When the Class of 1976 arrived in Cambridge, Matina S. Horner had just assumed the Radcliffe Presidency. Horner, who had developed a “fear of success” theory in the late 1960s (which postulated that women displayed this fear more than men because of the inevitable conflict between professional success and the traditional roles women were generally expected to play), told the Crimson in the fall of 1972, “I don’t like quotas. Period. But I don’t think we’re ready for one-to-one admissions.”

Horner argued that “defining what equal admissions means” was the key task, and that the admissions process should not necessarily ignore the gender of the applicant.

Some members of the administration were even more adamant in their objections to an equal access admissions policy.

“There were a lot of people who were very attached to the old ways, which had served Harvard for years,” says McGrath Lewis.

The Strauch Committee, formed by President Bok to study admissions policies, recommended a merged, non-quota admissions policy in the spring of 1973, and it was formally adopted for the Class of 1980. As the Class of 1976 prepared to graduate, the admissions office proudly announced that the ratio of the matriculating students in the Class of 1980 was the lowest ever, 1.84 to 1.

Head of the Class

As the ratio issue was slowly being addressed, life in the classroom for the women of the Class of 1976 reflected both the progress that was being made and the significant, if subtle obstacles still facing women.

“Sexism wasn’t as blatant as it had been in the days that women weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom in Lamont,” says Natalie Wexler ’76, a former Crimson executive. “But I was often the only woman in section. My Ec 10 section leader would start section by talking about football scores with all the guys. I never felt like I was really a part of the conversation, that I was really getting the whole section. I could not bring myself to open my mouth.”

“It could be that I wasn’t picking up on [the discrimination],” admits Wexler. “By the time we got to Harvard, if you had that attitude about women you had to hide it. It was no longer okay to display it.”

A lack of female faculty members was also an issue. In 1977 only three percent of tenured faculty members were female, and many students went through their entire college careers without taking a class from a female faculty member.

“There were reasons that there were so few female professors,” Borthwick says. “But we didn’t necessarily pick up on those reasons while we were there.”

However, institutional factors like the imbalanced male to female ratio and lack of female professors did not necessarily prevent women in the Class of 1976 from having academic aspirations. “I graduated from Harvard wanting to pursue a Ph.D. in history,” Wexler says.

The Class of 1976 also witnessed the opening of some academic prizes to women for the first time. Harvard endorsed three female candidates for the Rhodes Scholarship in 1973, three years before women applicants were officially allowed to compete for it. Other scholarships that had previously been restricted to male students were gradually opening up to women as well.

Wexler was the first woman to win the Knox fellowship, an award that paid for postgraduate study in England. “My senior tutor told me they were trying to open it up to women and that I should apply,” she says.

On The Ball