UPDATED: June 3, 2013, at 7:59 a.m.

“It will be a cold day in Bangladesh before [the opening of the clubs to women] happens voluntarily,” Delphic Club member Michael A. Zubrensky ’88 told The Crimson in an article from February 1988.

Zubrensky was responding to the public debate started by Lisa J. Bucher ’88, then Lisa J. Schkolnick, who was determined to challenge the status quo. Citing Chapter 272, Section 98 of Massachusetts General Law, which describes discrimination by sex as a punishable offense, Bucher had filed a complaint to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination the previous December against the Fly Club. In Bucher’s perspective, the male-only admission policies of the final clubs at Harvard College were in direct violation of this code.

Bucher’s complaint sparked the creation of Stop Withholding Access Today, a student group that included members of the campus magazine Perspective and aimed to end male-only admission practices at the final clubs. “SWAT the Fly,” read the headline of one of Bucher’s articles describing her case.

The controversial lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful; MCAD determined that the Fly Club was a private organization and therefore not under the body’s jurisdiction. The case, however, brought issues of gender discrimination and other social issues on Harvard’s campus to the forefront of conversation and reflected a growing frustration with a social scene that revolved around practices of exclusion.

LADIES NEED NOT APPLY

For Bucher and others on campus, Harvard’s final clubs represented centers of discrimination on campus, even as they had formally severed their ties with the University in 1984.

Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz advised Bucher in filing her case, hoping that it would bring subtle sexism on campus to the surface. “Harvard has had a very nix policy towards discrimination against women,” Dershowitz said. “I think there was passive and subtle discrimination against women in many areas in 1988.”

Dershowitz remembered that Harvard clubs had remained discriminatory toward women many years after women were admitted to the University and as the number of women faculty had grown.

“Harvard University did not play a noble role,” Dershowitz said. “It somewhat encouraged the anti-woman policy. It remained an old boys’ club for many years after it admitted women.”

Many female students felt that final clubs were still integral centers of student social life on campus.

Despite their many objections to these club policies, students said that without a female counterpart of final clubs, women were forced to turn to a social scene dominated by men.

“If you were a woman at Harvard, you had very little opportunity for a social life that didn’t involve somehow pandering to the boys in your class,” said Deborah Copaken Kogan ’88.

“Everyone knows that the social life at Harvard is lame,” Bucher said. “We just knew that having these clubs that were important to campus life discriminating against women had to be changed.”

Among the alleged discriminatory practices women remembered was being led into the clubs through side doors—only male members were allowed to enter through main entrances.