Radcliffe: Persevering in the ongoing process of women's education

We women at Harvard share much more than our anatomical and biological similarities. Unfortunately, but inescapably, we share the confusing and compelling urge to live out a supposed superiority to other women. We form a small percentage of each undergraduate class, which otherwise purports to be a carefully concocted cross-section of the young and talented. If Harvard so conscientiously represents other classes, or races, or what-nots regardless of their so-called "underprivileged" status, certainly it must be playing fair with us, too. Right?

Our conspicuousness and our conspicuous scarcity at Harvard, teach us the implicit lesson that we women do produce bright, charming "exceptional" females; but that our best and brightest are hatched in woefully smaller numbers than those of the male variety. And so we work at Harvard, forsaking our more equally distributed, humiliatingly less lauded sisters in the badlands remote from magical Cantabrigia. We get smarter and more self assured and "Cliffie" or every year, so that by the time we are ready to graduate, words like oppression and sexism, feminism and sisterhood sound a little overstated, or a little irrelevant, or just downright ridiculous.

The wasteful experiences of our foremothers, like their plans and frustrations, are brushed under the proverbial rug or efficiently vacuumed away and dumped in the garbage. What does it matter that your lover's eccentric old grandmother was 1952's Waitress of the Year in Kalamazoo, or that Mom never told Dad that her reason for turning down that teaching fellowship at Berkeley was fear of threatening his "male ego." After all, these are the days of affirmative action.

With some hard work and a cry of "every man for himself," we can jump, well-booted, right into the saddle and join the crazed stampede off into the sunset. Who needs the women's movement, those angry, difficult women's women, from whom most of us at Radcliffe have at one time or another felt removed by brains, or specialness, or male "peers," or ambition--or fear. Maybe we should be afraid of feminists. Their insistence on the distinctive and inalienable quality of women seems to be doing a rather fine job of opening doors at law schools, and med schools, even business schools; but this insistence also carries with it the troublesome but logical conclusion that there is a gender-related community existing and developing among women.

Frameworks, ideas and conventions arise from a community, and women haven't been one for an awfully long time. Bars, businesses, sports teams, structures for the development of male-bonding--we've heard it all again and again and haven't learned a thing from it. We've been paired off with men, one by one, barefoot and pregnant and isolated in our own separate living rooms. We've never even had our own ghetto, OK, so who wants to live in a ghetto, and moreover we've all got 18 forms of contraceptives and shoes and jobs. And we've still got no community, no solidarity and no real power. Historically, the only real social change has been the product of pressure exerted by a group of people who perceived their common oppression and created structures which testified to their solidarity. Revolutions aren't made in melting pots or in isolation.

And now the educated female individuals of the Radcliffe elite are being offered a choice to get a little bit of each in the form of a merger with our patriarchal pals, Harvard. By following the dangling carrot of equal admissions and equalized financial aid, we would change Harvard into a more accurate reflection of the population just outside its walls, but that change guarantees only that we would more clearly perceive how closely our situation resembles that of all women. Equal admissions for undergraduates does not in any way insure that male Harvard professors and executives will cease to dictate to female secretaries or to female students.

Nevertheless, a policy of equal admissions is our right and Harvard's responsibility. We simply cannot accept the assumption that the woman-created, woman-worked institutions of Radcliffe must or should be abandoned in exchange for the increase in women students. They will remain as important to us in the future as they have been in the past. Radcliffe's role is a function of the times. It was created originally to assert that women's education was valid--indeed, important. It must now be supported as an assertion of the importance of our experience as women. That our history is different from that of men is unquestionable; that the history and traditions of a people are significant parts of their changing self-definition and role is equally clear.

The most superficial examination of what Radcliffe is will yield examples of almost the only pro-women structures in the University, structures that would never have occurred to our proposed new bedfellows, the men who run Harvard University.

Radcliffe College, as it exists today, is financially responsible for several important functions. In supporting the Radcliffe Institute and maintaining the Schlesinger Library, it pays for the work of Radcliffe fellows. The Schlesinger Library contains a valuable collection of papers which contribute much to the recorded history of women. Our history is important. It is a thrilling and sometimes jolting experience to read expressions of our own needs and values in the largely unnoticed, and certainly unheeded words of women from other centuries.

The Radcliffe Institute, with its library and Fellows, is of established importance in the development of our sense of a women's culture. Our history is an affirmation of our birthright; our culture is the base from which we build. The work that the scholars and artists of the Radcliffe Institute are doing is and should continue to be supported and funded by women. Money from Radcliffe's endowment pays for women to study and develop our culture. As we support them, we grow ourselves.

Another way Radcliffe spends money is by helping women meet the expenses of a Harvard education. We who have received this education cannot afford to complain of the economic squeeze in determining our financial contribution to Radcliffe. Sons will continue to be educated throughout this "crisis." Unfortunately, cutting out a daughter's education here and there to ease a strained budget has been all too common in the past to allow us any complacency in giving, if we value the last four

Rebecca High is a senior living in Dunster House. years of our own lives and recognize the gross injustice of educating wealthy women first. The current ratio of male to female undergraduates, never mind of male to female professors, shows that those really committed to women's education and equality remain a minority.

At the Radcliffe Valentine's Day party last week, President Horner told us of the phone calls she has received recently from parents troubled by economic pressures. They tell her not only that they now cannot afford tuition payments but also that they refuse to let their daughters take Radcliffe loans to pay for college. It seems that they feel that these large loses will act as a kind of negative dowry for their otherwise marriageable daughters. This year Radcliffe was able to meet the financial needs of all its students, but a large amount of the aid was offered in loans. Contributions to the Radcliffe Fund can help to tip the balance of available aid away from loans toward direct gifts to women.

Radcliffe's money is also spent to improve women's athletic facilities and to support the Office of Women's Education. This office, established last year by our president, is concerned with evaluating and improving the education offered to women in the Radcliffe-Harvard community.

Clearly the issues here go deeper than sentimentality or "school spirit": Radcliffe's commitment is to all women. Our possibilities and those of Radcliffe are interdependent; the College provides an ever more important institutional framework for our increasing achievements and aspirations. Radcliffe, troubled though it may be, does not deserve the irony of disintegration during International Women's year. Perhaps Radcliffe's institutions need to change to become more effective in meeting the needs of the women of Radcliffe College. If this is so, Radcliffe needs more than our money. We are Radcliffe College now. The fact that we don't know what that means is reason enough for at least a pause before we place ourselves in the patriarchal hands of Harvard.

This week, during Senior Solicitation, we have an opportunity and an obligation to give money and thought to the work our college is and could be doing. Love each other well