Painting Over History

FOR as long as I could remember, the slogans on the wall of the women's room were a source of escape, a silent echo of the ups and downs faced by women in a male-dominated newspaper.

Sometimes I looked to Jane Austen's strangely comforting reminder that "We do not love a place the less for having suffered in it." Or the angrier, more assertive "Crush the Penarchy."

Often I needed the reassurance of one anonymous woman writer who counseled her fellow Crimson editors. In response to a plaintive question--"Help me restore my faith in human-kind"--she had written, "First you have to restore faith in yourself."

But one morning, when the edges of day and night had blurred along with my faded memories of sleep, the graffiti in the bathroom disappeared. It was painted over. Gone in the three-hour period of a nap on the couch.

My feelings of betrayal were matched only by the sense of loss that pervaded the building. It has happened yet again, we thought to ourselves, women's history erased. Gone another symbol of our place at The Crimson, of our place at Harvard.

THE looks on women's faces were angry--a frenetic, almost panicked kind of angry. No matter where they fell on the political spectrum, no matter what positions they took in the various internal disputes which tend to divide a newspaper, each woman wore that look.

We had discovered a community in our own anger. One that we had not known existed.

We resolved to do nothing less than recreate our history--or "herstory" as some of us called it. And we would do it all at once, immediately. The bathroom wall could not languish graffiti-less; its statements were the connections that we had with each other, the definition of our place here. The hard-fought place that was the source of so much alternating pride and insecurity on those walls.

And so we took our pens and our markers and marched from the newsroom into the bathroom. In the newsroom, caricatures of male faces lined the walls--the past presidents of The Crimson, only three of whom have been women over a 116-year history. In the women's room, we could all be rebels against that record, even if we took our rhetoric no further than the door.

But it was insecurity, the symbolism of the whole thing, which seemed to drive us. As one woman wrote, "Is our position here so tenuous that we--and what we have done--can be white-washed away in one morning's work?"

Such erasure is easily accomplished at Harvard, where 350-plus years of men's history competes with little more than 100 of women's.

After all, Radcliffe had its start as the "Harvard Annex," and its ostensible purpose was to provide access for women to a Harvard education. The history of women at the University, then, was always but a subset of the real story; women were simply an addendum to the course catalogue, an afterthought.

Just as a few strokes of the paintbrush could effectively silence a generation of women reporters, Harvard has its own mechanisms for deciding where women belong and what they can do.

History is a popular discipline among undergraduates today; it regularly places in the top one or two most popular concentrations and draws many graduate students, as well. Women's history, on the other hand, has been a perennial gaping hole in the Harvard curriculum--despite, or perhaps because of, the role history plays in determining the relative status of various groups.

For the past two years, American women's history has gone completely untaught at Harvard, as the History Department simply neglected--or refused?--to fill a vacancy created when they did not promote Catherine Clinton to the rank of associate professor.

Finally this year a new junior professor has been hired to teach the muchneeded women's history courses. But the message sent by the two-year hiatus couldn't be clearer: simply put, it isn't a priority here.

"ANONYMOUS was a woman," read one of the original slogans on the bathroom wall. After four years of a Harvard education, it would be easy to conclude such a thing; after four years as a reporter at The Harvard Crimson, it is also quite simple.

Creating a community based on women's history is not always possible at an institution--at any institution--which glosses over the contributions of women. For that reason, among others, women consistently find that they have a harder time making a place for themselves here, whether at student publications or in sections or as student leaders.

But still, hope cannot be completely consigned to the gradual process of building a history of women's accomplishments at Harvard. Rather, as women name themselves, give voice to their contributions, such a community can be made to flourish.

Tonight when I check the bathroom wall, some four months after its whitewashing, there is a new slogan written there. "Let's not let anonymous be a woman anymore," it says.

Susan B. Glasser '90 will write a column on women's issues this semester.