Landladies Are Called 'Forgotten Women' By Cambridge Chronicle

A recent Cambridge Chronicle editorial called the city's landladies "the forgotten women" and blamed it on the new Graduate Center and the Alumni Bulletin.

In an Alumni Bulletin article extolling the new Graduate Center, there was no space for "at least one kind word for that useful local institution and force for good, the Cambridge landlady," the Chronicle said. But the houses were not, the Chronicle protests, "unfriendly" as the Bulletin claimed.

"These houses," the Chronicle points out, "are owned by landladies who have hearts of gold and who have been second mothers to the lucky graduate students who have come under their wing."

The Chronicle lists the services these "second mothers" were supposed to have performed for student roomers. "They leave home-made cookies on their bureaus, give them wise advice on affairs of the heart, and loan them money when they are out of funds." One graduate student commented, "I had to pay 60 percent interest on those loans."

Graduate students will have certain disadvantages living in the Graduate Center, the editorial says. "The girls whom the Graduate Center boys pick up in the drug stores and cafes will probably not be as pretty or as good as the girls to whom any Cambridge landlady would gladly introduce them."

In addition, the Chronicle states, the Graduate Center student will spend his days in an ivory-towered igloo of stone and glass rather than in the reality of Cambridge life.