Jane Fonda, former film star, anti-war militant and aerobics guru, has found a new outlet for her passions and her cash - breaking down the stereotypes that divide boys and girls. She has given $12.5 million (£8.5m) from her personal fortune for the establishment of a Centre for Gender and Education at Harvard University, which she hopes will help undo the damage she says is inflicted on young boys by America's schools.
The gift marks a departure for the one-time militant dubbed 'Hanoi Jane' after infuriating much of middle America by visiting the North Vietnamese capital while US troops were fighting on the other side in the Seventies.
Talking on Friday at the Harvard Faculty Club, the inner sanctum of America's establishment education system, Fonda told of her new passion for examining the different ways boys and girls learn in school. 'For too long it's been "boys will be boys" and "it's just a hormonal thing" for girls,' Fonda said. 'It's much more than that, and that's what we want to get at.'
The new centre will bring together researchers, psychologists and educationalists to help boys and girls fight the pressures of traditional sex roles. With most of the energy in gender studies currently focused on girls, Harvard will look initially at males, examining how boys are taught by the age of five to be 'manly and strong'.
Speaking to the New York Times, Fonda said: 'I don't think women suffer any more than men do. In some ways men suffer more. The damage done to boys as a result of these gender strictures is very profound.'
Four million US children, most of them boys, have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and doctors write 11 million prescriptions for the drug Ritalin a year. In some schools as many as a third of all children are on Ritalin a result, and in some suburban areas of the US, including parts of New York, more than 20 per cent of white boys are taking Ritalin.
There is growing concern in the American academic community about the 'feminisation' of universities. In 1999, 8.5 million women enrolled in US colleges compared to 6.4m men, according to figures from the National Centre for Educational Statistics. In 2000, women made up 57 per cent of those entering college. The NCES expects this to rise to 61 per cent by 2009.
Announcing her gift, Fonda described how girls were 'bright-eyed and bushy tailed' at nine and self-censoring by 13, despite their academic successes. She looked around her at the audience and challenged Harvard to do something about this state of affairs. 'The old fuddy-duddies just stood up and raved about her,' said Jerome T. Murphy, dean of the educational faculty. 'She wowed a lot of people more than they expected.'
Asked whether her battle with the eating disorder bulimia had sparked her interest in gender issues, Fonda replied, 'It's in my DNA. The ways girls internalise and express the difficulty of growing up, they all happened to me.'
She said she had come to believe that traditional sex roles were key to understanding why boys are twice as likely to be on Ritalin and why girls stop speaking up in class as they grow older.
Some $2.5m of her donation will be used to endow a faculty chair to be named for Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan.
Fonda has played almost as many roles in her personal life as she has in film. As the wife of French director Roger Vadim, and as the star of his film Barbarella, she was the ultimate Sixties sexpot. Then she was nominated for an Academy Award in 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and won the Oscar two years later for Klute .
As a political activist and the wife of anti-Vietnam War protester Tom Hayden, she went to Hanoi to propagandise for the North Vietnamese; she even posed at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, for which she apologised during a Barbara Walters interview 16 years later.
Following in her father's impressive footsteps (and, luckily, not those of her mother, who cut her own throat when Jane was 12), she continued winning Academy nominations for Best Actress - a total of six - and she won her second Oscar for Coming Home .
In the Eighties, the longtime bulimic marketed the best-selling exercise video in history. Jane Fonda's Workout helped fund Hayden's political campaigns. She then went on to marry the founder of CNN, Ted Turner.
Fonda's generosity to Harvard continues the revived American craze for philanthropy in showbusiness. Giving endowments to colleges, causes and charities is a tradition dating back to weighty businessmen of the last century and has recently come to include rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam performing benefit concerts, and software billionaire Bill Gates becoming the nation's biggest philanthropic donor.
Apart from the time-honoured connection between Hollywood and the Clinton White House, some specific charities and lobbies have been established by movie stars: Bette Midler has poured a steady flow of money into her environmental trust which recently stepped in to buy up small islands of cultivated greenery in New York in order to rescue them from property developers.
And Paul Newman helps fill the political coffer which bankrolls the venerable Nation magazine which, alongside Mother Jones, constitutes a lonely, intelligent voice of the principled, if sometimes inflexible, hard left.
