Margaret Hennig; broke ground, ceilings for female executives

As co-founder and co-dean of the first MBA program designed specifically for women, Margaret Hennig helped propel hundreds beyond the corporate "glass ceiling."

"She was influential in the careers of many women executives, both in New England and nationally," said Anne Jardim, who cofounded the Simmons Graduate School of Management with Dr. Hennig in 1974.

Dr. Hennig and Jardim also co-wrote "The Managerial Woman," a study of successful women executives first published in 1977. Publicized mainly by word of mouth, it became a New York Times bestseller.

"She was able to say to women students that `yes you can' and `this is why,' " said Jardim of Dr. Hennig, 63, who died of heart failure Wednesday in Newton-Wellesley Hospital.

Dr. Hennig, a charismatic speaker with a melodious voice, was born in Ridgewood, N.J. From age 14 until she was 22, she spent summers working in a postcard factory. That experience, she said in a 1995 Globe story, set the course for her lifetime commitment to workplace quality of life.

"I learned early on that most managers did not care about the lives of people they controlled, and I saw that work for most people was not rewarding," she said. "People came into those doors, and they were expected to leave everything behind: sickness, depression, marital problems, financial worries. They were expected to be pleasant, upbeat, thankful, and work like hell. . . . Every kid growing up should have a blue-collar work experience."

After graduating from Simmons College, Dr. Hennig in 1963 entered Harvard Business School, where she earned a master's degree in business administration and a doctorate.

For her doctoral thesis she studied 25 of the 125 women listed as officers of Fortune 500 companies and found that they were either only children or the eldest girl in all-girl families, for whom their father's approval was a significant factor in the freedom they felt to pursue management careers.

She began teaching at Harvard Business School, where Jardim was also a member of the faculty. When the school's administration did not respond to their complaints about the lack of case studies on women managers and the paucity of women's restrooms, they concluded that women were second-class citizens at the school. They decided to create an MBA program exclusively for women, with an emphasis on behavioral studies of female corporate managers, hoping to encourage others to enter the "foreign territory."

"She was so far ahead of her time," Jardim said.

With the help of a $25,000 grant from Harvard and financial aid from other sources, Simmons Graduate School of Management opened in 1974. Dr. Hennig and Jardim were co-deans of the program until they stepped down simultaneously in 1997.

Peg Doherty, a retired senior vice president of human resources at Houghton Mifflin Co., was a member of one of her first classes.

"She was a large woman who carried a lot of presence as she walked around that amphitheater, telling it like it was," Doherty said.

Doherty pointed out that there were few female executives in the early 1970s and what an inspiration Dr. Hennig and her colleagues were.

"The program changed my life," she said. "Margaret educated a lot of women, and she educated a lot of companies, too. She showed them what their woman employees could become."

Dr. Hennig, who lived in Wellesley, leaves her companion, Dr. Catherine Nelson, and a brother, Richard Hennig of Georgetown, S.C.

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Monday in St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Wellesley. Burial is private.