Thanks for creating the garden, president Bunting.(Polly Bunting)

Life doesn't have to be a racetrack. It could be a garden, Dr. Polly Bunting said. She challenged the assumption that women must choose between racetrack careers and women's traditional roles.

She was midway through her presidency at Radcliffe, Harvard University's sister college, in 1966, the year I moved into an apartment to start grad school at Harvard.

Across the street rose the brick wall of Harvard Yard and the men's undergraduate library, Lamont. Women couldn't use Lamont for fear we'd distract the men. So we trudged a mile to Radcliffe to do required readings, hoping the professor had remembered to reserve books there too.

It was the era of women's colleges and men's colleges, women's dorms and men's dorms, deans of women and deans of men. The voting age was 21 and colleges were in loco parentis. Women had to be in by twelve o'clock, but men had no such curfew.

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Radcliffe was in the midst of dramatic changes. I hardly noticed. Only in reading Mary Ingraham Bunting: Her Two Lives by Elaine Yaffe (Beil 2005) did I learn to thank the quiet visionary for Harvard grad school admitting women at all. Bunting also got Harvard to open the men's library to me and all women.

Yaffe's unusually readable biography conveys Bunting's personality and the many eras through which she lived (1910-1998). It helps me make sense of my life and that of my mother, a frustrated academic of the same generation.