The class of 2005 will leave Cambridge with women’s issues catapulted to the forefront of campus and national awareness, following University President Lawrence H. Summers’ controversial remarks about women in science this past January.

But it was when the Class of 1980 attended Harvard and then-sister college Radcliffe that women’s issues came into the higher education spotlight.

This year’s freshmen—the Class of 2008—boasts admitting and enrolling more women than men for the first time in Harvard’s history.

This is all the more striking as only a generation earlier, students were witnessing the pioneering steps of integrating women into a campus dominated by men.

Even before they made Cambridge their new home, the students of the class of 1980 were the first group to be admitted by a joint Harvard-Radcliffe Admissions committee.

And in between grabbing meals in the Freshman Union and slaving over essays for Expository Writing, the class of 1980 finished up their first year just as Harvard and Radcliffe reached a new agreement in 1977. The collaboration granted the former primary control over the education of all undergraduate women­—giving Radcliffe students the same privileges, responsibilities, and rights as their Harvard counterparts.

As the class marched through their four years at Harvard, women were elected—for the first time ever—to lead influential undergraduate organizations, including the Harvard-Radcliffe Democratic Club, the Harvard Republican Club, and the Harvard Political Review.

FINDING A PLACE FOR WOMEN

As Radcliffe women became increasingly integrated into the academic and social life of Harvard, students and administrators faced a new struggle—that of defining a new role for women on a modernizing campus—a battle that still plagues Harvard 25 years later.

Then-President of Radcliffe Matina S. Horner complained and protested against the diminishment of services for women that accompanied the declining role of Radcliffe.

But then-Dean of Harvard College John B. Fox, Jr. concluded in his annual report that women no longer faced any obstacles standing in the way of an equal education—implying that Radcliffe as an independent institution no longer served a purpose.

But many women of the time did not see the situation quite the same way.

Susanna Rodell ’80, an undergraduate who balanced being a student and a mother while at Harvard, wrote that it was difficult for individual women to find a niche at Harvard because as the men’s college took on the responsibility for educating women, it was slower to accept the task of serving the unique needs of women.

“The confusion surrounding Radcliffe’s complicated and shifting position with Harvard have obscured many of the real issues,” Rodell wrote in a January 1979 article for The Crimson, “and made it extremely difficult for Radcliffe to function as an effective focus for a community of undergraduate women.”

For the women who were part of the first class admitted by a joint Harvard-Radcliffe committee, “Radcliffe didn’t have a real day-to-day presence for us,” says Marcia J. Hamelin ’80.