“I ran around on the beach for years,” Watkins says.

Before the end of World War II, her family moved again, this time to New York City, where just two weeks after arriving, Watkins was placed in boarding school. She says the transition, so early in her childhood, became a source of alienation. “I was completey in this American peer situation with almost no one to talk to in my language,” she says.

After attending a succession of boarding schools, Watkins arrived at her fourth and final school, New York City’s Hunter College High School, where she rose to the top of her class and eventually became the editor of the school’s magazine.

In matriculating to Radcliffe, Watkins found her new restrictive environment literally worlds apart from her unstructured, colorful upbringing.

Those challenges and freedom that became so innate during her first two decades contrasted much with the sedate, repressive restrictions Radcliffe expected from its women.

When Watkins attended Radcliffe in the early 1950s, she says Harvard was a school dominated by men and pervaded by veterans who had just returned from World War II.

The ladies of Radcliffe College were subject to a host of restrictions on this mostly male campus, including mandatory check-ins and lunches in the Quad, limitations on wearing pants and an absolute a ban on studying in Lamont library.

“We were in a minority of 1:4 and we were not allowed to do many things we would have liked to do, like try out for The Crimson,” writes Jean Berko Gleason ’53, Watkins’ first-year roommate, in an e-mail.

This Harvard was a place where women—who could attend, but could not teach—often had to take a back seat to their male classmates.

Watkins says she never liked the strict adherance to authority that Radcliffe required.

And Gleason says that Watkins rebelled.

“She...couldn’t put up with the foolish rules imposed on us, and had a number of scrapes and near-scrapes with Radcliffe, over such things as staying out too late, or failing to wear a hair net when waiting on table,” Gleason remembers. “I guess that ‘Question authority’ was in her mind long before the radical ’70s.”

But Watkins says it was the socially conservative atmosphere at Radcliffe that she found most anathema to her character.

There, students and professors were not openly gay and Watkins felt she had no choice but to conceal her lesbianism.

“It was just my nature. In college I fell in love with a woman,” Watkins says. “It was like a source of unbelievable alienation. Nobody knew except my partner.”