In the late 1960s, Harvard was marked by the tumultuous political activity taking place across the country. Male students at Harvard were feigning high blood pressure to flunk their physicals and prevent being drafted into the Vietnam War, while final exams were canceled due to anti-war protests. In 1968, Coretta Scott King took the stage at the Harvard Commencement address, filling in for her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated two months prior.
Amid this backdrop, a lesser known, but equally monumental event was happening at Harvard: women were beginning to have equal access to education. In 1968, the women of Radcliffe were moving into the formerly all-male Harvard Yard for the first time in school history.
One hundred and fifty-three years ago, the world “knew next to nothing about the mental capabilities of the female sex,” or so Harvard President Charles Eliot asserted in his 1869 inaugural address to the College. In spite of Eliot’s resistance to grant women equal educational opportunity, reformers founded the Harvard Annex, a school through which women could “receive instruction from Harvard faculty,” without actually being a part of the College. In 1894, the Annex chartered Radcliffe, and graduates received diplomas that read “equivalent in all respects to the degrees given to the graduates of Harvard College,” signed by none other than Eliot himself, according to archives of Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
However, these words on paper did little to further Harvard women’s education. In 1923, Le Baron Russell Briggs left office as the second president of Radcliffe, and in his last presidential report wrote: “I believe… Radcliffe will become a women’s college in Harvard, but that neither institution is as yet prepared for such a union.” Aligned with his prophecy, the merger did not begin until 1943, when Harvard’s classrooms opened to women for the first time, according to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute website.
In 1962, women of Radcliffe received Harvard degrees, while remaining as two separate institutions. But only 50 years ago did Harvard and Radcliffe completely unify as one.
Dr. Elisabeth Cohen ’71, an Ophthalmologist and Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, had the rare experience of applying to Radcliffe but graduating from Harvard. She entered Radcliffe as a freshman in 1967, and the transition into co-ed housing began the following year, with some upperclasswomen infiltrating River Houses and upperclassmen switching to the Quad. Housing was granted on a lottery system, and Cohen had the misfortune of remaining in the Quadrangle, where all Radcliffe women had historically lived. The Quad dorms were much less desired than Harvard housing, but were renovated during the merge, presumably for the benefit of the newly integrated male students.
Cohen recounted that “Everybody liked the idea of co-ed dorms,” and that she and her peers generally enjoyed the move.
Without a shuttle system, the women of the Quad made the frequent bike or walk to the Yard, sometimes even hitching a ride. After the merge, when men moved to the Quad for the first time, Harvard put in place a shuttle system. “The girls were tough. It was not an issue when only the girls and boys were walking back and forth, but all of the sudden, when the boys were there, it wasn’t good enough,” she said.
While the integration of Radcliffe women into Harvard was certainly a step in the right direction, it did not mark the end of Harvard women’s struggle for academic equality. In 1937, the year Cohen’s mother graduated from Radcliffe, “Each lecture was given twice a day, once to the girls and once to the boys.” By the time Cohen came to Harvard, classes were not physically segregated, but her desire to be a doctor was considered outlandish as a female. When she continued to Harvard Medical School, her graduating class was extremely male-dominated.
Her career aspirations were met with similar hesitations outside the classroom. “When I wanted to get a job as a freshman, they wanted to know how many words a minute I could type, and I said I didn’t want that kind of job,” she said. These experiences shaped Cohen’s interest in mentoring young women today.
Dr. Robin Freedberg ’75, Cardiologist and Associate Professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, although graduating only four years later than Cohen, felt that there was more academic opportunity for women at Harvard. “There certainly were some female role models,” she said, such as her female thesis advisor in the History of Science Department.
Freedberg recalled choosing to enroll as an undergraduate at Harvard over Princeton and Yale due to its active efforts to merge with an entire female institution. Meanwhile, Princeton and Yale accepted only a small number of females into their previously all-male classes, leading to overwhelmingly male-dominated classes. “For me, I thought that there was a better history of women being integrated into Harvard,” Freeberg said.
However, Harvard and Radcliffe alumni expressed hesitancy for this institutional change. “Male faculty and administrators had feared a legal merger would eventually require a one-to-one male-to-female ratio,” Freedberg wrote in a 1973 article for The Harvard Crimson, where she was a managing editor. As she proclaimed, these concerns meant that the “Merger Yielded to Non-Merger Merger” would eventually require “equal admission of men and women, the logical next step for an institution with a decaying male tradition.”
Freedberg also wrote about the blurred lines between Radcliffe and Harvard, as the women of Harvard technically still applied to enroll as students at Radcliffe. “Apparently our affiliation with Radcliffe ends with the letter of admission we received when we were still in high school,” she said. “And if the dividing line between our associations with the two schools was back in high school, maybe the issue of merger isn’t an issue at all.”
Graduating a year later than Freedberg, Jill Abramson ’76 was in a class of around 400 women, the last to be admitted through Radcliffe. he first woman to serve as Executive Editor of the New York Times and current lecturer at Harvard Shares that although upperclassmen housing was already integrated, she was one of the first females to live in Harvard Yard as a freshman.
While the dorms were co-ed as a whole, there were still separate entryways for men and women. She lived in the female entryway of Grays and was able to have both male and female visitors. Co-ed schooling didn’t seem out of the ordinary for Abramson. “I had gone to a co-ed high school in New York, so I was used to it. I had gone to school with boys since Kindergarten so it didn’t seem strange to me,” she said. However, she noted how it might have been strange for some of the men—especially those who stemmed from single-gendered prep schools.
With the country torn between a variety of causes and historic events, Abramson didn’t recall feeling that her move into Harvard Yard was a big deal: “It wasn’t that paid attention to. There was a presidential election going on, McGovern vs. Nixon, as well as a lot of opposition to the Vietnam War.” As a result, Abramson felt rather accepted as a student of Harvard College. “Radcliffe really didn’t play any part in my student life in my four years at Harvard,” she reflected.
She did not notice gendered biases in the classroom, and even reported having female role models and professors. Unlike Cohen, Abramson felt supported in her career choices by her peers and professors. “It seemed like all the women I knew wanted to do something professionally, whether it was academics, law, or medicine.”
In a counter-point piece to “Harvard Men,” titled, “…And Radcliffe Women,” which Abramson wrote for The Harvard Independent, she noted: “I remember little open hostility expressed about that first year of having women living in Harvard Yard. No one ever said to me, ‘You don’t belong here,’ and I don’t recall suspecting that many men even thought that.”
When contrasted with the experiences of the women who came before her, Abramson’s experience at the College speaks to the ability of Harvard women to overcome adversity and find a place for themselves on campus.
As Coretta Scott King said when she addressed the Harvard Class of 1968, “we have an inherent moral responsibility to become participants in the greatest creative venture in the history of our world: that of remaking, reshaping, yes, restructuring our whole world order.” Freedberg, Cohen, Abramson, and all female students to follow have fulfilled this obligation as women of Harvard.