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Mason nodded. These days he was an obstetrician. He already knew how tough women could be. Still, a woman? How could that possibly work?
In this passage Calvin Evans is trying to persuade his friend and coach Dr. Mason to let Elizabeth join their rowing eight. Dr. Mason, who is an obstetrician—and so regularly sees women demonstrate their strength—takes a moment, thinking about what Calvin said. Calvin wants Elizabeth to be on the team because he thinks she would excel at it. Even if this is true, Mason is not sure how a woman would fit into a team where all of the other members are men. Even though there’s only a superficial similarity between a rowing eight and the Hastings Institute, the fact that Elizabeth might join another small group of men doing something difficult together gives both Dr. Mason pause. Even though he knows women are strong and capable of pushing through great pain, he’s not sure how her presence will affect the team as a whole or the people in it.
[T]he only way she could have possibly gotten her master’s from UCLA in organic chemistry was the hard way—the word “hard” being accompanied by rude gestures and tight laughter. Who did she think she was anyway?
The above passage comes from an early chapter in the novel, as the narrator describes how colleagues at the Hastings Institute gossip cruelly about Elizabeth’s skills and motivations. This quote insinuates that Elizabeth only got her masters’ degree in organic chemistry by exploiting her sexuality. As if the innuendo weren’t explicit enough, the narrator tells the reader that moments like this are often accompanied by derogatory laughter and offensive sexual gestures. The assumptions that people make about Elizabeth’s qualifications dismiss her intellectual capabilities and reinforce gender discrimination and prejudice. Hastings is an extraordinarily toxic workplace, but attitudes like this were not uncommon in the 1950s and 60s. Instead of Elizabeth’s presence proving that women can be excellent scientists, her colleagues all assume they can’t take her achievements at face value.
Our future happiness does not depend on whether or not we’re married, Calvin—at least not to me. I’m fully committed to you; marriage will not change that. As for who thinks what, it’s not just a handful of people: it’s society—particularly the society of scientific research. Everything I do will suddenly be in your name, as if you’d done it.
When Calvin first proposes to Elizabeth, he’s blindsided when she refuses him and doesn’t believe her reasoning is sound. Elizabeth has been quite clear that she feels their future happiness does not hinge on marriage: her commitment to him is unwavering. The reason she isn’t interested in marrying Calvin is not because she doesn’t want to be with him. Instead, she points out that in the scientific community and society at large, a woman’s professional identity is almost always subsumed by her husband’s accomplishments or failures. She knows that if they marry, “everything [she] does will suddenly be in [his] name,” even if she doesn’t change her own. Like the wives of other famous scientists before her, any achievements or publications she makes would be wrongly credited to Calvin. Despite his good intentions, she’s painfully aware that American society in the 1950s tends to attribute a woman’s success to the closest man in her life.
“Someone ought to put her in her place,” said one.
“She’s not even that smart,” insisted another.
“She’s a c*nt,” declared a familiar voice.
Elizabeth hears several of the scientists she works with, including her boss Dr. Donatti, saying incredibly cruel things behind her back. These judgments are completely unjust, but there’s no recourse she can take to have the record set straight. The idea that she needs to be "put in her place" recurs a lot in this novel, and it points to the idea that Elizabeth’s male colleagues are threatened by her intelligence and her role in their professional lives. The fact that Elizabeth was also called a “c*nt” by her PhD. supervisor Dr. Meyers before he raped her makes this moment even more painful and upsetting. Men like Donatti and Meyers refuse to acknowledge women’s merits; they think of them in degrading sexual terms and dismiss their achievements purely because of their gender.
