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Up to the plate: women in advancement
At a fund-raisers' conference in Chicago this spring, our gals Sharon Davenport '82 and Nora MacKay '88, '95G alumnae now on the job for their alma mater were witness to an instructive scene. In a speech by Madeleine Leavitt, head of the Campaign for Drake University, that eminent philanthropist mentioned that her connection with the Des Moines institution is second-hand. Her father graduated from Drake; she herself is an Ohio State alumna. And while she's given several million dollars to her father's school, her contribution to Ohio State has been a steady $32 per year. The reason? That's all she's ever been asked for.
"Cringing," is how Sharon Davenport describes the response of the hapless Ohio State representatives in attendance. "Cringing under the table." And yet, note Davenport and MacKay, it could have happened to anybody. Says MacKay, "It's just the way we've done business" in the past. It's simply been assumed that those who have the interest, the money, and the freedom to make charitable contributions are men.
Which is why MacKay and Davenport took it upon themselves to attend a conference on "Women and Minorities in Philanthropy." At UMass too, progressive as it is in many ways, figures on alumni leadership and giving are considerably lower among women than men. The board of the Alumni Association, for example, includes eleven women and twenty-six men. Among donors of $250 or more, 25 percent are women, 75 percent men. "And that's in no way the fault of the women," says Davenport. "It's simply that they're not being asked."
A lot of people have been working to change this pattern. This fall's Women Activists Reunion (see story, page 36 ) was the brainchild of, among others, former director of alumni relations Ginny Rees '93. Other administrators like MacKay, who heads the Ambassadors Network of alumni-advocates, and Davenport, development director for social and behavioral sciences as well as humanities and fine arts, also incorporate an awareness of women in whatever they do.
These two, though, are determined to jump-start the process. Their "Initiative for Women in Advancement," given a blessing and modest funding this spring by the Vice Chancellor for Advancement, is taking off this summer with a series of focus groups with alumnae in New England, New York City, and Washington. "We need to know what alumnae want," says MacKay, "and what they feel will inspire other alumnae to step up to the plate and get involved with their alma mater."
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Then there were the years in the 1950s when she spent part of every month underground. "Yeah, literally underground," says old D.C. hand Sherry Barber with her wise old grin, taking a drag on her Winston. ("I've got it down to a pack a day," she says philosophically of her smoking habit. "It was three packs when I was working.")
When she was working and the reason she was periodically assigned, during the Korean War, to a top-secret underground city in a refurbished coal mine in Pennsylvania Mildred Sheridan Barber was a high-level career bureaucrat with the U.S. Labor Department, a crack statistician with a master's in economics from Harvard and a law degree from Boston College. (She had both within two years of graduating from then-Massachusetts-State-College.) An independent and ambitious dynamo from the word "go" "I was so rambunctious," she recalls Barber is the Boston-born daughter of first-generation Americans. Her father arrived at Ellis Island as Michele Barbera; her mother, Helen Sheridan, was orphaned at age five or six when her parents returned to Ireland to visit "when they were having a plague or something."
Michele Barber's first American job was digging subways in Manhattan. ("Hard work," we interjected, one day this spring, as Sherry Barber was telling this story in her apartment a few blocks from the Foggy Bottom metro. "Stinks," she agreed.) Later, in Boston, he found his niche as a largely self-taught engineer at the H.P. Elliott Company, where he helped develop the bicycle coaster-brake. Helen Sheridan, raised by the Sisters of Mercy in Springfield, moved to Boston at age fifteen to work as a seamstress, and met Michele Barber at a settlement-house dance. When she died of diabetes at forty-five, the youngest of her nine children, Mildred, was five years old.
"I only remember her with white hair," says Mildred, who cherishes the nickname "Sherry" in memory of a mother prematurely aged by insulin shock. "That was before the magic of drugs," she adds. Reflecting back on her education at Mass State during WWII, Barber marvels both at how different that world was the shock therapy she observed when her psychology class visited the state hospital in Belchertown, the syphilitic children, with their chewed fingers, that she saw and at the breadth and depth of education she received.
She used it well, seizing with brio the unusual opportunities of the times. In 1945, at age twenty-three, she had three college degrees; had already started working for the War Labor Board, the emergency wing of the Labor Department; even had a clear idea of what labor was, thanks to summer jobs at places like Hood Rubber in Watertown, where she earned 35¢ an hour and "learned one hell of a lot, let me tell you." With the war not yet over and few men in the job market, employers "had no cherce," as Barber likes to say, but to hire qualified women. "And that's what really caused the shift in women's work patterns."
It's been Barber's lifelong professional business to chart such patterns. Down in that converted coal mine in the '50s she was charged with charting deployments of skills to keep the country going during nuclear war. "Of course none of the people who had to do this thought it made any sense at all," she remarks. "We figured if the bomb dropped, that was it."
Barber is nothing if not a realist about the ludicrous side of bureacracy. "I always told interns to remember two things. One, if you get a boss who's dumber than you are, don't say a thing, just get yourself moved out of there. Second, never bad-mouth your boss, because in government you never know when you're going to run into him again." But she's also proud of having been one of the professionals who do the actual work of government. (She practically spits at the thought of Ronald Reagan, who broke a government union.)
When she retired in 1980, Barber was chief of both data operations and reporting operations for the Labor Department. She'd done well, and in fine philanthropic tradition is doing good, bequeathing a portfolio currently worth a million and a half dollars to the place without which, she says, "I wouldn't have that kind of money to give." This beautiful gift will have a beautiful name: The Helen Sheridan Professorship in Economics. "When I croak," grins Sherry Barber.
