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CCB Spotlight: Elga R. Wasserman, A.M. '47, Ph.D. '49

March 16, 2022
Elga Wasserman.
Elga R. Wasserman

This article is a part of "CCB Spotlight," a new ongoing series of articles that will report on achievements in research, education, career development, and community development among students, alumni, faculty, staff, groups and wider members of the chemistry and chemical biology community at Harvard. To nominate an individual and or a group to be spotlighted, please complete this short form or reach out to Communications Manager Yahya Chaudhry.

In honor of Women's History Month, this article profiles Elga R. Wasserman, A.M. '47, Ph.D. '49, who oversaw Yale's adoption of coeducation and promoted gender equity in the sciences. Although Elga was a brilliant chemist and protoge of Robert Burns Woodward, her scientific career was thwarted by gender inqeuities, and as a result, she made it her mission to improve higher education for the women who came after her.

Early Life:

Elga Ruth Steinhertz was born on June 30, 1924 in Berlin, Germany to a family that highly valued education. According to JWA, her father, Dezsoe Steinherz (1888–1973) had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, but moved to Germany after the war to study chemical engineering and law, becoming a chemical patent attorney. In 1933, the Nazi government closed Elga's Montessori school, so Elga alsong with her brother Hans Andor were transferred to a Jewish primary school where they learned Hebrew and Jewish history. After the Nazi police harrased her mother's brother, a liberal writer, Elga's family left the country in 1937, moving across the world to settle in Great Neck, Long Island where her father worked as patent lawyer and her mother was a real estate broker. Most of the family members who stayed in Germany died before the end of WWII. 

Elga excelled at school, graduating at the top of her class a year early in 1941, when she wasn't even seventeen years old. She attended Smith College, a liberal arts college, on a scholarship. Elga organized civil rights protests at Smith during the early 1940s, at one point organizing a campus-wide forum on race relations with the activist Roy Wilkins. Though interested in medicine, Elga was wary of debt and instead she accepted a graduate fellowship to Harvard in 1945 to study organic chemistry at Radcliffe.

At Radcliffe/Harvard:

In 1945,  Elga enrolled at Radcliffe, then a women's university, as a graduate chemistry student, one of only two students at the time. At Harvard, she belonged to Professor Robert Burns Woodward's research group. Burns, who would go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965, was considered to be one of the most talented sythetic organic chemists of the mid-20th century. At the time that Elga was his student, Woodward synthesized many complex natural products including quinine, cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine, lysergic acid, and , chlorophyll. According to Mary Bowden and Otto Benfey, "Woodward's intellectual self-aussurance disconcerted some students and colleagues over the years, but his sense of humor about his role as leader helped weld the Woodward group of students together and made collaborating or competing with him as a peer more like a game... Science was for him another game of skill and chance, with its own rules, played to win." During her time at Harvard, she worked a Teaching Fellow.

After serving in the US military during WWII, Harry Wasserman, a keenly creative chemist, returned to his graduate studies at Harvard and met Elga, a fellow member of the Woordward group. They wed in 1947, the same year that Elga earned her master's degree in chemistry. In 1949, Elga defended her dissertation, "Some reactions of phenylpropiolyl chloride" and recieved her Ph.D.

Elga Wasserman

Career:

 

When Yale’s chemistry department hired Harry in 1948 after his graduation from Harvard, the couple moved to New Haven, CT, where Elga was initially unhappy. Although she had a Ph.D. from Harvard and worked with one of the most esteemed chemists in the United States, Yale didn't hire women chemists, and instead Elga worked as a research assistant before her first child was born in 1949. According to Anne Perkins, "Over the next thirteen years she pulled together a series of part-time jobs, working as a lab assistant, teaching a few courses at two local colleges. She raised her three children, made friends, and crafted her life from the options available. Two years later, Elga Wasserman got a break. Graduate school dean John Perry Miller, who lived down the street, called and asked if she would be interested in working as assistant dean at the graduate school. It was an unusual move. Outside the Nursing School, Yale had no women deans at that time. Miller was only in his second year as dean, and he offered Wasserman not just a position as assistant dean, but assistant dean in charge of sciences, the land of men. “Can I work two-thirds-time, so I can be home when the kids get out from school?” asked Wasserman. Miller agreed, and Wasserman became assistant dean at the Yale Graduate School, the spot from which, six years later, Yale President Kingman Brewster selected her to chair the Coeducation Planning Committee.

Yale had left itself ten months to transform a college that had been all-male for the previous 268 years into a coed school, and Wasserman got right to work. Within four days of Kingman Brewster’s November 1968 coeducation announcement, Yale received 800 letters of interest from women students. By March of 1969, nearly 4,000 had applied. All together, Yale enrolled 575 women in the first year of coeducation: 230 freshmen, 151 sophomores, and 194 juniors. They came from west coast and east coast and most states in between, from city and suburb and hamlets so small the address was just an RFD number. Some had already been to college for a year or two, while others were fresh out of high school. They differed in race and ethnicity and in whether they took for granted their family’s ability to pay their tuition, or worried about the size of the loan they had taken out."

According to Anya Genier, "Brewster aide Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57, who also worked on the admission of undergraduate women, says their biggest challenge was not putting together an entirely new admissions apparatus or ensuring there were enough women’s restrooms: it was dealing with those who actively opposed coeducation. “Elga was a diplomat,” Chauncey says. “But if it was a matter of principle, she had a spine of steel, and if the diplomacy didn’t work, she would let people know they had no choice.”"

According to Rebecca Davis, "Wasserman and others quickly recognized the social and educational inequalities that the gender disparity created. Women of Yale College objected to weekend “mixers” that brought busloads of students from women’s colleges to Yale, while men at Yale protested their overcrowded living quarters. The absence of high-ranking women in Yale’s faculty and administration became immediately more noticeable and more problematic for Wasserman and others sensitive to women’s precarious position in academia. Gradually the university began admitting more women to the college and integrating them into the campus’s residential colleges and academic programs, but more substantial changes remained elusive. In 1972 Wasserman left Yale University, concerned that her visibility as the specialist in all issues pertaining to women at the university precluded other men and women from taking responsibility for transforming the institution’s gender biases.

Wasserman entered Yale Law School at the age of 49, graduating in 1976. For the next year she clerked for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, a post she remembers as her most intellectually challenging. For the next twenty years she developed a private family law practice. She retired from the law in 1995 to devote more attention to her newest project, a study of women who had been appointed to the National Academy of Sciences (86 of whom were living at the time of her study), which culminated in the publication of her book The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science (2000). She asked women members of the Academy to tell her about the relationship between their gender and their careers, their ideas for creating gender parity in academia and their secrets of success. Following the publication of the book, she lectured extensively at universities and in industry about the challenges facing women in academia and beyond."

Later Life/Legacy

Harry officially retired in 1991 and continued to work daily in his research laboratory, passing away in 2013. Elga Ruth Wasserman passed away on November 11, 2014, at the age of 90. The couple had seven grandchildren. In March 2021, the Women Faculty Forum at Yale initiated the "Elga R. Wasserman Courage, Clarity, and Leadership Award, a new award to honor a Yale woman every year who has demonstrated tremendous courage, clarity, and leadership in their community service. The award recognizes the important contributions of women faculty and staff who are committed to building equity, diversity, and inclusion and have excelled in articulating and advancing the highest aspirations of the entire Yale community. This award is named after Elga Ruth Wasserman, whose trailblazing career in the University’s administration and extraordinary advocacy on behalf of Yale women in the early years of coeducation continues to inspire future champions of gender equity and diversity in higher education. "

Sources/Read More

 

See also: Alumni, CCB Spotlight, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIEB)