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By example and precept, Mary Bunting has already gone far to counter the pressures against thinking women. No sooner had she seemingly stepped out of nowhere two years ago to become Radcliffe's third woman president than she began having startling new ideas. She has excited women all over the country with Radcliffe's new Institute for Independent Study, which this month launched a unique program of paying gifted women for part-time scholarship in the Harvard Yard. Perhaps most important, she has plumped for the old but recently unfashionable truism that an intellectually active woman makes a better mother, "even if she sometimes has to leave the little darlings on their own."
Pied Piper. Her old friends are not surprised. Mary Bunting has always been one of those rare people who make other people feel that they really can spend their lives doing what most interests them. She grew up that way in Brooklyn. In the close-knit family of her father. Lawyer Henry Ingraham, she recalls, "there was never this climate of unexpectation for girls." No one envisioned any particular career for Polly, as she was called to distinguish her from her mother Mary. She was simply expected to want to do something interesting with her life, paid or unpaid.
In those days, when trees really did grow in Brooklyn, the comfortable brick house on Adelphi Street was filled with children (two girls, two boys), books on every imaginable subject, and two remarkable parents who loved both. Mother Mary Shotwell Ingraham was, and still is at 74, a prodigious activist in civic causes, sometimes working 18 hours a day in such jobs as heading the Y.W.C.A.. helping to found the U.S.O. in World War II and launching the City University of New York (TIME. April 28) last year. Father Ingraham was "a kind of Pied Piper" who walked his children two miles to school every morning, telling serial stories and attracting a long train of fascinated kids as he marched along.
E-Minus. All the Ingrahams were passionately fond of being outdoors. Sunday mornings they spent "walking and admiring." Father was a fly-fisherman; mother golfed and swam; everyone bird-watched. The family spent weekends and summers at two homes on Long Island's
North Shore, one on the water, the other an inland farm.
Horses and books were Polly's world.
In the evenings Henry Ingraham read aloud to his wife—typically, the novels of The Forsyte Saga—while she sewed, and the children could listen or leave as they pleased. "They weren't doing it for us," recalls Mary Bunting. "They were doing it for themselves." Polly herself was the kind of omnivorously inquiring reader who could plunge into the encyclopedia and follow her nose for hours. School at Packer Collegiate was another matter: "I was glad to get rid of it in the afternoon and get back to something interesting.'' As for homework, Polly had a technique: "Prepare for your first class at home, do your work for the second class under the desk during your first class, and so on all day." Polly was such a poor formal student that her English teacher once returned a paper marked "E-minus. See me."