THE RADCLIFFE Institute sits in Radcliffe Yard, and yet surprisingly few Cliffies know anything about it. Mrs. Mary I. Bunting, president of Radcliffe, hasn't publicized it very well, considering her great interest.

The Institute caters to women who somehow have held on to big ambitions, even though they have often already achieved husbands and babies. They seem to be preserved Cliffies, or perhaps preserved freshman Cliffies--because they seem so unresigned.

But the women at the Institute are different from the rest of us Cliffies since they have stuck it out. We don't know if we will. Within a few years, we may store our books in the attic and start studying china patterns. The members of the Institute, however, ranging form 25 to 60 years old, have remained ambitious.

When I first visited the Institute in March, I wondered what kind of woman remains ambitious about careers, when so many women do not, and when it perfectly acceptable to give up career plans as if they had been adolescent daydreams.

These Institute Scholars, known officially as Associate Scholars, are awarded fellowships of up to $3000 per year to work on independent projects on a part-time basis. Chosen from more than 200 applicants, 18 to 25 women, about half of whom have doctorate degrees, become Institute Scholars each year. The Institute can accommodate only 40 Scholars at any given time, so a Scholar can stay at the Institute two years at the most.

The projects very greatly: one Scholar is studying the use of dance therapy for psychological and physical rehabilitation; another, how to communicate physics to children and laymen; another is writing the music and libretto for an opera; and another is exploring pre-Euclidian mathematical sources.

The Scholars also very greatly in their daily schedules. Each has a small office-studio at the Institute headquarters in the Radcliffe Yard, if she wants it. She can use it for storing storing junk, or she can virtually live there. No one expects her to be in. Often, several of the Scholars bring sandwiches and have lunch together at the Institute. They are get together, too, when each week a different Scholar gives a talk about what she's trying to do. About two-thirds of the Scholars usually show up at these 'colloquia," along with the Institute administrators, Mrs. Bunting, and whoever else is interested. (Cliffies are especially welcome, though few come, since the colloquia are not publicized.) But, there's no pressure on the Scholars to appear at lunchtime or at the colloquia. Their schedules are completely their own.

THE WEEK I visited one of those colloquia, Rachel Bas-Cohain, a young artist-Scholar in her late twenties, presented her experiments with reflected light, motion, and polarizing materials. As one of the guests, I wandered with about fifty women through her exhibit, a collection of whirring, flashing, rotating constructions made of glass, wood, water, and light. One construction consisted of two panes of glass pressed against each other and suspended from the ceiling. From one corner between the glass panes, water vapor seeped continuously upward in lacy bubbles. A light cast on the wall a shadow of the moving vapor lacework. The shadow looked like a spider web, growing, disappearing, and continually replacing itself.

The women around me stopped and watched, fascinated.

Later, in another room, Miss Bas Cohain began her presentation by reading a poem by Cummings. She then showed slides of paintings by Klee, Modigliani, Pollock, and various other modern artists, introducing them by saying simply that she liked them. The women in the audience sat silently in the dark, some smiling, some bewildered but receptive. Miss Bas-Cohain had said that she preferred not to explain what she was doing. She wanted to let the slides and the exhibit speak for themselves.

Few in the audience seemed to know exactly how to react (some women murmured confidentially to each other as if they were in a museum), but almost everyone looked pleased. There seemed to be something special about this almost completely female gathering. I got the feeling that all the women present were proud of Miss Bas-Cohain, perhaps because they identified with her as a woman. Among men, there's usually a competitive atmosphere, but that was absent here. Perhaps because they are still a minority group when it comes to having brilliant careers or even jobs, women feel something like the collective pride of the oppressed whenever one of them "beats the system" and stands out.

SINCE AN American woman's achievement is still scored mostly in terms of her husband's and children's happiness and success, she has much less at stake than a man when she attempts a career. She is considered exceptional if she just tries. So she can afford to be less critical of herself than a man can.

Today, as the demand for highly-educated employees increases, ambitious women seem to have an ideal situation: they are congratulated if they become wives and mothers and no more. If they have careers they get gold stars. It seems as if they can hardly lose.

But they can lose if they are ambitious, because many practical obstacles may prevent their careers. The society that considers marriage and motherhood sufficient goals for women can, and does, discriminate against them as students and careerists without feeling guilty. Although this country has one of the highest proportions of working women in the world, it falls far behind European countries in its postgraduate training of women, and in its acceptance of women in the professions. In graduate schools, men are notably preferred. Jobs that lead to promotion almost invariably fall to men.

Why? Supposedly, because women quit when they have babies. They are not considered good investments. Many are not good investments, but partly because society doesn't except them to be. It's as if the majority of woman made a deal with society: I won't feel guilty if you won't feel guilty. In other words, women will put up with discrimination (and not make society feel guilty) as long as society doesn't put pressure on them to try to achieve more (and doesn't make them feel guilty for not trying).

Unambitious women, therefore, don't suffer; the burden falls on women like the Institute Scholars who want careers, as well as families. And here the Institute comes in. Since most of the Scholars have to adjust their schedules to husbands and babies, the instigation where they study or work must be flexible. And the Institute is flexible: it allows the Scholars to study and produce, as they would in graduate school, but on a part-time basis, as they could not in graduate school. Provided with the amount of money she needs, each Scholar works out her own budget and schedule. She can use the money to buy time, by using it to hire a babysitter. If she's an artist, she can use it to buy the supplies which would otherwise be too expensive.

The Institute, though, benefits the Scholars more significantly just by choosing them. To become a Scholar means to be recognized as a talented woman. This recognition is a key to new associations, and eventually to career openings. (Since this recognition is so valuable, it seems very important that the Institute choose as Scholars women who are as yet "un recognized.") But most of all, the recognition gives the women the confidence that encourages them to keep taking risks.

For instance, if a married woman has to help support children, it might seem extravagant to give up a job to try to make movies, since she would not know whether or not she would be successful. But the Institute, by choosing her as a Scholar to make movies for a year, not only boosts her financially, but proves to her and to the world that it things she's doing something worthwhile. Also, given the year for her projects, she will presumably complete a movie within that time, and have tangible proof of her talent.

Perhaps, in America, where most people think women belong in the home and on PTA committees, women need extra boosts, when they want to try careers, because they lack self-confidence. One of the directors at the Institute remarked that the Scholars seemed to need encouragement more than anything else. Certainly they get his at the Institute. When I asked her how the Scholars were chosen, she said that the women who needed the Institute most, including some who would benefit greatly from a boost in confidence, were usually the ones picked.

SINCE IT opened in 1961 through a vote of the Radcliffe Trustees, the Institute--though it remains a rather elite organization--has gradually influenced and financed more and more women besides the Scholars. More than 20 women in universities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are able to do part-time graduate work through fellowships of up to $3000 per year from the Institute. In Greater Boston hospitals, about 25 women physicians are finishing their medical training with the help of Institute grants of up to $4000 per year. All these women have similar problems: since they have husbands and babies to care for, they need extra money and flexible schedules in order to continue their studies.

The Institute has reached an even greater number of women through the Radcliffe Seminar program which it coordinates. When the Seminars program began in 1950, independently of the Institute, about 75 women, representing 70 colleges, are taking one, two, or three of the 17 seminar courses. Women used to join the seminars as a leisure activity--they joined only one seminar each year. Now, though, the women who take two or three of the seminars at a time two or three of the seminars at a time see them more as a bridge to jobs. Some of the seminars, in fact, are specifically designed to prepare women for jobs. A number of women have participated in a series of seminars on landscape design to become city planners, and some have been employed by the Boston Dedevelopment Authority.

Other seminars--"The Practice of Politics" and "Color and Culture: The Study of Racial and Ethnic Relations"--are intended to help volunteers in fields such as education and civil rights. Creative writing, history of art, and American literature seminars, taught on a first-year graduate level, remain for those interested in the humanities. Any women is eligible to apply to these seminars. Applicants are accepted on a first-come-first-served basis. But most of the applicants are college graduates between thirty and fifty years old who want to rekindle old interests, having sent their children off to school.

PERHAPS the Institute's greatest service to American women all across the country is through its Guidance Laboratory and Research Center. More and more women want to combine marriages and careers. Many factors contribute to this desire for a combination: early marriages; longer life expectancy, which leads to an average of 30 years of life after the last child is 21--as compared with 14 years in the 1890's; automation; more college educations. Since educational institutions and employers haven't yet adjusted to this new resource, women are finding it difficult to get proper training, and find flexible jobs.

The Guidance Laboratory serves women with these problems by suggesting job opportunities and ways of adjusting family life to jobs. Information from the Guidance Laboratory is shuttled to the researchers who are carrying on numerous studies through special grants on "the woman in America." They're trying to answer questions like: How many American women are working today and for what reason? What effect does a woman's having a career have on family life? What kind of women become highly motivated and why? Some studies currently underway are: woman's role (a survey of married women in suburban Boston); changes in female students' attitudes from freshman to senior year (a survey at Cornell); women in medicine (a study in Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia). The Institute communicates its research findings through publications, extensive correspondence with other educators, conferences, and counseling.

With its staff of 16 women headed by Dean Constance Smith, the Institute has become the center of a great network of studies and programs designed to encourage women to continue their education and find worthwhile jobs. It acts as consultant on women's education to universities all over the world. In a sense, the Institute is the torchbearer of a movement, the movement by women to combine an impressive career with marriage.