On the Cusp: The Women of Penn ‘64

Stories of 19 University of Pennsylvania women in the vanguard of changing women’s roles in business, the professions, academia, and society at large. Ms. Magazine and the Woodstock music festival were still years in the future. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique only a year before they graduated. Yet, unbeknownst even to themselves, a small group of women in the University of Pennsylvania’s Class of 1964 was already in the vanguard of what ultimately became one of the largest cultural and economic revolutions in American history. And it would be a half-century before they became fully aware of what they had accomplished for themselves and women everywhere: shattering the then existing belief that the only roles in society for women were housewife/mother, secretary, teacher or nurse. These are their stories, in their own words.