Cliffe Dwellers View Co-ed Policy

An overwhelming number of Harvard men flock to the dorms on Shepard Street each night. This is proof that too much is said about Harvard's supposedly unpleasant attitude towards Radcliffe. What is of more importance and less discussed is the girls' apparently unhealthy attitude about the men.

A mass inferiority complex has developed amongst a large portion of the Radcliffe student body. Only occasionally does a girl venture to raise a timid hand and make a timid statement in a section meeting. Sullenly, she begins to accept her supposed inability to think, but aptitude for studying, as a truism. She gets frightened by women-hating professors and women-scorning students.

Even in extra-curricular activities she feels like a robot. She begins to brood over remarks such as this one overheard in St. Clair's and made by a Harvard man to a Radcliffe girl: "You be quiet; you're just here to look pretty." This, of course, was followed by a declaration of the ugliness of Radcliffe women.

We have, then intelligent girls, formerly convinced of their intelligence, who gradually have come to feel stupid and unwanted, not so much because of the Harvard man's disdain, but because of their own lack of initiative.

Dangerous Attitude

An equally dangerous attitude is that of the Radcliffe girl with one of those things every psychiatrist dreams of--a superiority complex to cover up a you-know-what. She stubbornly takes five economics courses in one term to show they're not really "men's courses." Yes, she gets four A's and a B plus. She also becomes head of one committee or another and immediately sets out to rival and defeat the corresponding Harvard committee. She becomes terribly arty, terribly intellectual, terribly unconventional; but is neither as impressive nor as shocking as she would like. In her falseness, she deserves being categorized as a "typical psuedo-intellectual Radcliffe girl."

Last and least found, is the Radcliffe girl who is aware of the fact that she is a student and that each Harvard man is a student. She knows that she came to Radcliffe because of Harvard but that she in no way differs from any other undergraduate. The only way she finds herself differing from and dependent upon the male species at Harvard is in a dim resignation to the fact that if she marries it will probably be to a Harvard man. Her attitude, alone of the three, is not unhealthy.