In the January 22, 1973 issue of the Boston Globe, staff writer Joan McPartlin Mahoney '49 wrote a memoir of her years as The Crimson's first female correspondent. The occasion was the student daily's 100th birthday celebration, to which Mahoney was not invited.

Although Mahoney did not go through the traditional training period--called the "comp"--that groomed out her male counter-parts, she had worked at the Boston Globe the summer before taking a position at The Crimson.

Her article, "Alumni editors mark Harvard Crimson's 100th, Cliffe still waiting for her invitation," ran with a companion article describing the festivities.

Reprinted courtesy of the Boston Globe.

The Harvard Crimson had a 100th birthday party over the weekend and that's one party I'm sorry to have missed, because I still think of myself as the first girl reporter ever to have worked for the Crimson.

So if I had been invited, I'd have gone like a shot to that party and I'd have met a lot of friends and big names there. Some of them would have been both.

But I marked the centennial anyway. Just for the day, I got out my Crimson medal and propped it against the typewriter. Draped my Crimson tie over the hanging lamp and taped my Crimson "Press" sign to the wall.

I hauled out my 1948-49 bound volumes of the Crimson and rifled through the pages, reading my bylined stories.

And then read, for the first time in years, the closing paragraphs of the 75th anniversary history of the Crimson.

J. Anthony Lewis, then of the Crimson now of the New York Times, had noted my appearance. "In the fall of 1947, President Leavitt added a Radcliffe correspondent to the staff and this miss, Joan McPartlin '49, proved so successful at the 'Cliffe and other women's hide-outs that the Crimson seethed with discussion about having females on the sacrosanct staff."

That discussion didn't last long. Lewis wrote in 1947; but 1949 a group picture of the Crimson staff showed four Radcliffe girls, although it would be the 1950s before they were admitted to full membership as editors and business board members, and the 1960s before a Radcliffe student became a Crimson managing editor.

In those days they called us members of the Radcliffe Bureau.

How, and when, did it all start? For the cause of history and Women's Lib, the official date was September, 1947, and I recorded that fact in a 1948 Crimson:

"With a ceremony not even so formal as wrapping the old wheeze in a discarded gallery proof and throwing it on the Lampoon's steps, the Crimson on Sept. 21, 1947, scrapped the Radcliffe jape.

"The old feud was at an end. The Crimson ceased treating Radcliffe girls as Hatfields and recognized them as the real McCoys."