Radcliffe Postwar

The shadow of WWII also touched the women of Radcliffe. If nothing else, some graduates remember with a smile, the gender ratio on campus was very much in favor of the "'Cliffe dwellers," as they were often called.

The hordes of returning veterans meant that there were "six men for every woman."

"You could have dates for breakfast, lunch, tea, drinks, dinner and a dance with someone different each time," recalls Anne T. Wallach '49.

Young women who had grown up in the restrictive 1930s were freed from their mothers' watchful eyes and were able to enjoy an active social life in Cambridge.

Yet Radcliffe was not free from rules either.

"We had to be in at the right time at night," Wallach remembers. "[We} couldn't wear pants unless it was very cold, couldn't smoke in the street."

Radcliffe women often took their higher level classes at Harvard where they were given "the best seats in large lectures."

Officials announced in February 1946 that the "joint instruction" begun during the war when instructors were scarce would be a permanent part of a Harvard education.

Access to the newly built Lamont library, however, was not available to women when the library opened in January 1949. According to officials, the staff needed to chaperone a mixed group of students in reading rooms was prohibitively expensive.

Student publications also made it clear that Harvard men and Radcliffe women were separate and only dubiously equal.

In the fall of '49, the Crimson ran a picture on the front page of four "Cliffies" with an extended caption about the physical measurements of Radcliffe women.

But women's liberation was still decades away, and members of the Radcliffe Class of '49 overwhelmingly say they enjoyed their undergraduate years.

"The thing to understand is that being at Radcliffe was so much better than being home with your mother that we wouldn't have dreamed of complaining about inequality with men," Wallach says.

One alumnus remembers that his wife was made to feel at home at Harvard where she could sit in on classes, and even organized her own poetry reading.

In general though, the gender inequalities that women faced here were minimal compared to those in the rest of the country, and Radcliffe women were given access to resources most were not.