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

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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