Rock and Ice: Beautiful minds – Blum, Reichardt, Kendall, Molenaar in Mountaineering Hall of Fame



From Rock and Ice Magazine
When Arlene Blum was accepted to PhD programs at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and Caltech, she dreamed of joining the Harvard Mountaineering Club – until the day the HMC president told her, “We can’t have women members.”
“You’re joking,” she said, according to her fine memoir Breaking Trails: A Climbing Life. “This is 1966″… Then, “I’ll go to MIT. I can join their outing club.”
Yet then, as the only woman in MIT’s PhD program in chemical physics, she was told by a potential research advisor that he didn’t take “girls.”
Blum was also rejected in applications to join mountaineering expeditions; and, though she had just written her thesis on the subject, her name was left out of a grant application to study gases in a volcano in Peru. Her own teammate told her, “I’m worried the committee won’t take our proposal seriously with a woman on the team”…
Alison Osius
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