Ann M. Moore ’61 says she and her classmates did not talk about the pill.

“We didn’t discuss it beyond a very limited circle of really close friends,” she says, adding that she personally did not know of anyone who took the pill.

In fact, contraception only became legal in Massachusetts for all women in 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down the state law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women.

“The society held an idea that a nice girl would not get pregnant before marriage,” Moore says. “It was very shameful to get pregnant without getting married.”

Joe agrees that the pill did not affect his sexual life at Harvard.

“During my time at Harvard, I didn’t have any intercourse with a girl who was on the pill,” he says.

GENDER DISCREPANCY

In 1961, women were very much outnumbered on campus. The male to female ratio in the academic year 1960-1961 was 4 to 1, with 4,596 male undergraduates at Harvard and 1,154 females at Radcliffe College.

In every class, women were by far in the minority. The women lived only in the Radcliffe Quad, could not eat in Harvard Yard unless invited by a male student, and could not go into Lamont Library, according to Pamela J. Matz ’70-71, a research librarian at Widener Library.

Furthermore, the Radcliffe women practiced “gracious living,” which meant they could not wear shorts or jeans downstairs in the dormitory or out in the Quad after 5 p.m.. They were required to wear dresses or skirts to class except on the coldest days, when they were permitted to wear slacks, Moore says.

Moore, who attended a large, co-ed public high school in the Chicago suburbs, says she was not as happy socially in college as she was in high school.

“It did not have the same excitement or opportunities that co-ed public high schools or universities would have,” Moore says.

Harvard and Radcliffe were “quite independent” from each other socially, Croll says, adding that a lot of Harvard men preferred to date women from Wellesley or Simmons Colleges.

“There were not a lot of Harvard boys chasing Radcliffe girls,” he says, speculating that some of his peers may have been intimidated by the Radcliffe women.

Patricia D. Lemon ’61 says only a few of her friends at Radcliffe dated Harvard men, and their relationships tended to be largely sexual.