Harvard Gets a Woman

Harvard had a brand-new $250,000 chair in anything-at-all on one brand-new condition: a woman had to sit in it. The gift, with string attached, came from United Fruit Co.'s President Samuel Zemurray, no Harvardman himself. A committee of Harvard professors, representing departments from fine arts to physics, solemnly scoured all available corridors of learning for a suitable candidate. They finally found her in England: Dr. Helen Maud Cam, 62, a tweedy, vigorous history don at Cambridge (her specialty: medieval local government). She would be the first woman professor of arts & sciences in Harvard's 312 years.

Until she was 19, Helen Maud never went to school; her father, a parson and schoolmaster, tutored her at home. She learned enough to win a scholarship at the University of London, has been leading a serenely academic life ever since.

Dr. Cam's home is in Oxford, but in term she lives at Girton College, Cambridge. Her day begins when a gyp (servant) brings a cup of tea at 6 a.m. Three times a week Dr. Cam cycles to a lecture hall, her steel-grey hair and black academic gown billowing in the breeze. She has been to the U.S. only once, to teach at Pennsylvania's Bryn Mawr, and that was 39 years ago. Most of her days are spent in tutoring, writing, helping edit the Cambridge Historical Journal, keeping the university archives, and campaigning energetically for the Labor Party. Social life? Says Spinster Cam: "I don't have any. Too busy."

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