"Being black, being female, being middle-class, being at Harvard--a lot of times, these things didn't go together in my mind," she says. "I never told anyone where I went to school. At the time, to be academic was to considered 'white' or a 'sell out.'

"I remember seeing pictures of these women in the halls and thinking, 'They would die if they saw me here because here were these white, upper-crust women from New England society, and here I was a young black female,'" she adds.

Boswell, whose grandfather earned his Ph.D. from Yale, says she compensated for the exclusion she felt by volunteering three times a week at a children's day care in Roxbury.

Blustein says that despite the steps taken to integrate Harvard men and women, University officials balked at accepting black women.

"Apparently more women had applied to Leverett than Leverett could take, and they would have a lottery," she says. "It turned out that only black women students' names were in the lottery. We started a leaflet and the next thing we knew there was no longer any Leverett lottery."

Crossing the Gender Line

Harvard students broke other social constraints as well.

During the first semester of 1968, entrance into the all-male Freshman Union, the first-year dining hall, was contingent on wearing neckties and shoes. But enterprising students found ways around that.

Gorman recalls how "people would wear ties but no shirts or only shoes and a tie" to the cafeteria.

Quasha also remembers that parietal hours--the hours in which women could visit a male room--were disregarded by first-year males who discreetly snuck females into the dorms.

The need for discretion ended the next year, however, when Harvard admitted women into the traditionally all-male house system and men trekked up to integrate the Radcliffe Quad.

Noyes and Class Secretary and Marshal Hollis S. McLoughlin '72 were two of the first men to live in the traditionally all-female Briggs Hall, Noyes says.

However, such integration came with some tension.

"Some men organized a walk-out of Briggs House because they felt they were being ignored by the women," Noyes says.

Nevertheless, Radcliffe undergraduates retained a strong sense of themselves as "'Cliffies" and still refer to themselves as graduates of Radcliffe College to this day, says Karen L. Peterson '72.