Harvard Yard is the quintessential symbol of the Harvard College experience. So when the women of the Class of 1976 came to Cambridge in the fall of 1972, and 200 of them moved their trunks into the Yard instead of the Quad, it was clear a new era had arrived.

Having first-year women in the Yard was perhaps the most obvious sign of the shifting place of women within the University, but the Class of 1976 arrived just as many of the changes fought for by earlier generations of women were coming into place.

They watched as imbalanced gender admissions quotas were eliminated, and women were finally on equal footing with men in the Harvard admissions office.

Women in the Class of 1976 were aware that they were enjoying these fundamental improvements in the status of women at Harvard. But old habits die hard. As visible and formalized discrimination fell away, it became clear that individual prejudices, built up over decades, would prove more difficult to overcome. And with a history of over 300 years of male domination, Harvard was not always willing to let go of the past.

“We thought we were seeing things change, helping things change, but we didn’t always realize how limited our own opportunities were,” Jane R. Borthwick ’76 says.

Ladies First

Women had moved into Harvard classrooms in 1943, but it wasn’t until 1967 that they were allowed in Lamont Library. By 1970 Harvard and Radcliffe had held their first joint Commencement ceremony, and in a 1971 “non-merger merger” agreement, Harvard absorbed responsibility for Radcliffe’s finances. In 1975, for the first time, admissions officers began admitting female students to both Harvard and Radcliffe. And in 1977, Harvard officially took full responsibility for women’s undergraduate education and student life.

The 1970s also marked the beginning of Harvard’s co-ed living experiment. In the winter and spring of 1970, 150 men and women transferred to and from Quad and River Houses in the hopes of balancing residential life for men and women.

However, it was not until the fall of 1972, when 200 out of the 450 women in the Class of 1976 moved into the Yard along with 1,000 of their male classmates, that the more visible trappings of sexual discrimination were falling away. The integration of the Yard was a key step to giving women access to the Harvard experience.

Integration created a balanced co-educational environment in the Quad, where the switch led to a one to one ratio of males to females. But women often only made up 30 percent or less of the student population in the River Houses. This imbalance was even more evident in the Yard in 1972.

“You could walk into the Union and not see another woman,” remembers Alison N. Mitchell ’76.

“We definitely had a sense of being pioneers, living in the Yard,” Borthwick says. “We had this sense that things were changing and we were part of that process.”

But women were still an evident minority in the Yard—and things would stay that way until 1976, when Harvard did away with its rigid policy of admitting more men than woman.

“It was most obvious socially,” Borthwick says. “All of my friends would sort of go from one boyfriend to another. I think it affected social life quite significantly.”

Some perceived the changes as threatening to the security and intimacy that women had known at Radcliffe for generations.