Carving A Niche

I plunged into Radcliffe in 1955--an enthusiastic newcomer ready for anything and everything. After four years, I still had great enthusiasm despite many discouraging obstacles and had also developed both a canny resourcefulness and a dogged determnation to survive. I also felt great elation at having competed successfully with some of the most able students in the country.

My friends and I were mostly crazy about college (we never said "school") but only with time have I begun to understand the many situations that then puzzled, troubled and/or frustrated me. Each person's college experience is unique, but many of my experiences I'm sure are shared by other classmates.

Despite the divisions of public and private, day and boarding, city, country and suburb, we were more homogeneous than our brother class at Harvard, and most of us found a starting group of friends right away. The academic system seemed designed to confuse and repel Radcliffe girls especially--a situation that didn't change for most of us, as the minimal advising system only focused on the top students all four years.

Most of us gravitated to the challening courses and majors. We were part of a fabulous era of lecturers (I treasure my memories of lectures by Bate, Demos, Handlin, Hugo, Lynn, Perry Miller, Mark deWolfe Howe and Kenneth Murdock) but mostly of weary section men. I found the curriculum in the humanities and social sciences well designed but many of my science and math oriented friends seemed to have endless struggles with pre-requisites and conflicts. We were thrilled to be at Harvard, but underneath our pride I think we were disappointed at the lack of contact with the faculty and missed the intellectual communication we had had in high school (nearly all of us had been among our schools' strongest students).

Moreover, we felt doubly cheated because we knew the Harvard students had regular contact with interested faculty through the House system.

Despite "the system", the intellectual excitement survived and flourished with most of us. There were some very unhappy people who stayed in collge and some who left. One had to ask for help and that wasn't easy--in fact, very difficult.

Hardly any part of Radcliffe life was easy--not even the geography! Most of us loved Cambridge--the city that didn't seem like a city. We were much more conscious of greater Cambridge than the Harvard students because of all the walking and biking needed to reach everything important in our lives. Nearly every Radcliffe student had at least one really long trip in her schedule every term. As a result, we carried a sense of street danger. At night the Common, a convenient shortcut, was unsafe, and the very dark side streets had deservedly poor reputations. I remember carrying my cello home alone from a Mem Hall rehearsal because there were no other Radcliffe players going home at that time. I really wondered if I would make it safely to the protected zone of the Quad.

I used the Radcliffe Yard and its library extensively, but other classmates never went near there. The administration had a very slight impact on most people's lives. The Quad was lovely, with its combination of old and new dorms, green space and the wonderful collection of off-campus houses, all gray with white woodwork Gilman was the most elegant, with a beautiful polished newell post and stair railing.

I enjoyed dorm life immensely and found the company of so many interesting bright girls exhilarating. The girls from boarding school mostly found dorm life tedious and moved off-campus as soon as possible, some studiously ignoring the required dorm affiliation and meals. Most of those on and off-campus formed good friendships among themselves, tolerating the rules which did not seem particularly difficult--certainly not oppressive, except for the highly sophisticated. We signed in and out if we were out after 10 p.m. We acknowledged Cambridge street crime and did not walk around alone at night if at all possible Corridors had to be quiet after 10--some people had record players but not all. WHRB's classical music was very popular, as was classical music in general. The smoker always had someone willing to talk for a while. The dorms each had a big study room with big tables good for the stacks of index cards and endless yellow legal pads.

It did seem unfair, and we did grumble, but we could only entertain boys in our rooms for two hours on two Sunday afternoons a year. Off-campus houses offered much more informality. One could share a sandwich with a boy in the ancient kitchens there and feel a little more natural than in the dorm calling rooms.

Our geography lesson also included residential Harvard, although we could enter the Houses only as a date or a tutee. The trolls hidden in the entrance walls signed us in. We blotted up the house stereotypes but we all had friends who were exceptions. We were arrogant probably and could afford to be--we had such a choice! The ratio of men to women seemed about 10 to 1.

We met boys in all kinds of formal and informal situations--jolly-ups were not so bad. I spent one Moors jolly-up evening talking to a shy grad student in biology with a slight British accent. His name was Jim Watson! Another jolly-up brought forth a great group of Harvard med students. After all, we came from a generation whose parents introduced us to their friend's children. Public school girls seemed to handle the stresses and strains of college social life better than the private school girls. That division existed, but did some-what diminish with time. College level work went better for many private school girls the first year, but many public school girls were very well-prepared all the same.

We were conscious of each other's cultural and social backgrounds. Some girls clustered with others of the same background while others spread out. One hesitated before becoming too romantically involved with someone of a different religion. Except for the Harvard eating clubs (notoriously WASP) we didn't hear about much prejudice, either at Harvard or Radcliffe. There were quite obviously few Black students. For many of us these were the first Black friends we had had.

We were faced with a huge choice of people, courses, activities and interests but not of sports. Excepting the field hockey team which played on the Quad, we had no possibilities of convenient sports. The two tennis courts behind Moors were covered by Comstock and the swimming pool was dreary and over-chlorinated. We never went near it after passing the required swimming test freshman week. The Harvard facilities were never open to women. Most of us didn't actively miss sports but we all would have benefited from the camaraderie of some group exercise as we tended to be solitary and intense. We were mostly less than svelte (dorm food was not bad, better than Harvard's famous steam tables) and resigned to our shapes. We knew we were short-changed but there seemed to be no way to make things change.

Sexual orientration defined activities but we chose by interest. All girls--dorm councils, student government, the choral society. Co-ed--Phillips Brooks House, instrumental music, interest and academic clubs; affiliate--the drama club, political groups. The Crimson, Friend of member--the Outing Club. House musical and theatrical groups No women--the Lampoon, the private clubs, and, I believe, the Advocate, which, however, would publish Radcliffe writing. There was a ruckus my sophomore year over admitting girls to full-membership in the Dramatic Club Full membership was turned down (the movement was led by boys and girls), despite the talented and committed group of girls in the productions. We had very high standards and were critical of slip-shod effort.

We usually boiled down these choices to one interest. The science majors were at a real disadvantage, with long labs, long walks and Dracula-like section men. We were generally devoted to our group, whether club, clique or corridor. One's group of caring friends was always very important, but increasingly so during my junior and senior years as the undergraduates (both Harvard and Radcliffe) developed great apathy and cynicism I saw this distressing anomie show up in colder personal relations, disillusionment with the administration and college institutions, political disinterest and constant major-switching, especially with the boys. We didn't know the reasons for it, and many people kept the momentum going, but it was uphill work.

National and foreign news seemed much less important than college and local issues. Cuba seemed more remote than Europe. However, for those interested. Israel's heritage beckoned to many Jewish classmates. Its future seemed very bright. Other nationalities existed only through friends' backgrounds and summer travels. We were all wild to travel in Europe. We began to think about Africa as Nigeria's and Algeria's revolutions penetrated our Cambridge bubble. A few people tutored and coached needy kids, while the rest of us let the world's troubles wait. We studied a lot and aimed to qualify for honors--the only route to small-group intellectual activity. We hated the Cambridge government, felt superior to other colleges, and thought Boston to be a great city.

Drinking was something we could take or leave, depending on the company. I don't remember Radcliffe girls drinking too much but I could be wrong. One's social life was determined by the company and that seemed to be determined largely by the boy's pocket book. Boys were expected to pay for everything on a date. But dates did not need to be expensive--there were lots of plays, concerts, lectures, two movie theaters, cheap eateries and pleasant excursions locally. I went to only one or two football games a year I think--a game with the wrong person was a very long, expensive date.

We had study dates in the many libraries except for Lamont which was closed to girls. We considered that very unfair as Harvard boys could use the Radcliffe library, and everyone knew Lamont had a much larger pool of reserve books. People were quite frank about their money or lack of it. Scholarship girls were required to live in economy doubles and had to keep their marks up to a B average.

But there were things not talked about, either in our late night bull sessions in the dorm smokers, or at the much franker evenings at The Crimson. We never mentioned homosexuality. The tragedy of this ignorance was brought home to me when a good friend committed sulcide on her discovery that her boy friend was a homosexual. Sex was private, surreptitious with complex arrangements, at least from a girl's point of view. Even when we knew a sexual relation existed, we did not talk about it. The complexity gave many Radcliffe girls an easy excuse to postpone such activities, with great relief, since sex was closely connected with commitment and marriage--a direction many of us were not interested in following right away. There was no pressure to "have a ring by graduation", unlike the reputed atmosphere at many girls' colleges. Many of us who stuck with college through senior year had many things we wanted to do after college.

But what? We had no official career advisement except one interview the last month of senior year. The science majors seemed to know where they were headed, the engaged seemed to have their futures settled, the few law and medical school people seemed to know, while most of the rest of us had ideas but not much self-confidence to make them happen.

This lack of guidance is my biggest gripe about my college experience. We felt and knew there was a void but found the male tutors little help except in preparing for graduate school. The two Radcliffe deans seemed oriented to PhD. work. Our education did not seem to have direction for itself. We had worked hard, harder than many of our Harvard classmates, and done well. We felt triumphant academically at graduation but very unsure.

The announcement of Mrs. Bunting's appointment (as the new president of Radcliffe) coincided with a stirring in the Radcliffe Yard. Along with Mrs. Bunting's new ideas, expressed before her arrival, came a new dean of residence who actually formed a student committee to discuss dorm life. The new freshmen and sophomores ('61 and '62) had more direction and confidently spoke their minds. At graduation I felt I had been born two years too soon. The college was just beginning to be the place it should have been for us.

I now see that our class was in a bridge era During our four years the all-Radcliffe activities which had given may women meaningful leadership roles had dried up as the active people started to break into the parallel Harvard groups (if I had come five years earlier I would have probably been happy to write for the Radcliffe News). From the faculty's point of view we were an able, but sometimes inconvenient afterthought. As woman students we had not been able to improve things for ourselves because we lacked leadership against the immense Harvard bureaucracy. Any triumphs we had achieved, whether academically or extra-curricular, had come to us only with that extra push. Our close friendships sustained us through those four years.

We knew we had earned those diplomas, many of them with honors--a great accomplishment but typical of our time. I don't remember whether President Pusey or President Jordan handed them out on that broiling hot day in the Radcliffe Yar