Judy Berkowitz almost didn't graduate from the College of Women in 1964.
"I was called in by the dean and she asked me who was coming up for graduation and I said 'my family.'" Berkowitz, 59, remembers. The dean "said 'it's a shame they won't see you get a diploma because you haven't passed your swim test.'"
Swimming wasn't the problem, though. Born and raised in a beach community, Berkowitz could swim like a champ. Diving, however, was another story.
"I went down to the pool and told the lifeguard that I could swim, but I just couldn't dive," Berkowitz says. "The lifeguard said 'then you won't graduate.' So I dove. And I graduated."
Berkowitz didn't just dive into the water; she dove into a world where the role of women was already defined. Yet in the midst of a world of gender-imposed barriers, Berkowitz was persistent in her pursuit of a career.
Now she serves as the President of Jarby Inc., a buying office for women's fashion, and is the chairwoman of Penn's 125 Years of Women celebration. After all, while she might have fought the system, Berkowitz hasn't left her past behind.
"Of course in those days you got out of college and you became a secretary, and that's what I did," Berkowitz recalls.
She didn't last long in the clerical world. Instead of swimming along with everyone else, Berkowitz fought against the current.
As an administrative assistant at IBM, Berkowitz realized that her work wasn't doing justice to the education that she had received at Penn. Breaking free from corporate America, Berkowitz co-founded Whodunnit Fashions, a multi-line office that represented American designers.
"To me it made sense to go out on my own because I had confidence that I would do it well and I would be free from any restrictions that a corporation would set up for me," she says. "It was different back then -- women just didn't do things like that -- but I never thought that it was unusual to do."
Straying from the norm was ingrained into Berkowitz's head long before she became a successful businesswoman. Berkowitz's four years at Penn led to defining experiences that gave her the confidence needed to achieve her post-college goals.
"One of the things that I realized at Penn was that nobody knew or cared that I was on scholarship," she says. "Seeing that money didn't matter was a great thing for me."
Not long after she set foot on campus her freshman year, Berkowitz discovered that not being from a prep school or a wealthy New England family wasn't as big of an issue as she expected. She soon learned that she was just as educated as her peers, and while she might not have been able to distinguish Deerfield from Exeter, Berkowitz never felt judged or burdened by the fact that her background was different than most of her peers.
This ability to look beyond any hurdles that might stand in her way has gotten Berkowitz far in life. After selling Whodunnit in 1984, Berkowitz went on to become the president of Jarby.
"Setting up a small business is a very American thing to do," Berkowitz says. "I was in fashion, and fashion wasn't unfriendly to women."
These days, Berkowitz has managed to maintain her position at Jarby while serving as a University trustee, a member of the Women's Studies Advisory Board, and the chairwoman of this weekend's celebration.
Berkowitz has also managed to raise two children, both of whom are now college graduates themselves -- in fact, her daughter ended up at Penn in 1988.
Having her child attend Penn has left Berkowitz acutely aware of the changes that have occurred over 20 years.
"When I came to Penn there were separate newspapers, honor societies and student governments," Berkowitz says. "Women couldn't eat in Houston Hall, and they weren't allowed in the Quad."
Berkowitz also remembers how she learned the hard way that freshmen, particularly freshman women, weren't allowed to go to fraternity parties.
"The first day that I was at Penn, I was invited to a party at a fraternity house and I didn't know that freshmen weren't allowed to do that," Berkowitz says. "When I got back to my dorm, the house mother was waiting for me -- she told me that I should probably read the handbook."
More importantly, though, Berkowitz has observed differences in how women are viewed at Penn.
"One of the biggest changes that I've seen is that women now assume that they're equal at the table with men," Berkowitz says. "This is a result of a long fought battle that was not present when I went into school. You would never accept or think it was possible that you wouldn't be an equal partner at the table, and that's not the case anymore."
Now, as she follows through with two years of work as the organizer of 125 Years of Women, Berkowitz's pride in Penn -- and in women at Penn, for that matter -- is as evident as ever.
"Women who come to Penn have already shown that they are smart and good leaders and energetic," Berkowitz says. "You should make the most of Penn and to use the education and experience because everything is working in your favor when you leave these grounds. It's all working for you because you have that Penn degree, and it's worth a lot."
If getting far in life were a matter of distance, then Rebecca Matthias wouldn't have much to say for herself. It's good that it's not.
Matthias, who graduated from the College of Women in 1975, took the Walnut Street bus to Penn for the first day of freshman orientation. Her parents were still on vacation at the Jersey shore, so she simply put a pillow under one arm and left her home on 5th and Spruce streets on public transportation.
Thirty years later, she's only blocks from where she grew up and went to school. As the president and founder of Mothers Work Inc., Matthias, 48, spends most of her time at her office and warehouse at 5th and Spring Garden streets, where she heads her $400 million company.
Yet while her ventures in becoming a successful entrepreneur might not have taken her around the world, it was by no means a straight shot from her beginnings at Penn to her current success.
"I took a very crooked path, I didn't have a straight career," Matthias says bluntly, sitting at a large circular table in the upstairs of the Mothers Work headquarters, which is also her self-proclaimed office.
As an architecture major at Penn, Matthias went on to Columbia University to get her master's in architecture before heading off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to get her master's in civil engineering.
With enough schooling to last her a lifetime, Matthias began to work as a construction engineer, but got diverted when she met, and soon married, the man whose business was housed in the building that she was constructing.
By the time that Matthias was pregnant with her first child, she still wasn't locked into a career.
"I was sort of uprooted, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do," Matthias says. "That's when I realized how much fun and exciting it is to start a company."
It didn't take her long to put two and two together. The combination of pregnancy and her entrepreneurial urges led to one of the best business moves that she ever made.
"I was looking for something that had growth potential in the future and that was small enough to begin with that I could run it out of my house and I decided that mail order was the answer," she says. "That's when I realized that career maternity clothes didn't exist and that that was an opportunity and that that was a product of a market void."
Her thinking could not have been better timed.
After all, it was the late 1970s -- women were in the work force, and a lot of them, including Matthias, weren't going to let pregnancy keep them from going to their work. The only problem, of course, was that there was no professional maternity clothing on the market.
"Women working through their pregnancies was new back in the late 1970s," Matthias says. "It was one of those timing things because there was newness in the market and no one had addressed the situation."
The initial response that Matthias' business received was staggering. What started out as a mail order company in the front closet of Matthias' Philadelphia home in 1982, Mother Work has grown to a manufacturing and marketing company with over 900 stores nationwide.
With leading brands including "Motherhood Maternity," "Mimi Maternity" and "A Pea in the Pod," Matthias has founded three different types of stores that market maternity clothing to a broad spectrum of incomes. Plus, Mothers Work also offers Internet retailing and direct mail ordering.
When Matthias thinks back to her time at Penn, she can't say that she had any formal training for becoming a businesswoman. Yet, her four years as an undergraduate led her to try a wide range of things, giving her the inspiration to enter a field in which she had no experience.
"What I did learn at Penn was to try things and be experimental," Matthias says. "I tried every club and took courses in things that that I never knew existed before I went there. It was eye opening to me to do things I had never done before and figure out how to do them."
Matthias relates her approach to trying new things to what it's like to create a business.
"Experimentation is what starting a business is all about," she says. "Every day you do 59 things that you've never done before and there's nobody to tell you how to do it so you just do it."
While she didn't have a road map to lead her along the way to founding a company, Matthias did have the motivation and direction to get what she wanted. Her book, Mothers Work, outlines her experiences in starting a business and conveys the message that it's important to have self-confidence every step along the way.
"Starting a business was empowering," she says. "I was made to believe that I could do anything and I could go anywhere and there weren't any doors that were closed. Just having that mindset was a really big piece of the equation."
And now, as a mother of three, an author and a successful entrepreneur, Matthias can reflect upon her past and offer words of wisdom to the future.
"I think that it's important to think that through to think about what you want to get out of your life and not be afraid to go in a direction that not every will go in," Matthias says. "You can't have it all and you have to make choices and you have to choose a path, but there's no right and there's no wrong except for what's right for you and what you want to do."
When Marcia Greenberger was a senior at Penn, she decided to sit in on a Law School lecture to see what it was like. Thinking that she could slip in unnoticed and just observe, Greenberger sat down in the back of the classroom and waited for the talk to begin.
Later, she found out that all of the seats were assigned, and that there were so few women in the class that she stuck out like a sore thumb.
"While I was sitting there, the professor called on me to answer a question about a law case," Greenberger, 55, recalls. "He referred to me as 'Ms. Visitor.'"
As heads turned and fingers pointed in her direction, Greenberger, mortified, cowered in the back of the classroom, wanting to melt into the corner.
"I literally thought that I was going to die if someone else didn't think of a way to get me out of that situation," she says.
Greenberger didn't die -- she didn't even let this first visit to the Law School prevent her from going there. And now, 32 years later, Greenberger, a campaigner for women rights since the beginning, sits as the founder and co-president of the National Women's Law Center.
As a student in Penn's College for Women in the 1960s, being a female -- especially one interested in law -- was a lofty aspiration in the primarily male-driven world. The term "feminism" hadn't been coined yet, nor had the Equal Rights Amendment been drafted. Yet, in the midst of John F. Kennedy's assassination and the decade of civil rights activism and Vietnam War protests that followed, Greenberger developed an awareness of public service and a political consciousness that she didn't shed.
"There were a lot of experiences at Penn that were so important to what I ultimately chose to do," Greenberger says. "Campus issues and global issues gave even more of an impetus to me to think about reform, public policy and the importance of law in peoples' everyday lives and the government."
Despite the politically active environment at Penn, issues regarding women's rights had yet to be confronted. As a freshman living in Hill Hall, as Hill House was then called, Greenberger was witness to the rift between men and women on campus.
"There were some women in my suite who wanted to start a crew team," she said. "Many people thought that it was a joke, and the women took a lot of heat for trying to set it up. A lot of people couldn't figure out what they were thinking."
Greenberger's decision to apply to law school left some people equally baffled. Fortunately, she and two friends, Lisa Holsaker Kramer and Barbara Meyers Rothenberg, went through the process together, which helped take off some of the barriers that they confronted as women.
"Several men came up to the three of us before the [LSATs] and asked how we could take the test and compete with men who 'really needed' to get into law school," she says. "Not only was it assumed that men needed a law career more than women, but at that time law school attendance was still grounds for a military deferment."
Comments like these did not hold Greenberger back -- if anything, they fueled her fire.
As one of the 11 women in her law school graduating class in 1970, Greenberger and her husband, who had also received his J.D. from Penn, moved to Washington.
There she began her career in law as a tax lawyer in a private firm. After two years, though, she realized that her passions for civil liberties, especially those relating to women, weren't going to be fulfilled by such work.
A job interview at the Center for Law and Social Policy, one of the first public interest law firms, was her ticket into the world of women's rights. Greenberger worked for the Center for 10 years, paving the way for the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and many other women's rights crusades. A decade later the Women's Right Project that she had established was getting too big for the center -- at that point, Greenberger chose to convert her undertaking into the National Woman's Law Center, which has been in existence ever since.
And now, as Greenberger looks back on her role as one of the modern pioneers for women's rights, she can reflect on how much has changed since she graduated from the College of Women at Penn in 1967.
"Before, [women] couldn't be lawyers because they weren't emotionally tough enough, and having a career and children wasn't possible," Greenberger says. "There were so many more limits on what it was felt that women could do than what they should do -- now there's a sense that there's nothing that women aren't able to do."
Even at Penn, where her daughter Anne graduated from in 2000, Greenberger has observed changes since 1963, when she moved into Hill Hall as a freshman.
"It struck me the day that I was helping my daughter move into the Quad how different her experiences would be from mine," Greenberger said. "I came in assuming much narrower choices than what I ultimately made, but she came in and Penn reinforced the wide range of choices that would be available to both male and female students."
Yet while there are no more dress codes, curfews or single-sex dorms at Penn -- or at most universities, for that matter -- Greenberger refuses to be content with the progress that has been made since she shrank back in the corner of that Penn Law class 37 years ago.
"I wish I could say that all the barriers were gone, but unfortunately my generation hasn't made all of the progress that I wish we could for the sake of my daughter and the others coming along," Greenberger says.
