Carolina, the group was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency and ARAMCO. Miller states that Gildersleeve's "sympathies were indeed overwhelmingly with the Arabs." Women's equality Gildersleeve was an early advocate of paid leaves of absence for women faculty members to take maternity leave. In 1931, she raised the matter with Columbia President Butler, who "looked a little startled", but he agreed, saying "We should have women teachers with fuller lives and richer experience, not so many dried-up old maids". Gildersleeve recorded this remark in her memoir without comment. She then persuaded the Barnard board of trustees to enact a maternity policy that provided one term off at full pay or a year off at half pay for all new mothers among the faculty. In the first year, three women took advantage of this new policy. In 1915, in a speech to the Columbia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa she challenged the commonly held belief that the education of women was a detriment to society, arguing that improved public health and the declining infant mortality made it unnecessary to breed so many children as once had been the case in order to have surviving progeny. She asserted that in the modern world women could have the same ambitions as men. Rosalind Rosenberg, Gildersleeve's biographer, has argued that "Through her work Gildersleeve and other pioneers like her provided the essential conditions necessary to winning for women full equality with men in American society and throughout the world... In broadening women's scholarly horizons, Gildersleeve laid the groundwork for some of the most innovative scholarship of the twentieth century. And in helping to draft the charter of the UN, Gildersleeve assured that the issues to which she had devoted her career on Morningside Heights would be addressed throughout the world in the decades that followed. By insisting that women have the right to every educational opportunity open to men, and by fighting her whole life to secure that opportunity, she helped establish the bedrock on which feminists have been building ever since." Sexuality For several decades Gildersleeve and Professor Caroline Spurgeon shared a summer retreat. Later, she lived with the Barnard English professor, Elizabeth Reynard, and they both are buried at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard, Bedford, New York. This has given some a basis to speculate about Gildersleeve's sexuality. In her 1954 memoir, Gildersleeve protested the "particularly cruel and unwholesome discrimination against unmarried women"