Women Pioneers
Early Women MBA Students Usher in a New Era
By Linda Robinson Walker
 There
were 19 of them. Rich and poor, most came from Michigan and most were in sororities.
Many loved math. A high comfort level with numbers might be the most telling
trait shared by the women who defied the prejudices of their time to graduate
with MBA degrees in the 10 years following the creation of what is now the Stephen
M. Ross School of Business.
They lived in a world where most women didn't work outside the home.
In the 1920s, only 21.5 percent of women over 16 were in the labor force compared
to 60 percent in 2000. The difference lies in the virtual absence of married
women workers in the early years of the last century. In 1900, 44 percent of
single women worked, but only 6 percent of married women did.
But change was in the air. In 1920, women won the right to vote and a social
revolution in women's dress and manners had taken hold. Many sheared their
long hair, cropped their long skirts, dispensed with whalebone, smoked in public
and began breaking the law — specifically the prohibition against liquor,
which was enacted in 1919.
 All
19 students began college when the economy was booming. A fascination with business,
the stock market and innovative new industries like automobile manufacturing
swept through the country's Main Streets and caused Babbitts everywhere
to dream of fantastic wealth. But by the time they graduated or began seeking
jobs, the world had become bleak. The 1929 crash and ensuing Great Depression
closed plants and drove men from the workplace to the breadlines.
The obstacles that confronted women workers were mirrored in the business school.
Women made up only 5.6 percent of those earning MBAs between 1926 and 1935:
19 women, in contrast to 317 men. In 1930-31, in the middle of that decade,
only 28 percent of all U-M students were women.
Two women business students held class offices; none was an officer in the
Business Administration Club. They lived where they could, in a dorm, a sorority,
with the family of a professor or in one of many private residences called League
houses, where women lived under University supervision. The men, on the other
hand, formed two business fraternities and the dean dreamed of a dorm 'to
cultivate [men's] esprit de corps by living together." Segregation
between the sexes extended to alumni clubs, smokers and other social events
— even the want ads.
Responding to a survey about women's careers published by Dividend in 1970,
Helen Cornelia Sandford, MBA '28, wrote, "Discrimination
in my case began with the University of Michigan itself. When I was about to
graduate with the MBA degree, I was advised to return to teaching, even though
my adviser said that as far as IQ was concerned, I was second in the class."
Sandford, the daughter of Benjamin and Sarah of Northville, New York, went on
to become an investment accountant at Stanford University and then secretary-treasurer
of an investment bond company. She died in San Mateo in 1995.
 Ailene
Mae Yeo Bardsley, MBA '33, however, remembered that women were "very
welcome. Everyone was scared of [William] Paton," who taught accounting, she
said, 'but he was a wonderful professor and very tolerant of us gals, there
were so few of us."
Bardsley, who at 98 still lives in Anderson, Indiana, her home since the early
1940s, doesn't remember Margaret Elliott Tracy, the one woman faculty
member at the school from its founding. Tracy researched why women were clustered
in social service and education jobs rather than higher-paying business professions.
Students dressed up for class and, like many, Bardsley wore a fur coat but
resisted the lure of bobbed hair. She instead spent "hours" under
the dryer at the hairdressers. Prohibition didn't touch her life since she didn't
drink or socialize with those who bootlegged liquor. Few students had cars.
She, like the others, walked or rode the streetcars. The one exception was traveling
to the formal dances at the Michigan Union because floor-length gowns required
taxis.
Every such formal event began with a procession led by the man who had chaired
the event and his date. Bardsley twice led such processions. Women received
special dispensations from rules for big events like the J-Hop. Otherwise, they
had to be in their rooms by 11 p.m. during the week and 1 a.m. on the weekend.
"Our housemother would sit up until everyone was in," Bardsley recalls.
The only child of Alice and William, a Canadian who practiced law, Bardsley
grew up in West Branch, Michigan. She earned a BA degree and teaching certificate
in 1930 and taught a year in Royal Oak before deciding, partly because she loved
math, to return for an MBA, majoring in banking and merchandising. Her first
job was with Himmelhoch's in Detroit as a buyer in the better dress department
— 'any dress over $29," she explains. She organized a fashion show fundraiser
for the Michigan League using professional models and U-M students.
 After
working for the retailer for five years, she and her friend Mary Parnall,
MBA '31, who worked for Sanders ice cream company in Detroit, obtained leaves
of absence to travel around the world. Sailing from Oregon, they spent six months
visiting Hawaii, China, Australia, India and Europe.
Parnall was born into a family of adventurers. Both her father, Samuel, and
her grandfather were mining engineers in Michigan's Houghton County. Samuel,
along with his wife Lauriette and their four children, moved West, living at
various times in Colorado, California and the Arizona Territory, where Parnall
was born.
Parnall came from California to Michigan for her BA, perhaps because of the
presence of family. Her uncle, Christopher Parnall, had been medical superintendent
and director of the University Hospital and his sons attended the U-M. She was
active in the Michigan League. Bardsley remembers Parnall as "a super gal,
with a brilliant mind." Parnall graduated with high distinction. Soon
after Parnall joined the Sanders company, Bardsley recalls, she "practically
ran it, moving up very fast to become general manager."
After their trip abroad, Parnall resumed her job at Sanders, but Himmelhoch's
had hired a replacement for Bardsley. Unfazed, she moved to New York, where
she became a buyer for Lord & Taylor. There, a friendship with a man who
had lived in the same apartment building in Detroit blossomed into a romance,
and in 1940 she married P. Edward Bardsley. The war took them to Anderson, Indiana,
where the General Motors Delco-Remy plant produced war materiel. She didn't
work outside the home — "I didn't have to," she recalls. Bardsley
was active in the community while raising her two children. When they were grown,
she traveled for her sorority, helping establish new chapters. Every summer
Parnall spent a week with Bardsley and her family in Northern Michigan. Parnall
died in Whittier, California, in 1995.
The program that Sandford, Bardsley, Parnall and the 16 other women embarked
on consisted of three years of work in the liberal arts and two years in the
business school. A BA degree was awarded after the first three years, and an
MBA after the last two years. In the first year they could study production,
personnel, marketing, business statistics, accounting and finance. In the second,
they studied accounting, marketing, investments, banking, sales administration,
advertising and real estate management. Courses in business policy and a thesis
were required. In 1929, the number of years in liberal arts was reduced to two
and the years in the business school increased to three.
With a curriculum in place, a faculty drawn mostly from Harvard and Michigan,
and Edmund E. Day as dean, the first students were welcomed to Tappan Hall in
September 1924. The quarters were "admittedly makeshift," old and
inconvenient, according to acting dean C. E. Griffin. Bardsley remembers walking
up the stairs of 'that old red building" and turning left into a classroom.
A reading room and library took up a large part of the second floor.
Here, Dividend looks at the lives of other early women business graduates.
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