Since making sure well-known senior faculty join junior scholars is a major part of the Institute’s revamped program, many women who held fellowships in the program’s earlier days have returned.

Kessler-Harris, a history professor at Columbia University affiliated with its Institute for Research on Women and Gender, remembers her first time as a fellow in the 1970s.

Then, the program was known as the Bunting Fellowship and provided a nurturing refuge for young female scholars.

“The Bunting was a very nice, comfortable place to be,” she says. “The new Radcliffe Institute is probably more intellectually challenging and much more closely connected with Harvard.”

Currently, she says, gender is “much more peripheral than it used to be.” And though Kessler-Harris says men should be a part of the new Radcliffe, she says those men who do become fellows should be studying gender.

“There’s been no thread of gender running through people’s work,” she adds. “There was a time when if there was not that thread, at least everybody was female.”

Some maintain the program should exclude men altogether.

Florence Ladd, who was a fellow for two years in the early 1970s and came back to direct the program from 1989 to 1997, says she has happily watched it grow and become more integrated with the University at large.

The inclusion of men, she says, is her “one regret.”

As a result of combining with Harvard, the Institute was forced to open its doors to men in compliance with federal gender-equity laws.

As top administrators from Harvard and Radcliffe hashed out the tenuous merger agreement behind closed doors, the gender restrictions of the Bunting Fellowships became a stumbling block. Harvard administrators worried that the single-sex tradition could expose the Institute to lawsuits under federal gender-equity laws, while Radcliffe administrators thought the addition of men to the mix might disrupt the Bunting’s sense of community.

The issue was on the verge of stalling negotiations until Radcliffe gave in.

Ladd says a compromise could have kept the fellowships intact as a program for female scholars.

“In the ways that women’s colleges are protected and are allowed to remain single sex, I felt that single-sex status could have been accorded to the Institute with some legal intelligence,” she says. “I suppose it was just easier to comply with regulations than to be brave and challenge them.”

Judith Plaskow, a religion professor at Manhattan College who came to Radcliffe in 1986 and returned for a second stint last year, says many of the 2001-02 fellows were alarmed when they learned that their list of successors included 11 men.