News Shorts

Sixty women and four toddlers met last night at the general meeting of the Harvard Dames, an organization of graduate student's wives.

"The big thing that holds the Dames together is bridge. The other is baby-sitting," Georgina M. Scherzer, president of the nation's oldest student wives organization, said yesterday.

The Dames had a feminist discussion group for several years, but interest in women's issues has faded, Scherzer said.

The club is dominated by women who are "into the housewife and mother thing," she added.

The Harvard Dames was founded in 1894 by President Lowell because student wives "knew only their landladies," Scherzer said in her opening remarks last night.

Pink Punch

Members last night ate twelve kinds of cookies, drank pink punch from the club's engraved silver punch bowl and signed up for activities ranging from children's parties to "cosmopolitan" evenings of armchair world travel.

Scherzer said she planned to have more activities for couples this year, adding that she would like to see "more people of more backgrounds involved."

Scherzer said she does not foresee any fundamental changes in the Dames' activities. Efforts to change the name of the organization to something "less stuffy" and to include all graduate student spouses have been defeated in recent years, she said.

Scherzer said she felt that although Harvard Dames was "probably started to keep wives off their husbands' backs during exam time," the organization now fulfilled "a real need in having a group for people to get to know each other."

One man mistakenly poking his head in the door said, "Harvard Dames? That's pretty nice....That's real cute."