Glamour and Radcliffe: A Love Story
When Nancy A. Redd ’03 flipped through a Glamour magazine in the women’s studies department lounge last fall, she didn’t realize she would soon continue a 45-year tradition of Radcliffe and Harvard winners of the magazine’s “Top 10 College Women” competition. Redd’s many accomplishments—including being the highest-earning black American on a game show (for winning $250,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”) and co-authoring a Princeton Review book called The Girls’ Guide to the SAT: Tips and Techniques for Closing the Gender Gap—propelled her to the winners’ circle.
“She’s amazing. She combines beauty and brains,” says Lynda Laux Bachard, one of the contest’s coordinators. Redd hasn’t been the only Harvard woman with the winning combination of brains and beauty. Beginning in August 1957 as “The 10 Best-Dressed College Girls in America,” the contest has attracted a plethora of Harvard’s finest. One of the 1957 winners, Radcliffe graduate Priscilla Bowden ’61, was the first woman accepted to the editorial staff of The Crimson. Glamour quoted a Princeton man describing Bowden as “an Ivy intellectual...but so pretty, it doesn’t matter.” Radcliffe winners in the early ’60s had the chance to meet famous politicians, including Lyndon B. Johnson and John. F. Kennedy ’40. Kennedy’s advice to the girls: “Marry a politician—it’s an interesting life!”
It wasn’t until the late ’60s when the contest changed from “Best Dressed” to “Top 10 College Girls.” As the application procedure changed—the previous requirement was the submission of photographs in three outfits— Harvard women continued to get recognized by Glamour, with at least 13 winners since 1980. Last year, Ajarae D. Johnson ’02 won Glamour’s “Queen G” contest, a competition open to women of all ages.
Perhaps most interesting is the case of Mary Lou Schiavo ’76, who achieved further Glamour fame after taking home two more awards from the magazine. In the ’80s, Schiavo, then inspector general for the Department of Transportation, won Glamour’s “Working Woman” contest. Then, after writing a book, teaching aeronautical engineering and working for the California law firm Baum & Hedland, she took home one of Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” awards in 1997, a title recently shared by big names like Salma Hayek and Eve Ensler.
Will Redd continue in the footsteps of her glamorous Harvard predecessors? The women’s studies concentrator isn’t sure of her post-graduation plans, but she trusts her instincts. “I want to do something fabulous,” she says. “We’ll see where the wind takes me.”