While she was here, she left her mark on the school. "I started a life-drawing group," she says, "but when some people found out we were working with nude models, it was discontinued."

Life was restricted elsewhere, too. Says Hohenberg, "At the end of a date, we had to run back to the Quad. That was such a drag. We wanted more freedom."

And Kneerim found out what happened if you took liberties. One night, she recalls, a Harvard friend drove up to the Quad in his brand-new MG. Kneerim and her friends sat around drinking champagne to christen the car, while the dorm's housemother peered through the window at them.

Kneerim found herself put on social probation--meaning she had to be in the dorm each night by 8 p.m. for a week. Kneerim has few kind words for house mothers--"papery old ladies"--as compared to the "intellectual House system at Harvard.

"Retired women were our mentors," says Russell, while the men's mentors were tutors and professors. Harvard men lived in suites, while the women "were crammed into economy doubles," she says.

Yet there was some good in all these inequities, Darst says. "In a very rough way, Radcliffe prepared you for the real world because you learned how to fight," she says.

Kay argues, however, that the preparation did not affect everyone. "It strikes me that some of the brightest women in America have contented themselves with desultory activities, submerging themselves in children and husbands," she says, a fact she says she noticed especially in looking through her class's 25th reunion book. "There are too many compromises being made. What has happened to your intelligence, what has happened to your drive, when you're making cookies for the PTA?