It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. And Martha Fransson decided it was going to be her. In 1967, as a Harvard undergrad exploring MBA programs, Fransson learned about Tuck from a female friend. The friend had applied and was notified by mail that Tuck did not accept women. "I liked that," says Fransson with a laugh. "Tuck became my first choice."
It's easy to forget that only 40 years ago, the percentage of female students at Tuck was precisely zero. But as timing and luck would have it, Tuck had a new dean in 1968 who made it a priority to admit women. John Hennessey wanted five women in the class of 1970, but after the application process, the only qualified applicant was Fransson. She said yes, and the rest is history.
What was life really like for Tuck's first woman? A struggle to be accepted? A battle against sexism? Well, no. "I had a very pleasant, positive Tuck experience," she says. "I was accepted as unusual, but a lot of my classmates wanted to work with me, get to know me. I think by the time I graduated I was sort of the class mascot."
Fransson, who was selected as an Edward Tuck Scholar at the end of her first year, lived in a house with Dartmouth's 10 other female graduate students—this was before coeducation hit big-time in 1972. She was treated like every other student. Except for food fights and parties. "The other students decided I shouldn't be present at the food fight in the Stell Hall cafeteria," she says. So a few classmates shrewdly took her out to dinner so that she would miss it. It was also commonly agreed that the men didn't have to tone down their behavior at parties but that an administrator would escort Fransson home before the party mood became too elevated.
In the business world, too, Fransson could go to conferences and never wait in line for the bathroom. "Until Jimmy Carter required federal agencies to take affirmative action to support women's business enterprises, there was a pretty small pool of women active in business." In those days, Fransson says, female graduates—even Harvard women—who wanted to work ended up in fashion or publishing. At a recent conference, a fellow Radcliffe student recognized her and remarked, "You're the one who went to business school!"
That business-school degree and her own talent have served Fransson well, even without food-fight experience. In 12 years at her hometown Hartford National Bank, she rotated through nearly every department, rising to vice president. As general manager of Times Mirror Cable Television, she managed the crisis that ensued when Connecticut threatened to revoke the company's franchise. Then, after a two-year stint as vice president of strategic planning at Massachusetts Mutual, Fransson took the job she has today: clinical professor at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Hartford campus. Now in her 20th year at Rensselaer at Hartford, she teaches marketing to working professionals, most of whom are pursuing master's degrees in the evening. As a specialist in writing cases, associate editor of Business Case Journal, and president of the Society for Case Research, Fransson realizes that her earliest experiences in business—studying cases—loops nicely with her current work.
For her, that Tuck experience has come full circle.
