Despite the initial adjustment, graduates recall coeducational housing was a positive part of the class's undergraduate experience.

"For the most part, we had brother-sister relationships with the Harvard guys," Moreno says. "[Co-residency] ended up being the creation of a lot of friendships."

Crane agrees, saying that with integration, "most people found casual male-female relationships easier. There were enough women so that you didn't feel totally weird."

However, Melvoin, a Kirkland House resident, says that, "given the overall proportion of women in the colleges at that time, it was impossible to have anything approaching equity in the Houses."

He says a less gradual transition would have made the integration more complete. Restrictive quotas prevented more than a set number of women from transferring into each House.

"That ability to have great friends that were male and female did not yet exist," he says, "partly because of the numbers and partly because of the structure of the place."

On the flip side, males who moved up to the Quad say it could often be an alienating experience.

"I much preferred it to living at Harvard, but I felt like sort of a mascot up there," Morse says.

"There was an unwillingness to allow for all of us to have our own humanity, as if the men at Radcliffe were as much a part of the problem as any 'male chauvinist.'"

Margaret Morgan Grasselli '73, who was a Quad resident while an undergraduate, says "more women would have liked to have lived in the Harvard Houses, but it wasn't that easy" because of the restrictions. Meanwhile, "attracting the men up to Radcliffe was, sad to say, not that easy."

Race Relations

While men and women were beginning to live together without tension, black and white students often were not. They took the same classes, but many ate at different tables, joined different activities and lived in differentsocial spheres, separated by an often-impermeablewall of tension.

Schneider, who is white, says there was "prettymuch total isolation. There were very fewAfrican-Americans who were highly integrated interms of their daily activity. To a very largeextent, the African-Americans associated, partiedand dined together."

For Sykes, a black student from the segregatedSouth, the Harvard experience was disappointinglysimilar.

"There certainly was a sense of 'them' and 'us'and a division between us," Sykes says. "It wasdistressing to me because I had thought that lifein the North was going to be different," she says.

Moreno, who is Hispanic, says the tension waslimited to black and white students. "Back then,nobody even knew in the East whatMexican-Americans were," she says. "It wasn't anissue."