"People were making a big russ in those days," says Caroline Greve Darst '60 of her college days, "because a dog was caught in Lamont Library--but a woman could not get in there."

When it first opened, Lamont was considered a Harvard College undergraduate library. Radcliffe women, who were not then Harvard students, were not allowed in the building.

"Radcliffe students were really second-class," says Katherine Bolster Russell '60, a Unitarian minister in New Hampshire.

Twenty-five years after graduating, that discontent at the way Radcliffe students were treated is a dominant theme in alumnae's recollections of their college experience. But just as strong is the fact that almost every woman accepted the way it was.

"It's almost like reading Victorian novels," says Judith Abrams Plotz '60, now a writer in Washington, D.C. "You say to yourself, 'How can people live so'--but yet these people were human."

"There's been much more than a generation's worth of change," says Joal Peters O'Connor '60. "We were so accepting and now people question.. The whole thing was part of the structure... We didn't know enough to be disgruntle; we didn't know enough to think it was different. It was the way things were."

"Radcliffe was a server of the times rather than a snapper of attitudes," says Plotz.

Indeed, Radcliffe women in the late '50s and early '60s were caught between two ears: they were raised to believe in the traditional female role of housewife, but entered the role world as the seeds of the feminist movement were planted.

"We were all expected by our parents to get married and have children," says Barbara Blanchard Hohenberg '60. "You figured you'd marry a Harvard man, and I don't think that particularly teaches you how to be part of the real world."

And Radcliffe certainly did not teach women how to live in the real world, which, as Darst points out, is coeducational. "The message was, 'You're still a little girl,"' says Jill Kneerim, now a writer in San Francisco.

It was a message that came through everywhere--from classes to dormitories.

Although most of the classes were coeducational by the mid-fifties, some classes such as a ROTC naval history class nickn med "Boats," with enrollment restricted to men Darst remembers that one of her friends sough permission to take Boats--and when she got the OK, the story ran on the front page of The Crimson.

In her own classes, Darst says, "some professors did not like the idea of teaching women and some of those in graduate schools did not keep their ideas to themselves."

And professors did not restrict their sexism to those women on the other side of the podium. "There was a pervasive sneering at the faculty wives. Wives of great intelligence were often mocked by men who had the world in front of them," Plotz says.

Nor was sexism restricted to lecturers. Liia Annus Vilms '60, now a software development engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado, majored in math and had to take introductory physics. There were only a dozen women in her class of 300, and she was the only women in her lab section. After all the Harvard students teamed up," "my section leader made no effort to get me a partner and told me to work by myself," she recalls.