In 1950, Anne G. Davies '50 remembers, men rarely came to the Radcliffe Quad. When they did, they were usually fathers who stayed on the first floor--and if one dared to venture upstairs, the front desk would issue an alarm.

"Man on second! Man on third!" Davies recalls them yelling.

"This foreign being was on the floor," she says wryly.

The women might have had the upper levels of the Radcliffe dorms to themselves, but men had a firm footing on the higher steps of Harvard academics. Despite its status as one of the first classes to experience co-education, the Radcliffe Class of 1950 was far from equal with their male Harvard counterparts.

While Radcliffe women trekked to the Yard for classes for the first time (instead of having separate lectures,) they were often treated poorly in ways they themselves did not see.

The separation of the sexes transcended the social sphere, going beyond the pristine Radcliffe dorms into the newly coeducational classrooms, where exams and sections were segregated by sex and professors factored gender into grades.

But a different generation of Radcliffe women, largely unaware of what could and should have been theirs, did not fight the status quo--settling, instead, for what seemed to them to be an adequate arrangement: a Harvard education, in Harvard classrooms, alongside Harvard men.

A Community of Women

When the Class of 1950 entered as first-years, Harvard was making room for the men returning from the war. Women who lived locally were asked to commute.

The commuters formed their own tight-knit community, centering on Agassiz House in Radcliffe Yard. The family of Jane Opel '50 took in three boarders--women from the waiting list that would not have been able to attend otherwise.

And women surmounted obstacles more than housing shortages to obtain a Radcliffe education--sometimes unconscious that they were receiving separate treatment.

Even in the supposedly objective world of grading, an A was not necessarily an A for a woman taking classes in Harvard Yard between 1946 and 1950.

Davies recalls that one of her friends received a B in chemistry after getting As on quizzes and laboratory work in a piece commemorating her class (see page seven).

"When she confronted the professor, he replied that the class was graded on a sliding scale, he could give just so many As and those had to go to boys because they need them to get into medical school," Davies writes. "Even more dismaying, she accepted the explanation without argument."

The incident was "a downer" for the young woman in question, Davies remembers.

"She had hoped actually to have a career in medicine," Davies says.