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.

“There was a real difference of opinion among women,” Mitchell says. “Some in the Quad felt that those of us in the Yard were selling out and giving in, and we felt that we were breaking down barriers.”

Borthwick says, “I chose to live in the Yard more out of curiosity than anything else. It wasn’t exactly an issue of loyalty to or disinterest in Radcliffe.”

The women who chose to spend freshman year in the Quad were also choosing a more balanced male to female ratio, something that many men and women perceived as necessary for more healthy and normal social relations.

“I remember choosing to live in the Quad freshman year because I knew there would be more women there; we wouldn’t be so spread out,” Joanna Blum Jerison ’76 says.

While it may have taken decades for Harvard to agree to allow women to take up residence in the Yard, the new living situation was not such an outrageous idea for many women who lived there.

“For people on the outside it was a big deal. For people living in the Yard, it was not a big deal,” says Sheila Quinn Cox ’76. “I grew up with two brothers.”

Having women in the Yard was not necessarily momentous for men either. “It was kind of a non-event,” says Mark R. Depman ’76, who lived in Thayer. “We arrived at Harvard and assumed that it was the norm. Our entryway was all male anyway, but there was a very collegial atmosphere with the women who were around.”

Outnumbered

In 1971 Harvard had a rigid admissions policy that admitted four male students for every one female student. Former President Derek C. Bok mandated that the ratio for the Class of 1976 be changed to 2.5 to one. The debate over the admissions policy took place and was resolved during the Class of 1976’s time on campus. Administrators finally abolished the gender quotas for the class of 1980.

Bok’s move for the Class of 1976 prompted a closer examination of the admissions policy.

“When President Bok changed the ratio, he knew that the question of whether we were getting the strongest candidates possible under the current admissions system had to be addressed,” Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’71-73 says.

Bok appointed a committee, chaired by Leverett Professor of Physics Karl Strauch, to look into the admissions policy. Opponents of an equal access admissions policy argued that Harvard alumni would not stand to see women admitted at the expense of men, and that donations to the College could drop significantly if women were admitted on an equal access basis.

Dean of Freshmen F. Skiddy von Stade ’38 landed in hot water when a letter he wrote to the director of admissions at Radcliffe opposing any change in the four to one ratio was obtained and published by The Crimson. Von Stade wrote that he “thought that the world in the foreseeable future was going to be primarily run by men.” For this reason, he argued it would be impractical to try to increase the number of women, whom he saw as less likely to rise to leadership positions.

“I don’t think most of [the women] want a childless marriage,” he wrote.

The push for equal admissions had a great deal of support from undergraduates, male and female alike. In the 1972 Commencement ceremonies, 70 percent of the graduates attended with red armbands over their black robes to protest the quota system of admissions.

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

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.”

“People at The Crimson bent over backwards not to be sexist,” she says. “But it was just that the president had always been male and that was just the way it was. Things tend to perpetuate themselves. Up to a certain point, women didn’t even think of putting themselves up for leadership positions. But I think there was a recognition from everyone that it was just time for this kind of thing to happen.”

Newer student organizations were often more hospitable to women because they lacked institutional traditions that many women found intimidating. The Harvard Independent, which was founded in 1969, made Mitchell its first female president. She says she found the atmosphere at the paper “very welcoming.”

“The women’s movement was really taking off when we got to college, and I was the same way,” she says. “I wanted those opportunities. I wanted to break those boundaries.”

On The Verge

Women’s successes in the 1970s due to institutional changes often coincided with confusion over their place in the University—and signified a real disconnect with Radcliffe.

Looking back on women’s first appearance in the Yard, the 1973 yearbook predicted, “[These women’s] immediate frame of reference was Harvard, and for many, Radcliffe will only be a name to scrawl on a form during their four years here.”

Borthwick remembers, “I had certainly applied to Radcliffe, and I thought there would be more of a Radcliffe presence.”

Women in the Class of 1976 were not only uncertain of the role of Radcliffe, but they were also uncertain of themselves and where they wanted to fit in.

“I think the whole debate over Radcliffe was emblematic of the tension that existed over how to define the women’s movement,” Muscatine said. “It was very difficult to define what was the best path for women. We were sort of the tipping point: we said that we went to Harvard, not Radcliffe, we lived in the Yard and by the River, not just in the Quad.”

Perhaps the one thing that was certain for the Class of 1976 was that they had seen Harvard fundamentally change its attitude toward women. The Harvard they left behind could no longer remain an old boys’ club.

—Staff writer P. Patty Li can be reached at ppli@fas.harvard.edu.