Alumni celebrate women at Penn

Canvas tote bags, plastic name tags and pantsuits seemed to be in fashion this weekend.

At this year's Homecoming, a slightly different demographic than usual returned for the football game and festivities. The crowd included some of Penn's most distinguished alumnae, all returning to celebrate the 125th anniversary of women at the University.

Panel discussions, a banquet with University President Judith Rodin and the dedication of the renovated Women's Walkway and Class of '49 Generational Bridge were all on the agenda for those in attendance. But many were just as excited to see the physical changes on campus and the changes in attitude and composition of the student body, which have altered the campus environment over the past several years.

"It's really been fascinating to see all the changes, the new buildings," said Sue Klein, who graduated from the Graduate School of Education in 1967. Klein works with the United States Department of Education and was one of several alumnae authors featured in the Penn Bookstore this weekend.

"We didn't get to interact with the students that much," Klein said. "[But] the dress codes for women have changed. When my husband first started at Penn, the men's dorms were off limits to women -- the Quad. Hill Hall was the women's dorm."

And many of the women said that, since the days of segregated dorms and separate classes, changes have been just as abundant in the outside world. At several panel discussions, prominent alumnae from the fields of business, media and politics, healthcare and philanthropy all shared their experiences and success stories.

One common theme of the discussions was that one way to combat gender discrimination is for women in top positions to help each other up the corporate ladder. Susan Ness, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, noted that in the large conglomerates that drive the media industry, women are largely squeezed out.

Jean Sherman Chatzky, the editor of Money Magazine and financial editor of NBC's Today Show, got her start at Working Woman magazine. But she did not gain respect in the world of business journalism until she spent two years on Wall Street getting "down and dirty with the numbers."

"The experience that I had was that working at a women's magazine was a far less supportive [environment than men's magazines]," Sherman said.

But Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center said that a unified female workforce had helped her to get her foot in the door -- in her case, at a public service law firm where the all-female administrative staff revolted.

"They wanted better pay... they wanted the firm to work in women's rights, and they didn't want to serve coffee," she said. "So I was hired to work on women's issues.

Like Greenberger, many of the alumnae in attendance had worked extensively toward broadening women's rights. Andrea Mitchell, who spoke at a dinner with Rodin and the Board of Trustees on Thursday evening, is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News as well as a feminist author.

Others set precedents for women during their Penn careers.

"They told me when I registered for graduate school, they said after all these years, I'm the first woman graduate in Engineering, in fact, at Penn," said Ferdows Poosti Noorchashin, who received a masters degree in civil engineering in 1972. "After 250 years which they had this school, I was the first woman."

At the dedication of the newly renovated bridge, both Rodin and Judy Berkowitz, the celebration's chairwoman, attempted to metaphorically and physically link the alumnae to today's campus.

"The bridge spans both time and distance, and since it is a living bridge, it will reach even into the future as our sons, daughters and grandchildren join the Penn family," Berkowitz said at the dedication. "Women wanted their names written in stone to commemorate their part in Penn's history. And families wanted visible testaments to their multigeneration traditions."

Many of the women who attended the celebration said they also have children or grandchildren who are at Penn or who plan to apply. Most thought the evolving campus would offer their children an even better experience than they had.

"It didn't seem that there were ever as many people," said Anne Gilchrist Gleacher, who had not returned to campus since her graduation in 1971. "I don't remember it ever being so crowded or the students so diverse."

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