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The First Two Women Fellows


Class of 1946
Front row: Ben Yablonky, Robert Manning, Mary Ellen Leary, Cary Robertson, James Batal, Louis Lyons (curator), Charlotte FitzHenry, Arthur Schlesinger. Back row: Arthur Hepner, Leon Svirsky, Richard Stockwell, Frank Hewlett.


Sixty-two years after women were first allowed to participate in the Nieman program, a total of 304 women (188 Americans; 116 internationals) have been appointed Nieman Fellows.

We asked the first two women Fellows, Mary Ellen Leary and Charlotte FitzHenry, to give us remembrances of their year at Harvard. Their perspective, especially valuable to those women who became Fellows after 1946, illuminates better than any statistics the process of change within society and the Nieman program.

The linked articles originally appeared in the Summer 1979 issue of Nieman Reports.