"I tended to say I was from Harvard," Green says. "The politics of race and gender became much more apparent to me later, when it was obvious that Radcliffe was a good influence."

Many female members of the class remember an atmosphere of unspoken hostility toward women.

"Dean F. Skitty Stade was famously chauvinistic and opposed to co-ed housing," Green says. "I remember the time his wife was interviewed about Radcliffe, and she said, 'I have no opinion except that of my husband.' She did not feel any need to challenge him, even on this matter."

At a time when Harvard and Radcliffe were united in most academic areas, they had one important distinction: Their admissions offices were separate. There were quotas on how many men and women the college contained, and the numbers generally hovered around 4,800 men and 1,200 women.

Dale Russakoff '74 says "this very male policy" had major effects on her education.

"Usually you were the only female in a class," she says. "A lot of women were intimidated. They were sitting there thinking, 'I know the professor thinks I can't produce. I know the other [male] students think I can't produce.' I wanted to say to those girls, 'Why don't you produce? Why don't you show them? But it wasn't that simple."

For Russakoff, one woman who ensured she was heard was Radcliffe President Matina S. Horner.

"At Michigan, Horner had done her Ph.D. on why women feared success," Russakoff says. "She was pretty famous."

Horner's study judged women's responses to the question of who was happier: women who had a professional career or women who were married and stayed at home to raise their children. In the study, most women picked the latter.

This expertise about female fears was one of the reasons Horner was named president; it was also one of the reasons she was so popular.

"She always wanted to know how we were feeling, if we were stressed out," Russakoff says. "She wanted to be supportive of us. We told her how hard it was to be a woman at Harvard. Harvard-Radcliffe? What was that exactly?"

In the end, Russakoff's feelings, like those of many women at the College, were simple.

"I just wanted to make it, like everyone else [at Harvard] made it," she says.

Clubs, Cigarettes and Caffeine

As the turbulent years of war-time protest began to wind down, final clubs once again became prominent in campus social life.