Parietals: "First, You Do Your Day's Work..."

It will be just like old times next Tuesday evening when the Masters of the seven Houses get together for their monthly meeting. For the first time in three years, the agenda will feature a student petition for extended hours to entertain ladies in the Houses. Once again, the sound of fists hitting table and of statements like "Let's keep this a man's college" and "By God, they're even bringing girls into Chapel now!" will echo through the smoke-filled air. The parietal rules fight will be on in full force.

The issue this time--whether or not to allow women in the Houses between 1 and 4 p.m. on weekdays-- probably will not interest the Masters any more than it did in 1952, when Lowell's Elliott Perkins confessed, "the whole subject makes me very tired." But Perkins and his colleagues cannot complain that they are the first Harvard administrators to face this problem. Parietal rules, if not as old as the College itself, date back at least to the time when Harvard students first took an interest in young women. (This latter date seems to have succeeded the College's founding by more than a century). Restrictions were a definite necessity by 1770, when, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, it was reported that "2 women of ill fame" had "spent the night in a certain college chamber."

Yet before 1930 and the start of the House Plan, parietal rules caused remarkably little trouble at the College. As a senior member of the Faculty recalls, "In those days nobody particularly wanted girls around anyway." Most undergraduates of the time lived not in College-owned dormitories, but in rooming houses scattered around the Square. These houses, though lacking official proctors, were run by immensely respectable old ladies, whose strict enforcement of propriety would make today's Masters seem irresponsible rakes by comparison. Parietal rules in rooming establishments and dormitories at that time were strict and simple: no lady could enter a student's room at any hour without a parent or proctor as chaperone.

Safety in Numbers

By 1931, however, times were changing. A Democrat was about to be elected President, several gigantic "Houses" were rising near the river thanks to a Yale man's largesse, and even the Faculty recognized that social regulations at the College could not remain frozen forever. The authorities easily agreed that the chaperone rule should go. But they had a hard time deciding how to replace it. For a while they toyed with the idea that not less than two women could visit in a student's room at one time--the "safety in numbers" philosophy--but this was eventually-dropped. Finally, after several student petitions and much debate it was decided that upperclassmen could entertain women in their rooms between the hours of 1 and 7 p.m. on all days of the week.

Despite the liberalized parietal rules, Harvard remained essentially an all-masculine place throughout the thirties. You were still a "fruitier" if you took a date to a football game instead of sitting with the boys in the cheering section. Radcliffe was still a much-maligned institution whose students were worth nothing except A's in courses taught by Harvard Faculty members. But during the last war, when expediency brought "joint education" and inflation brought soaring prices for outside entertainment, the dam of the anti-feminists broke. House residents now entertained women guests in considerable numbers, and in 1946 the Masters, disturbed by non-masculine sounds emanating from House rooms in the early afternoon, decided that they didn't like the pre-4 p.m. part of the new parietal regulations after all. As one of them felt then--and still feels now: "In the grown-up world, you do your day's work and then you entertain a lady."

Cautious Killjoys

The 1 to 7 p.m. rule had been working well for 15 years, however. The Masters were reluctant to step in themselves, knock off a few early afternoon hours for no reason at all, and thus seem like consumate killjoys. Therefore they decided to wait, knowing that before long students would inevitably appeal for extended parietal hours, thus giving them an opportunity to re-open the whole issue with a vengeance. And in the fall of 1950, sure enough, the seven House Committee chairmen unanimously asked the Masters for permission to entertain women guests until midnight on the Saturdays of the Yale and Dartmouth weekends. A petition furthered the appeal, by demanding midnight room permission on all Saturdays, while the CRIMSON pointed out that "anything that can be done in the rooms between 8 and 12 can be done before 8." Tension increased steadily as the crucial October meeting of the Committee on Houses approached, and a pre-battle atmosphere took hold of the College. When Winthrop Master Ronald M. Ferry, was asked before hand for his views on the issue, he played it cagey: "General MacArthur made the mistake of opening his mouth this summer, and I can assure you I don't intend to do the same."

As it turned out, however, the 12 o'clock forces never even reached the 38th Parallel, much less the Yalu. The Masters, much as they wanted to eliminate the 1 to 4 p.m. hours, couldn't bring themselves to grant midnight permissions in return, not even for just the Dartmouth and Yale Saturdays. They unanimously voted down the House Committee Chairmens' proposal, and agreed merely to study the whole question of "simple, inexpensive, decent entertainment"-- particularly decent.

The Masters were still "studying" the question in the fall of 1951, when suddenly an uncomfortably cogent argument drifted up from New Haven. Yale, it seemed, had extended its upperclass parietal hours to 11 p.m. on all Saturdays, and had found the new rule working "better than we expected." Reminded that the Connecticut university had been founded "in protest against the liberalism of Harvard," and encouraged by the reduced demands of undergraduates here for 11 p.m. instead of midnight permissions, the Masters at last saw their chance to eliminate the 1 to 4 p.m. parietal hours and to compensate by granting a reasonable extension on Saturday evenings. That fall they approved this give-and-take proposal and sent it off to the Faculty for confirmation.

The Faculty Administrative Board, however, had been aptly characterized by the CRIMSON as "a vestigal remain of an unenlightened nineteenth century conservatism." It stoutly refused permission.

When Delmar Leighton became Dean in 1952, however, the bookies predicted that his Administrative Board would go along with the Masters' desire for "liberalized" parietal rules. This is exactly what happened. The House Masters again piously told the Board what they thought parietal hours should be. This time the Board listened. On December 2, 1952, it proposed that the Saturday curfew be raised to 11 p.m., and that afternoon hours on every week day start at 4 instead of 1 p.m. Officially, the Masters had no idea how the afternoon change had come about, but privately, they could be seen to wink at each other.

Quick Calculating

Undergraduates at first were pretty confused about the proposals, but it didn't take them long to get out their slide rules and calculate that they were losing something like 15 hours of "room time" per week. The very next day, when the Faculty gave final approval to the new regulations as the first major parietal rules change since 1931, Student Council spokesmen deplored the cutback in afternoon hours. In Winthrop House, a poll showed 92 upperclassmen disapproving of the new hours as against 35 who were satisfied. It was Radcliffe, though, that objected most strenuously to the 4 p.m. starting time in the Houses. "There is no other place to sit quietly in the afternoon," complained one girl. "People used this opportunity to study together," said another. Even a Housemother got into the act--Mrs. Allan S. Locke of Briggs Hall confessing that she couldn't understand the Faculty's reason for eliminating the afternoon hours: "Before lunch, I can see why girls in a man's dormitory would be far from welcome; but in the afternoon, most people are up and around and clothed."

Besides stressing the need for "keeping this a man's college," the Masters said little at the time about the reasons for cutting out early afternoon hours. If they were not talking about parietal rules in public, however, they were planning secretly among themselves to invalidate the new 11 p.m. Saturday curfew and revert to the 8 o'clock rule on all fall football weekends--the very time when students most wanted late hours.

When the facts finally came out, as the 1953 season rolled around, undergraduates were shocked. On September 26 three Masters admitted that they "favored" cutting the Saturday curfew to 8 p.m. during the football season. By the next day, a newly-formed Student Parietal Rules Committee had collected 300 fervent signatures on a petition urging the Masters not to do this. On September 29, however, the Masters admitted that they had actually decided to do it early the preceding spring, but had not mentioned the decision to a soul. The secrecy was a complete oversight, claimed Master Perkins: "We were crossing our bridges when we came to them, although looking back on it, it might have been handier to say something about it at the time." Finally, on October 1, the Masters met, and turned down student appeals with a curt "You can always get somebody to sign a petition." Once again they decided--this time openly--to enforce an 8 p.m. Saturday deadline during the football season. They did make one concession, however, in exempting away game weekends from the new ruling. Yet students were hardly satisfied. A CRIMSON editorial spoke of "seven horse traders" who "by promising anything ... and never paying, reaped great profits from un-suspecting children and old women." The Masters may have laughed, but they certainly did not change their minds.

Behind all the entertaining verbiage there were--and still are--a number of solid arguments on either side of the curfew issue for home football Saturdays.

Masters contend that a student would be more likely to crack up his automobile while driving his date back to Wellesley after an evening of drinking in his room. Students counter by showing how seldom this happens after the 11 o'clock deadline on non-football weekends.

Revived Hopes

Persuasive as both arguments may seem, however, neither side has persuaded the other during the past two years. The Masters, once the petitions were dead and the present parietal rules established, were delighted to stick with the status quo. (The Houses now are idyllically masculine at 2 p.m. on weekdays, and House dances on home football weekends are inhumanly mobbed--at a fine profit for the House committees). Meanwhile, two classes of undergraduates have left the College since parietal rules were last an issue, and by the time today's juniors and seniors have graduated no student will ever think that the hours of 4 to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 1 to 8 p.m. on home football Saturdays are not sacrosanct. The Masters can hardly wait.

But this fall somebody threw a rock into the pool of parietal apathy. Thomas M. Lowes '56, realizing that his class is the last to remember "the good old days of 1 to 4 p.m. parietal hours," decided that he would try to get these hours back in the interest of "leaving something of value to undergraduates." Last month be circulated a petition urging the Faculty to reinstate these early afternoon hours. The appeal, which quickly gained the signatures of 1100 upperclassmen and the endorsement of the Student Council, is now before the Masters, who will discuss it Tuesday and then make a recommendation to the Administrative Board.

In the eyes of the Masters, however, the College is now in more danger than ever before of creeping feminism. The idea of ladies visiting in the Houses at 1 p.m., and thereby intruding on the rightful order of the day's activities "in the grown-up world", is still abhorrent to them. There is not the slightest chance, therefore, that either the Masters or the Administrative Board will approve the current plea for the 1 to 4 p.m. weekdays hours. In fact, the 1100-odd names backing the appeal may not even convince the Masters that the issue is worthy of serious consideration. This is, after all, just another in a long line of capricious student petitions. As Master Perkins remarked: "I might have signed it myself if I'd been in the dining room at the time.