Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  As it happened, ETS's Planning Division was abolished shortly after my departure, so I don't think it would have made a very promising launching pad for the career I envisioned. Many years later, when I was a vice president of General Motors and a trustee of Princeton University, Polly Bunting, who had successfully led Radcliffe as its president through the tumultuous 1960s, asked me if I remembered John Valentine. When I replied “of course,” she said John, who was by then president of the College Board in New York, had given her a brief, cryptic message for me. In its entirety, it was “tell Marina Whitman she was right.”

  The upshot of my decision was that a good friend, Burt Malkiel, and I applied simultaneously to the graduate program in economics at Princeton. The departmental faculty looked with favor on both our applications but pointed out that, in my case, there was a technical obstacle to overcome. I would have to persuade Harold Dodds, then in the final year of his thirty-five-year career as Princeton's president, to change the university's rule against the admission of women.

  As I've described, my interview with President Dodds did not go well. Two years after my vain attempt, Princeton, led by a new young president, Bob Goheen, accepted its first female graduate student. But by that time I was preparing to take my doctoral qualifying exams and start writing my dissertation at Columbia University.

  My choice of Columbia was entirely pragmatic; I simply picked out the closest school on the Pennsylvania Railroad that was well known and had an excellent reputation. I was not only accepted but received a generous fellowship, despite the fact that when I walked into the office of Columbia's financial aid officer wearing the fashionable going-away dress from my wedding, along with white gloves, he told me that I looked much too well dressed to need financial assistance. When, as a faculty member, it came my turn to handle admissions and financial aid for the economics department at the University of Pittsburgh, I realized that I would never have admitted myself, let alone awarded a fellowship to a student whose entire preparation for the graduate program had been Harvard's Economics 1. But, fortunately for me, the requirements were more elastic when Columbia decided to take a chance on me.

  Commuting daily by train from Princeton to New York, and then taking a long subway ride from Penn Station to the Columbia campus and back, made for very long days, and it wasn't easy to study on the jerky, overcrowded commuter trains. But Bob, who worked long hours himself both in intensive research and in crafting little jewels of lectures that met his perfectionist standards, did everything possible to make things more manageable for me, providing a strength of support that was virtually unheard of among husbands in the 1950s. And I had one of my closest friends from Miss Fine's School for company on the daily trek to New York and back.

  Petite Daisy Harper, whose enormous blue eyes and fetchingly tousled curls had been attracting a male following ever since she was a little girl, had started at Radcliffe with me but dropped out at the beginning of her junior year to get married. By the time we moved to Princeton, she had had two children and a divorce in quick succession. She was muddling along as the single mother of two active toddlers, a very different life from the one she had anticipated when, as a talented teenaged violist, she had played string quartets with her family's next door neighbor, Albert Einstein. Determined to finish her college education, she had applied and been accepted to Barnard College, then the women's division of Columbia. We made the daily trek together and often studied together at home over endless cups of coffee.

  I was entering uncharted waters when, despite my lack of undergraduate preparation, I signed up for a full load of graduate courses in economics, and I had to work harder than I ever had in college to catch up. The course I found both most challenging and interesting was the required one in microeconomics. It was taught by a brash, brilliant young professor named Gary Becker, whose pathbreaking work in applying formal economic analysis to such decisions as marriage and childbearing eventually won him a Nobel Prize.

  Becker's innovative approach to teaching microeconomics gave me a whole new way of making sense of a wide range of questions. It was what I thought of as a mental filing cabinet that enabled me to take real-world questions apart for systematic analysis and then reassemble them into a coherent whole, an approach that has proved invaluable to me not only as a teacher and researcher but as a corporate executive and board member as well. At the end of the term, I was amazed to discover that only two students had received A grades: the sole undergraduate in the class and me. When I asked Becker how that could be, he replied, “That's simple. You two had the least to unlearn.”

  My one venture into a course given by the Columbia Business School, on corporate finance, was not such a happy experience, although it was a useful one. The instructor was both boring and unhelpful; when I asked a naive question, he told me I had no business taking his course without the prerequisites and, if I didn't withdraw, he was going to fail me. I replied boldly that I might be ignorant but I wasn't stupid, and I intended to stick it out. When Bob learned about the B+ I got as a final grade, he bought champagne. For the first time in my life, I had broken through the A barrier on the downside, a long-overdue lesson in humility.

  Early in my second year at Columbia, Gary Becker called me into his office and asked me if I had considered going on for a PhD in economics. I answered no, that I intended to stop with a master's degree and then move on to a master's in journalism in preparation for the career I envisioned. He commented that he was prepared to offer me a doctoral fellowship if I should chose to go in that direction. The fellowship, underwritten by the conservative Earhart Foundation, carried no teaching duties; its only requirement was a good-faith declaration that I believed in the superiority of a market-oriented economic system.

  I had always resisted being pigeonholed politically as either liberal or conservative, but my parents' views, the Cold War environment in which I grew up, and my own research on alternative systems during my high-school and college years had all engendered in me a deep suspicion of statist regimes. So the commitment required by an Earhart fellowship came quite naturally to me. And Becker's proposal intrigued me. I was thoroughly enjoying my study of economics, and I was beginning to think that writing about economic developments as a journalist might not be as satisfying as actually having some impact on those developments. So with little more reflection than a “sure, why not?” I accepted his suggestion and the offer that went with it. With that decision, I took a big step toward defining the direction my intellectual and professional life would take, rather than drifting in a sea of choices, as I had done with my dilettante's selection of undergraduate courses and then with the plan to get master's degrees in two different fields.

  In the middle of my second year of doctoral study, I discovered that I was pregnant. We had really meant to wait until I was further along in my studies, but Bob and I were excited at the prospect of becoming parents. There was no way, though, that we wanted to introduce a third person, however small, into our crowded quarters—I had seen too many lines filled with damp diapers strung across the living rooms of other apartments like ours. Armed with money inherited from my father as a down payment, we went looking for our own house. We found one a few blocks away from where we were living. It was a Christmas-card white ranch, small but with a lovely, tree-filled backyard, on a quiet street. We bought the little house and lovingly painted each room a different color—the only do-it-yourself project we have ever successfully completed. Now we had a bathtub, a furnace properly located in the basement, and a nursery for the upcoming addition to our family.

  I was uncomfortably aware of the disdain felt by a number of my professors for a married woman, “who would drop out as soon as she became pregnant,” taking up a place “that might have gone to a man” in the PhD program. That knowledge, combined with my natural impatience to get on with it, made me determined to take the doctoral exam before my pregnancy started to show. This meant advancing to the end of my second year an ordeal that most
students preferred to delay until the third, after they had completed all the necessary courses and had time for review. The exam, a two-hour oral inquisition on four different subjects, would determine whether or not I would be allowed to go on to write the dissertation required for a PhD. Horror stories abounded about students who, in the stress of the moment, couldn't remember the name of John Maynard Keynes. And the fact that I intended to take the exam early created even more pressure.

  As I plunged into intense hours of cramming for the dreaded orals, no amount of coffee could keep me from falling asleep. Guessing that this had something to do with my pregnancy, I tried to make an appointment with a highly regarded obstetrician. He indicated that he had no interest in seeing me until I was a further six weeks along but, told of my difficulty, said he would phone a prescription in to my drugstore. I picked it up, took one pill from the unlabeled bottle every morning (in those days prescription bottles gave no hint as to their contents), and, miraculously, had no more trouble staying awake. Only much later did I find out that I had been popping amphetamines. Given what we have since learned about fetal vulnerability, hardly a day has gone by that I haven't given thanks that such an irresponsible act did no harm to our unborn son. And I've never again taken unidentified pills.

  By the time my oral exam came, I could barely squeeze my expanding waistline into a regular suit—if I had sneezed, the crucial button would surely have popped. I was nervous enough anyway, confronting the serious miens of four of my professors across a seminar table. Most terrifying of all was Arthur Burns, the economic forecasting pundit whose mop of iron-gray hair, rasping drawl, and interminable pulls on a pipe between sentences had become familiar outside, as well as inside, the academic establishment. Eventually, he and I would meet again, as near equals, when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and I was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. But I never quite conquered my fear of him, nor got away from the feeling of being student and professor again, as we sat across from each other at monthly meetings in the Fed's elegant lunchroom.

  I honestly don't remember how I managed to answer the variety of questions that were put to me during those endless two hours. I only remember the huge sense of relief I felt when I was called back into the room and congratulated on having passed. I had gambled and won my high-stakes bet.

  Having passed that hurdle, the next one was to hone in on a subject for my dissertation and find an appropriate supervisor. My long-standing interests pointed to an international topic, and my teacher of international economics, Ragnar Nurkse, a wise and kind Estonian who had previously worked for the League of Nations, would have been my chosen supervisor. But that spring, while hiking in the mountains near Vévey in Switzerland, the fifty-two-year-old Nurkse had suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. Fortunately for me, Albert Hirschman had just come from Yale to join the Columbia economics faculty. A specialist in international trade and economic development, he was already well known for his innovative ideas on political economy.

  What made Hirschman a true original among academics, though, was his heroic past, concealed by his merry blue eyes, calm demeanor, and courtly manner. When war broke out in Europe, shortly after he had completed his PhD, the German-born Hirschman joined the underground in German-controlled Vichy France. There he worked with the American journalist Varian Fry, head of a rescue network that helped many Jewish artists and intellectuals escape the Nazis and the Holocaust. Surviving numerous narrow escapes, Hirschman made his way to the United States and joined the American army, before settling into a career as a financial adviser and then a professor. His underground code name was Beamish—which means “beaming with optimism, promise, or achievement”—a name that suited him very well indeed.

  Hirschman readily took me on as an advisee, and we talked about how I might focus a dissertation in international political economy, reflecting my long-standing interest in both relationships among nations and the interactions between economics and politics. There was then a great deal of interest in the question of how government loans and guarantees could be used to attract private money into economic reconstruction and development projects abroad, with the goal of shifting more and more of such funding from the public purse to private investors. I had observed that, although proposals for new programs to implement the goals of public policy abounded, much less attention had been given to careful evaluation of how well the programs already in operation were working. So I decided to investigate how effective the existing loan and guarantee programs were at pump priming. When, several years later, a revised version of this study was published by Princeton University Press, I took it as a sign that I was beginning to be heard in the public discourse on policies affecting international relationships.

  While I was doing this research, I received another badly needed lesson in humility. I could do a lot of my work at home, but one hot, late summer day, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, I went to New York to keep an appointment with Gary Becker, whom I still regarded as a mentor. I arrived at Penn Station from Princeton in the midst of a subway strike and had to battle a huge crowd, all trying to get taxis.

  When I finally arrived at Becker's office, hot, disheveled, and out of breath, I found that he wasn't there. Filled with righteous indignation, I stomped into the office of the department secretary and unburdened myself of a long soliloquy on the irresponsibility of faculty members who didn't keep appointments with students, particularly in light of all I had gone through to get there. When I finally paused for breath, she asked quietly if I would like to know why Professor Becker hadn't showed up. “I certainly would,” I replied. It turned out that his wife, who suffered from postpartum depression, had attempted suicide that morning. My self-righteousness evaporated in an agony of embarrassment.

  A few weeks after this incident, our son Malcolm was born. My friends had been amused at the thought of bluestocking Marina becoming a mother, but like many first-time parents, I couldn't believe how enchanted I was by this newborn creature. Fortunately Bob, who had diapered more than one young cousin, could fill in for my total lack of experience where babies were concerned, and it didn't take me long to catch on. My brain, which seemed to have gone into hibernation toward the end of my pregnancy, stayed there for several months afterward, and Bob and I spent much of the time in the happy but sleep-deprived daze common to new parents. It was clear from the very beginning that Bob regarded himself as an equal partner in the parenting adventure, long before such an attitude was fashionable or even socially acceptable.

  My husband and my parents were totally supportive of my intention to finish the PhD and then combine motherhood with an academic career. But in the world of the late 1950s my decision was more generally regarded with surprise and, often, disapproval. During my pregnancy, acquaintances and even strangers would respond with raised eyebrows when they learned, in the course of a cocktail party conversation, that I intended to lead a double life as both mother and scholar.

  I could take these reactions in my stride, but my mother-in-law was a different matter. A strong and intelligent woman, herself a college graduate at a time when that was rare for a female, she was also an old-fashioned lady closer in age to my grandmother than my mother. Although I liked and admired her, I had always felt that she didn't entirely approve of me. When she learned of my plans, she was horrified. Convinced that I would ruin my health, make my husband miserable, and neglect my children, she told me I was being selfish to insist on going on with a career outside the home. I was upset at the effect that the tension between us was having on Bob, trapped between the views of the two strong-minded women he loved most. I was also terrified that there was a chance she might be right.

  Without Bob's staunch support, I might have succumbed to the then-current view of the proper role for a married woman with a family. As it was, I cried a lot and demanded constant reassurance from my husband but stuck to my course. My first publication, my master's thesis revised into a monograph, came o
ut at about the same time that our son was born. In response to my mother's long-ago warnings that I shouldn't let my brains show too much, I inscribed her copy “As evidence that blue stockings don't necessarily form a chastity belt.” I thought I was being terribly clever, but as usual she had the last word: “I think you've married the only man in the world who would put up with you.” The longer Bob and I have been married, the more convinced I am that she was right.

  When I resumed my monthly trips to Columbia to discuss the latest chapter of my dissertation with Professor Hirschman, he commented that he hadn't received either a chapter or a visit from me in several months and asked why. When I told him that I had recently had a baby, he looked surprised. Although I had last seen him less than a month before Malcolm's arrival, he had never noticed. Inured as I was to the apprehensions with which other professors regarded the possibility of pregnancy in female students, Hirschman's cheerful insouciance and the genuine warmth with which he congratulated me made me want to hug him. At last someone seemed to recognize that a woman could exercise both her brain and her uterus at the same time.