Letters to the Editor

Wellesley welcomes short letters (300 words maximum) relating to articles or items that have appeared in recent issues of the magazine. Send your remarks to the Editor, Wellesley magazine, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, or email your comments to magazine@wellesley.edu.

Wellesley and Family Planning

I was very interested in this article (“Where Are the Babies?” winter 2026) because I always wanted children, I have the two best, and I never thought they would interfere with my career or financial plans—which they have not. What that goal did interfere with was my Wellesley education.

Attending Wellesley was a dream that came true for a missionary kid who grew up in Japan, the daughter of Southerners, and had only two choices for college: one in the Carolinas or Wellesley. In the 1960s, that was an easy decision. I met my future husband at an MIT mixer my first weekend, and the rest is the story of my son’s life.

The policy at that time was that being married before the junior year meant losing financial assistance, which was a substantial percentage of the total cost at that time. So that was the end of one dream, but an easy decision, and not the end of my education.

I finished at UConn, earned a law degree there, did a master’s in English at Trinity College Hartford, and, more recently, a master of arts in religion at the Yale Divinity School. My daughter was born during my transition from law to teaching. Neither of my children made my career more difficult; they made my life wonderful.

I called Wellesley once, I do not remember to whom I spoke, and was told that, as I suspected, the policy changed some time ago.

Recently, I was sorting through stacks of family papers and found a short essay I wrote in 10th grade describing my life goals. These included seeing the world, completing college and graduate school, pursuing an interesting career, and having three children. Three out of four is better than I deserved, but I’ll take it.

I am glad today’s Wellesley students can accomplish all four.

Angela Grant ’68, West Palm Beach, Fla.

Are Fewer People So Bad?

I read “Where Are the Babies?” (winter 2026) with interest. How times change. Back in the 1960s, many people were concerned about too many people. I remembered that there was a group called Zero Population Growth, so I looked it up. It is now known as Population Connection and its mission statement explains that it is the “national grassroots population organization that educates young people and advocates progressive action to stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained by Earth’s resources.” Lower birth rates around the world may not actually be as much of a crisis as some think, although there are likely to be difficulties in many countries adjusting to them.

Priscilla Fox ’69, Montpelier, Vt.

Correcting the Baby Boom Math

In her thought-provoking article in the winter 2026 Wellesley magazine, Heather Long ’04 makes an error in describing fertility during the U.S. baby boom. She asserts that “In the late 1950s, American women were giving birth to nearly four children, on average, in their lifetime.” It is the phrase “in their lifetime” that makes the statement incorrect.

How do demographers measure fertility? One way, a period rate, is to count births per women of reproductive ages in the same year. If a woman experienced the fertility rate of women 15-49 in a particular year, how many children would she have? Another way to measure fertility is to compute a cohort rate. That is, births are counted to women born in the same year after they have completed childbearing. The phrase “in their lifetime” refers to a cohort rate.

While it is true that period fertility peaked at nearly 3.8 children per woman in 1957, completed cohort fertility peaked around 2.7 for women born between 1930 and 1940, women whose births, for the most part, constituted the 1950s baby boom.

Why the difference between the period and cohort rates? The period rates were “inflated” because of the postponement in marriage and childbearing for women born in the early 1920s affected by the Depression and WWII combined with earlier marriage and childbearing and shorter birth spacing for women born in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Barbara Mensch ’76, Wainscott, N.Y.