First Woman

In all its 700 years, Britain's venerable Cambridge University has been a man's institution. It gruffly consented 18 years ago to let women study there but refused to recognize their presence officially. Denied regular students' privileges, women finish their studies at Cambridge not with a degree but only "the title of a degree." Last week, while London clubs were hemming and hawing, Cambridge's first woman professor was receiving congratulations on her appointment.

Plain, thick-browed, 47-year-old Miss Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod wears her dark hair in a severe bob. She is a daughter of the late Sir Archibald Garrod, former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. Rated by famed Scientist Sir Arthur Keith "in the front rank of European archeologists," Miss Garrod unearthed a Stone Age infant's skull in a cave at Gibraltar, last year turned up 50,000-year-old remains of paleolithic man in the Balkans, has spent much of her life tenting on famed excavations in Palestine and Kurdistan. She was director of archeology and anthropology at Newnham College, a woman's college at Cambridge, before her appointment to the University's Disney Professorship of Archeology.

As Miss Garrod prepared to take her place next fall with Cambridge's 73 men professors, moot point was what she would wear to classes. Professors wear academic gowns, but by an unwritten rule no woman has so appeared in the University's halls. Last week the University authorities had not yet unraveled this question, but Miss Garrod gave them a hint by pointing out that a woman holding a titular Cambridge degree may wear a gown on "appropriate occasions."

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