This comparison conjures up images of Radcliffe women adorning the study carrels in both libraries-but is a bit inaccurate since women were not allowed in until 1967.

In the Harvard Library Bulletin of winter 1949, the library director defended the decision to exclude women.

"Experience here and elsewhere has shown that a library for men only or for women only can be administered with almost no supervision in the reading rooms, but that a coeducational library requires supervision if reasonable quiet is to be preserved," Metcalf wrote.

"The staff would have to be doubled if adequate reading room supervision were to be provided on a coeducational basis," he continued.

Fifteen years later, in 1966, the majority of Harvard students were still opposed to allowing women into Lamont.

In a poll conducted in January 1966 by the Harvard student government, 62 percent of those polled voted to exclude women entirely; 19 percent voted to allow women inside only weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and 19 percent voted to admit women at all times.

But things changed after female undergraduates were allowed to use Lamont for two weeks in the fall of 1966 during the construction of the new library for women, Hilles Library in the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

Afterwards, Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford '48 announced that the administrators had determined that use of the library by women did not pose any serious problems. His announcement sparked a spirited controversy, with letters to the editor back and forth persuading Lamont to let women in or "keep the girls out."

In the fall of 1967, the debate was ended when women were allowed permanent access to Lamont.

Current Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73 recalls being in the first class allowed to use Lamont for all four of her undergraduate years. For her, she says, the issue did not spark political embitterment as it did for some.

"[The idea of exclusion from Lamont] was very amusing to us, and did not loom particularly large as a significant barrier, just another of those annoying little things that showed that we were really 'guests' and not entitled to the run of the place, as our male classmates were," she says.

Traces of the old limits, however, still lingered after the library was opened to women.

"The biggest annoyance...was that there wasn't at that point a restroom we could use," Lewis says. "So here we were, able to use the stacks, go to sections, but not use a bathroom."

Cole says that though the resistance may have been slow to fade, today it has become obsolete.

"I don't think the opposition to women was something that was going to disappear overnight. I think the passage of time has shown people that there were no disadvantages to having women in the library," she says.