Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Stanford women didn’t play football, but they did play sports, and the administration encouraged it. The school was designed to be coed, and Terman was interested in girl geniuses as well as boy geniuses, finding plenty of subjects worth his time. Relative to other colleges, Stanford seems enlightened with regard to gender equality, but within the bionomic framework women were meant for something different from men. “[S]ince women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species and are not destined for anything else,” Jordan declared in one of his evolution lectures, quoting the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “they live, as a rule, more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual.”