A Matter of Simple Justice. Lee Stout

      FIGURE 22

      Barbara Hackman, Penn State graduate, class of 1962, on her way to Harvard Business School. Barbara Hackman Franklin Papers, Penn State University Archives.

      Although she wasn’t awarded the full scholarship, Hackman did receive a combination of a scholarship and loan that made attendance at Harvard possible for her. She headed for Boston and became a pioneer at Harvard, completing her MBA degree in 1964. There, she was one of twelve women in a class of 632, placing her among the first women to graduate from the Harvard Business School.52 Barbara Hackman Franklin—the surname she acquired after her marriage—went to work initially for Singer Company in New York City. Not only was she the first woman MBA Singer had ever hired; she became a member of the corporate planning staff, where she created their environmental analysis function, to watch trends and analyze competition worldwide.

      After four years at Singer, Franklin was recruited to First National City Bank (now Citibank), for another position in corporate planning. As at Singer, she found that “there were some men who just didn’t take women seriously. [One] time when I knew I didn’t get as much of a salary increase as the guy who worked beside me, I raised that issue and was told, ‘You don’t need that salary increase. You’re doing fine for a girl, and, besides, you have a husband who works.’ There was that sort of thinking then at the bank.”53 It was not the first or last example of sex discrimination she would encounter, or the only one she ever questioned.

      Franklin’s most significant accomplishment at City Bank was creating a government relations department. In 1970, the U.S. Congress passed legislation closing a loophole that had allowed banks to form holding companies, which could add services to the bank’s business without violating banking regulations. The banking industry was caught off guard. In a meeting of the planning group with CEO Walter Wriston, Franklin recalled that Wriston said, “Well, we don’t want this to ever happen again.” He then looked at her and said, “I want you to figure out how we don’t get surprised.” Her management study of the bank’s relationships with government at all levels led to the creation of the government relations department, which she headed. It also later led to the establishment of a Washington office for the bank to track legislation and do lobbying.54

      In the meantime, Barbara Franklin had joined an informal women’s group. Charlotte Browne-Mayers was an executive at Standard Oil Company (now Exxon); they met and became close friends. In 1964 or 1965, they began having get-togethers with some of Barbara’s former business school classmates and other women who were working in the city. Franklin recalled: “ ‘The Group’ met once a month in someone’s apartment, we’d have some glasses of wine and talk about whatever was on our minds. Everyone was in a career, and we shared experiences. It was consciousness-raising and how to get over the obstacles of the workplace, even though we didn’t call it that.”55

      At the same time, Franklin was also getting involved in Republican politics in New York City and would eventually be consulted about recruiting new people to work in the White House. Thus began an explicit effort to identify and recruit women for leadership and policy-making positions in the executive branch, an initiative no presidential administration in history had attempted before.