Harvard mandated that women only visit the men's Houses between one and seven p.m. during the week and between one and eight p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Tactics to evade the rules were many and elaborate.

"It was a running battle. The students always wanted fewer parietals and the administration wanted to keep the parents happy," Bayley Mason '51, a former Crimson executive, says. "People would be crawling underneath the window of the superintendent's office of Lowell House or Eliot House. Once your guest got in the problem was not having her get caught."

The eventual outburst in the College was preceded by a graduate student movement to change a rule requiring every woman who visited a graduate student dorm room to be accompanied by another woman.

Punishment for breaking the parietal rules ranged from a loss of guest privileges to a request for the student to resign from school.

The students claimed that the rooms of the new Graduate Center were too small to fit a couple and a chaperone.

"Stuffing four people into one of the center's rooms creates an atmosphere about as congenial as a subway during rush hour," The Crimson reported students saying.

Enterprising students founded the "Radcliffe Couple-Sitting Service," which provided a female chaperone who would do her homework while the Radcliffe girl visited a graduate student.

The graduate students were eventually successful in abolishing the chaperonage rule and extending their visiting hours to 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. on Saturdays and 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Sundays.

But when members of the College confronted the administration over their parietal rules, they received no concessions.

In October of 1950, the House Committee chairmen voted unanimously to extend the visiting hours until midnight on the nights of the Dartmouth and Yale games and until 10:30 p.m. on the Friday before the Yale game.

A group called the "Ad Hoc Student Committee to Liberalize Parietal Rules" circulated a petition to change the House sign-in rule so that women would be allowed in dorm rooms until 12 p.m. every weekend.

The committee argued that the graduate schools and other colleges with fraternities had more relaxed parietal rules than those of the Houses. The petition eventually grew to include more than 1,000 signatures, but the Committee on Houses voted against the change.

"The parietals were fairly strict, whereas now they're very lax," Fred Fortmiller '51 says. "Back in my day you could drink but you couldn't have sex-now you can have sex but you can't drink."

Instead of altering parietal rules, the Committee agreed to investigate the parietal committee's contention that good entertainment in Cambridge had become more expensive and difficult to find, forcing men to bring women back to their rooms as a recourse.

"The bars closed early," Mason says. "People hung out in automobiles more than they should have."