I feel as though some apology is due Vassar College from Economics in the Rear-view Mirror for having filed this post under Columbia University, the alma mater for Margaret Good Myers’ 1931 Ph.D. in economics. She did teach thirty years at Vassar College after all. I’ll use my pang of guilt as an opportunity to remind visitors that the focus of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror is the history of undergraduate and graduate economics education, so tagging economists to the institutions where they received their training makes sense as principle for ordering the artifacts transcribed and posted. While the where and how of any particular economist ending their performance on the stage of economics will matter for the biographer, we are taking the opposite perspective of the young economist beginning the performance of their lifetime.
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For more on economics @ Vassar
Shirley Johnson-Lans, “The History of Economics at Vassar College” (Feb. 2011).
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Margaret Good Myers (Beckhart)
1899. Born April 3 in Fremont, Ohio to Philetus ‘Leet’ Blanser and Katherine Mary Mangold Myers.
1920. A.B. Barnard College
1921. Married Benjamin Haggott Beckhart (1897-1975). One son.
1922. M.A. Columbia University
1920-22. Statistician, Federal Reserve Bank of N.Y.
1922. Monthly Production of Pig Iron, 1884-1903. Journal of the American Statistical Association 18 (June): 247-9.
1923-25. Director of Statistics, East Harlem Nursing and Health Demonstration
1926-30. Research consultant for the Council of Research in the Social Sciences of Columbia university
1931. Ph.D. Columbia University. Thesis: The New York Money Market, Vol. I: Origins and Development. Published by Columbia University Press.
1931-32. Fellow, Social Science Research Council. Research in economics at the Faculté de Droit of the University of Paris.
1933. Research at University of Vienna.
Research Consultant for the 20th Century Fund [
1934. Begins teaching at Vassar.
1936. Paris as a Financial Center. New York: Columbia University Press.
1940. Monetary Proposals for Social Reform. New York: Columbia University Press. [“Published in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Vassar College and in honor of Henry Noble MacCracken in the twenty-fifth year of his presidency.”]
1960. Listed in Who’s Who in America.
1964. Retires from teaching at Vassar.
1965 Summer. Visits Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Samarkan, Kharkov and Kiev. Part of second reciprocal program of exchange visits initiated by Nikita Khruschev in 1963.
Source: Vassar Miscellany News, Volume L, Number 12, 15 December 1965, p. 3.
1970. A Financial History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.
1988. Died July 11 in Medford, NJ
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‘I had to fight to keep my own name.’
(1978 Interview)
Margaret Myers, professor emeritus of economics, taught at Vassar from 1934 to 1964. Talking to Professor Myers is like talking to one of the original feminists, a Lucy Stoner.
“I decided early on to be a feminist and not to be fully dependent on a man for my spending money. My husband fully agreed with me. I wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t. Some girls are naive about that, not knowing where their future husbands stand on such issues.
“Girls used to come up to me after class and ask why I didn’t believe in marriage. I’d say I had been married to the same man for thirty years.” Needless to say, the students were surprised for Miss Myers never changed her name. “I have always used my own name. I even vote in my own name, but I had to fight to keep it.”
Although Professor Myers loved teaching, she felt ready to retire at 65. She had a book underway, A Financial History of the United States, now being translated into Japanese. She was also active locally in the League of Women Voters and in Planned Parenthood.
“I have been on the Planned Parenthood board through two six-year terms. I feel that birth control is the most important element in social reform. I think that much crime can be traced back to unwanted, unloved, unskilled young people. The Right to Life people should have to pay taxes to support unwanted young children.”
Miss Myers feels controlling family size might also be a way to reduce the infant death rate. ‘‘lnfant death rate in the United States is shockingly high. Sixteen other, countries have infant death rates lower than ours. But it seems that the idea that women can control their own bodies sends men into an hysterical rage.”
While an undergraduate at Barnard College, Miss Myers took a course entitled ‘‘Women in Gainful Occupations.” “In that course, we read about women’s wages and women’s jobs in factories. It was the nearest thing to consciousness-raising for me.”
Miss Myers had wanted to attend Vassar but couldn’t at that time because no financial aid was offered to freshmen. Instead she went to Barnard and met her husband, Haggott Beckhart, in a graduate course in statistics. Miss Myers recalled, “The class was so boring that we had to entertain each other.” In 1921 Miss Myers was married to Mr. Beckhart, then a professor in the Columbia Business School.
During Myers’s years at Vassar, the Economics Department had an activist orientation, and its members were politically involved. Miss Mabel Newcomer, an economics professor and contemporary of Miss Myers, had been at Bretton Woods on a committee to establish the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
When I met Edna Macmahon at the Bryn Mawr summer school in 1922, we were arrested for strikebreaking in Philadelphia, although we had only been interviewing the strikebreakers. The police were just arresting anyone near the factory.”
Although she felt that the Economics Department was politically conscious when she came to Vassar, Miss Myers does not remember much of a feminist movement here. She does remember that there were more women on the faculty and in the administration than today. “Presidents McCracken and Blanding were pretty fair-minded about women in the faculty and administration. I don’t think that women felt discriminated against under these two.
“The Depression was an awful setback for the women’s movement. Since women couldn’t get jobs, they just grabbed onto the nearest man. After World War II, there was a growth of patriotic motherhood. Again, women suffered a setback. Women just married and had children, and didn’t go to graduate schools. These factors made it unusual to be a feminist.”
While these factors may have made it unusual for other women to be feminists, they never stopped Margaret Myers.
Source: Carla De Landri, “Six emeriti who chose Poughkeepsie,” Vassar Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, Number 3 (March, 1978), p. 31.
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Book reviews by Margaret Good Myers
1930/1. Book Review of “The Labor Banking Movement in the United States” by Princeton University, Industrial Relations Section. Personnel Journal 9: 191-.
1930/1. Book Review of “Robots or Men? A French Workman’s Experience in American Industry” by Dubreuil. Personnel Journal 9: 264-.
1931/2. Book Review of “Cost of Living Studies II. How Workers Spend a Living Wage” by Peixotto. Personnel Journal 10: 67.
1931/2. Book Review of “The Movement of Money and Real Earnings in the United States, 1926-28” by Douglas and Jennison. Personnel Journal 10: 67.
1931/2. Book Review of “The National Income and Its Purchasing Power” by King. Personnel Journal 10: 67.
1932. Book Review of “Le Crédit par acceptation: Paris, centre financier” by Pierre-Benjamin Vigreux. Political Science Quarterly 47: 301-.
1935. Book Review of “Le Crédit” by Louis Baudin. Political Science Quarterly 50: 150-.
1938. Book Review of “La Monnaie et la formation des prix. Partie I: Les Eléments” by Louis Baudin. Political Science Quarterly 53: 310-.
Source: Bibliography from Kirsten K. Madden, Janet A. Seiz and Michèle Pujol, A Bibliography of Female Economic Thought to 1940. Routledge, 2004.
Image Source: Carla De Landri, “Six emeriti who chose Poughkeepsie,” Vassar Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, Number 3 (March, 1978), p. 31.