Taking bell desk duty is a part of the Radcliffe work program, which allegedly keeps down the price of room and board. Instead of the Harvard situation, where scholarship boys work to pay their own way through school, all the Radcliffe girls work to lower their common rates. Besides bell duty, the Cliffite can also don white apron and hair net two or three times a week to "wait on" in the dining hall.
Life in the dorms is not all work and no play, however. Each girl pays compulsory dorm dues, and can get her money's worth by attending the hall's social functions. These include the famed twice-yearly Jolly-Ups, Sunday afternoon tea hours, and weekly open-house nights, when the dorm stays open until midnight in stead of the usual 10 p.m. After dinner sociability takes the form of demi-tasse in the living room, with the head resident pouring coffee into miniscule cups.
Social Highlights
Highlights of the all-college social functions are the Chairstmas and Spring formals. These weekends include the rare treat of entertaining young men in one's individual room, but only from 2 to 4 on Sunday afternoon. Here again, the Radcliffe girl is plagued by the community, for she must leave her door open while she entertains.
In contrast to her Harvard counterpart, the Radcliffe girl cannot wander out of her dorm when she feels like it. To stay out of the dorm later than 10 p.m., when the doors lock, the Cliffe-dweller must register in the sign-book for all to see. Unlike some women's colleges, at Radcliffe a girl does not have to sign the name of her date, but only her destination, with as little specificity as "Boston movies," "Square," or "Corner."
Several years ago Everett House residents livened its sign-ins by using a colored pencil system to indicate the calibre of their dates. A yellow sign-in signified "intellectual conver-sation," green meant "walk and eat," blue indicated "movie and dancing," and red "a perfectly swell time." A purple signature meant "all this and Heaven, too."
Signing in and out of the dorm is done on the honor system, with each girl owning a key to the front door. Warnings are issued for tardiness up to 15 minutes, and later violations are punished by "social pro." This means that the offender must endure one Saturday night of staying in the dorm.
"Typed" Dorms
Although the Radcliffe dorms are very different from the Houses in most respects, they have tended to be "typed" in a somewhat similar fashion. Radcliffe girls, for example, may think of one dorm as embodying "gracious living," and others as populated by socialites, or by girls bent on little gold bands, or on little gold keys, as the case may be.
It is more difficult, however, to type the residents of each dorm at Radcliffe than of each Harvard House, chiefly because of the mobility of residence from year to year. Freshmen are original assigned to dorms with the intention of creating a typical cross-section rather than a characteristic atmosphere, but they are allowed to change dorms in succeeding years.
More fruitful than typing the individuals in a dorm is trying to dicern an atmosphere characteristic of the hall. Dictinctions arise from variation in the facilities, in the staff and in the personality of the house mother--how willingly she gives late permissions, how stringently she enfroces the rules, how well she is acquainted with the individual girls.
Need For Expansion
Dissimilar as they may be in some respects, the University Houses and the Annex dorms both face the same need for expansion. In 1930, when five of the present eight dorms were standing, the Radcliffe Yearbook reported: "There is room for every single girl, be she freshman or senior, New Yorker or Cambridgeite. There is no such thing as living in an 'outside house' and running over to a dorm for meals."
The same cannot be said today, when all eight brick dorms are filled to capacity, and when there are ten off-campus houses being used for the overflow. Since the statement of 1930, three dorms have been added--Cabot, Moors, and Holmes.
With the completion of Comstock Hall, the Annex Administration predicts that "Radcliffe will be able to provide housing for any student who desires it." And although the interior design has not yet been determined, one thing is certain--the living will be communal.