"A lot of us took the war very much personally," he adds.

The draft weighed heavily on the minds of male students.

While almost all of the students had obtained college deferments in order to postpone the draft, each student was assigned a lottery number. The lower the lottery number, the more likely it was that the students would have to enter the draft come graduation time.

"Two numbers that everyone knew very well were their own SAT score and their lottery number," Mitchell says.

But with the ending of the draft and the heavy withdrawal of American troops in March of 1973, the class became less activist.

"The number of issues decreased because the whole war issue largely subsided as an issue," Schneider says. "There was a momentary flurry around what was going on in Angola, but the reality was, there was nothing that galvanized people like the Vietnam War."

"[The winding down of the war] took the wind out of the sails in political activism," he says.

Melvoin agrees that the amount of activism changed as the class progressed from their first year to their senior year.

"I don't think we could have possibly maintained that level of intensity [as in our first year], and we didn't," he says.

Radcliffe and Harvard

When Charlotte Crane '73 came to Harvard University, she lived in the Quad, signed in and out of her House and could only receive male guests during certain hours.

By the time she graduated, Crane was living in John Winthrop House, came and went as she pleased, had many casual male friends and only had to walk a few minutes to her job in Lamont Library.

"It was something of a shock," she says of the Radcliffe and Harvard administrations' decision to integrate both colleges' dorms and Houses in the spring term of 1970.

"Our first semester was the only time I experienced the old Radcliffe," Ritchie says.

Being the last Radcliffe class was something of a distinction. "We had, at least, that first term where we could all live together," says Rebecca Miller Sykes '73.