and the declining infant mortality made it unnecessary to breed as many children as once had been the case. In the modern world women could have the same ambitions as men.

Rosalind Rosenberg, Gildersleeve’s biographer, has argued that “Through her work Gildersleeve and other pioneers like her provided the essential conditions necessary to winning for women full equality with men in American society and throughout the world. … In broadening women's scholarly horizons, Gildersleeve laid the groundwork for some of the most innovative scholarship of the twentieth century. And in helping to draft the charter of the UN, Gildersleeve assured that the issues to which she had devoted her career on Morningside Heights would be addressed throughout the world in the decades that followed. By insisting that women have the right to every educational opportunity open to men, and by fighting her whole life to secure that opportunity, she helped establish the bedrock on which feminists have been building ever since.”