When on Dec. 18, 1957, the first girls were taken onto the Crimson to the special position of Radcliffe Correspondents, not entitled to vote or hold office, the managing editor made a futile last-ditch stand against them, declaring in print "Woman's place is in the home. The female is innately inferior." Within two years girls were serving on the executive board of the paper, on the executive board of the Young Democrats, as president of the Liberal Union, as president of the Organ Society, as announcers for WHRB, and had organized a cocd disarmament club.
And by way of dowry, Radcliffe sacrificed in these same two years her Voluntary Service Organization, the Radcliffe News, the Percussion (another weekly paper), the Management Training Program, Radio Radcliffe, and even the May Day Festival. The last Miss Radcliffe was chosen by Crimson editors in the Fall of 1955 from among the freshman class of '59. McGeorge Bundy, then Dean of the Faculty, noted that "Radcliffe is a good thing for Harvard, but Harvard may not be such a good thing for Radcliffe."
The affair has cooled off since the torrid days of the late '50's. Yearbook, diploma, graduate schools, course catalogues: these are symbolic gestures: the wedding ring and license. Rumor has it that Radcliffe is pregnant with a Student Union. But areas of the two schools that are still separate-student government, residence, athletics, admissions, guidance, final clubs, and honor societies may very well always be separate.
And Elsewhere
BUT this painless revolution, this inevitable trend to coeducation, is not to be merely smiled at. An institution of higher education cannot seriously make a claim for greatness unless it recognizes both sexes as worth educating. It is increasingly evident that the best schools in the United States are such places as Berkeley, Stanford. Reed, Swarthmore, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Oberlin -- rather than Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Dartmouth, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley and Vassar.
The anachronistic ideal of sexually separate education is detrimental to the development of the individual Boys' school newspapers write about sports and their own faculty cocktail parties; girls' school newspapers only print letters from juniors in Paris and results of student elections. Boys at all-male schools admit that they "begin to think of themselves as young gods," carouse and have riots, don't think girls have minds, seek to "conquer rather than love" a female.
And girls at all-girl schools complain