National rules were the driving force in creating equality among Harvard’s sports teams.

As a result of the 1971 non-merger merger, Harvard took responsibility for women’s athletics in 1973. Harvard was slow to give its female teams the same support it traditionally offered its male ones. And women’s athletics had a lot of catching up to do because under Radcliffe, they had never been given adequate or comparable resources—especially in terms of access to adequate facilities, equipment and funding.

“There’s no question that if you were involved in women’s athletics at the time you had to be really determined to do it, because there just wasn’t a lot of support,” says Borthwick, who was on the Radcliffe crew team and helped start the women’s track and field team. The women’s crew team would practice in secondhand boats and its coach was not paid.

“Radcliffe had no money and Harvard was preoccupied,” Borthwick says.

But Harvard had to start taking women’s athletics more seriously after Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 insisted on equal spending. These demands coincided with an increased competitiveness and seriousness in women’s college sports.

“Intercollegiate sports for women were at a very nascent stage,” says Lissa Muscatine ’76, who was captain of the tennis team and a member of the basketball team. “Still, there was a greater demand for a higher level of competition. Title IX had just been passed, women’s tennis was turning professional and there were more athlete role models for women.”

The director of the Department of Athletics during this period was Robert B. Watson ’37. Watson was at first reluctant to allow women to have access to better facilities or resources at the expense of the men’s teams. The Crimson reported in the spring of 1974 that Watson said he did not think female athletes were as serious or intense as male athletes.

“Some people were pretty serious about getting women equal access and some people just didn’t get it,” Muscatine says. “But at that time the inequities were so apparent and transparent that something had to be done.”

Given the fact that Harvard recruited athletes while Radcliffe did not, women were additionally disadvantaged by the argument that women’s athletics was not serious or developed enough to warrant equal access to athletic resources.

“Politically, it was very delicate,” Muscatine says. “There were still a lot of issues, even when I was a senior. But the good news is that the progress we had hoped for is obvious 25 years later.”

Women On Top

Women’s involvement in other extracurricular areas also made marked progress with the Class of 1976.

Historically, Harvard student organizations had been slow to accept women as members. The Crimson accepted women editors in the 1940s. Women have served on the board of the Advocate since the late 1950s and WHRB allowed women to join in 1960. The Harvard University Band had its first female members in 1969. And it took even longer for women to rise in the ranks of these groups.

The slowly increasing female population and the progress made by the women’s movement helped bring women to leadership positions in the mid 1970s. WHRB and The Crimson both had their first female presidents in 1977.

Wexler, who was a features editor at The Crimson, remembers members of The Crimson having a “predominantly male ethos that was, to some extent, inescapable.”