A Half-Century of Women Faculty at Amherst College

In 1962 Rose Olver became the first women to be hired to a tenure-track faculty position at Amherst College, the highly rated liberal arts institution in western Massachusetts. It would be another 13 years before women were admitted as students at Amherst.

Professor Olver, who still serves as the L. Stanton Williams ’41 Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst, participated in a recent symposium on campus entitled, “Half a Century of Women Teaching at Amherst: Gender Matters.” About 60 percent of all the women who taught at Amherst in the 1962-1983 period attended the event.

Three videos on the recent conference on the history of women faculty at Amherst are available here.