Flashback
40 years ago
‘The Half-Eaten Apple’
“Although Eve’s bite into that apple made her the world’s first seeker after higher learning, her fate was to be punished for her presumption, rather than praised for her initiative,” was how the author of “The Half-Eaten Apple” explained the title of a 1970 report on the status of women at UB.
After her death in 1975 at the age of 45, Ann London Scott was described in a newsletter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) as “a truly heroic woman and one of the most magnetic and inspiring leaders the women’s rights movement has produced.”
Scott, a poet, was a native of Seattle and received her PhD from the University of Washington. In 1970, she was teaching in the English department at UB. She also was a founder of the Buffalo chapter of NOW and served on the board of the national organization. It was in her capacity as chair of NOW’s National Campus Coordinating Committee that she authored “The Half-Eaten Apple.”
Published in the Viewpoints section of the Reporter on May 14, 1970, “The Half-Eaten Apple” was an eight-page report with graphs and charts that indicated that UB was not offering the women it hires and teaches equal opportunity in either employment or education. “Moving up the academic ladder, we find that women simply vanish. While women are half the freshmen, they are only one third of the seniors, one fifth of the graduate students, one seventh of the faculty, one twentieth of the full professors, less than one percent of the top level administrators.”
Scott headed the group, which spent four months researching the lack of equality for women at UB. Among the report’s recommendations was an affirmative action program—recommended by NOW for all universities—designed to end sex discrimination on campuses and a call for UB to establish a 50 percent female quota for faculty hiring as part of a model affirmative action program for American universities.
A quarter of a century later, President William R. Greiner created the President's Task Force on the Status of Women at UB, and when the group’s report was issued in 1997, “The Half-Eaten Apple” was cited as the greatest inspiration for the task force’s work. “‘The Half-Eaten Apple’ served as a valuable reference that made it possible for us to compare the UB 'climate' for women 25 years ago with the present. None of the extra-mural reports we studied benefited from such precious historical information.”
After failing to receive tenure at UB, Ann London Scott accepted a position with NOW. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard holds the Ann London Scott Papers.The National Organization for Women Buffalo Chapter Records, 1973-1986,) are in the University Archives, as are the papers of Bernice Noble), co-chair of the President’s Task Force on the Status of Women at UB.
—John Edens, University Archives
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