The Harvard Man and the 'Cliffie'

In 1950, Anne G. Davies '50 remembers, men rarely came to the Radcliffe Quad. When they did, they were usually fathers who stayed on the first floor--and if one dared to venture upstairs, the front desk would issue an alarm.

"Man on second! Man on third!" Davies recalls them yelling.

"This foreign being was on the floor," she says wryly.

The women might have had the upper levels of the Radcliffe dorms to themselves, but men had a firm footing on the higher steps of Harvard academics. Despite its status as one of the first classes to experience co-education, the Radcliffe Class of 1950 was far from equal with their male Harvard counterparts.

While Radcliffe women trekked to the Yard for classes for the first time (instead of having separate lectures,) they were often treated poorly in ways they themselves did not see.

The separation of the sexes transcended the social sphere, going beyond the pristine Radcliffe dorms into the newly coeducational classrooms, where exams and sections were segregated by sex and professors factored gender into grades.

But a different generation of Radcliffe women, largely unaware of what could and should have been theirs, did not fight the status quo--settling, instead, for what seemed to them to be an adequate arrangement: a Harvard education, in Harvard classrooms, alongside Harvard men.

A Community of Women

When the Class of 1950 entered as first-years, Harvard was making room for the men returning from the war. Women who lived locally were asked to commute.

The commuters formed their own tight-knit community, centering on Agassiz House in Radcliffe Yard. The family of Jane Opel '50 took in three boarders--women from the waiting list that would not have been able to attend otherwise.

And women surmounted obstacles more than housing shortages to obtain a Radcliffe education--sometimes unconscious that they were receiving separate treatment.

Even in the supposedly objective world of grading, an A was not necessarily an A for a woman taking classes in Harvard Yard between 1946 and 1950.

Davies recalls that one of her friends received a B in chemistry after getting As on quizzes and laboratory work in a piece commemorating her class (see page seven).

"When she confronted the professor, he replied that the class was graded on a sliding scale, he could give just so many As and those had to go to boys because they need them to get into medical school," Davies writes. "Even more dismaying, she accepted the explanation without argument."

The incident was "a downer" for the young woman in question, Davies remembers.

"She had hoped actually to have a career in medicine," Davies says.

Her friend rapidly gave up her career hopes. Davies says she suspects the incident was not isolated. Generally, she says, women were treated "somewhat dismissively."

Toni Shayes '50 says she also was discouraged from pursuing a career in medicine.

"The only place where I felt real discrimination was in a pre-med program," she says. "There they couldn't have been more discouraging. They told me all the places in med school were going to be reserved for veterans and I should just forget about it."

However, Davies says unequal treatment did not lead to a Radcliffe outcry because it seemed hardly to deviate from the norm.

"We didn't know enough. We didn't realize that we had the power to protest," Davies says. "We were just very happy to be there.... We had a sense of security and protected-ness."

Radcliffe and Marriage

Barbara W. Snelling '50--a former lieutenant governor of Vermont--did not have the conventional Radcliffe experience. A junior transfer from Smith, she arrived in Cambridge only shortly before her first child.

She lived off-campus with her husband, recently returned from the war.

"Transferring was the biggest challenge because Radcliffe was not very encouraging to married students at that point," she says. "They were really quite discouraging."

Unlike some of her classmates, she had more Harvard friends than Radcliffe friends. The men whom she met through her husband were "a trifle snobbish, but I also think liking the coeducation overall."

Coming from Smith, she did not find that coeducation made a significant difference in classroom dynamics, except in some large classes, "where women were less likely to speak."

Snelling was also subject to a stricter standard of grading than her unwed classmates.

"They thought I wouldn't do well married and with a child," she says.

She was told that if her marks at Radcliffe did not equal her marks at Smith, she would be dropped an additional grade. For example, if she got an A in freshman English at Smith, she had to get an A in senior English at Radcliffe. If she got a B, the grade would be bumped down to C. If she did as well at Radcliffe as she had done at Smith, then her grades would be moved back up prior to graduation.

"I said I didn't think I was going to have any problem," she says.

She and her husband had to meet in the Yard between classes to exchange the baby stroller.

"We had to arrange our courses around being able to do that, but that worked out pretty well," she says.

In the end, she equaled her grades at Smith and was eligible for Phi Beta Kappa.

But her path was not without its bumps. One faculty member who taught child psychology "seemed to think either I was obnoxious or I knew too much about it from direct experience."

"I received the lowest grade that I received in anything," she says. "Comments on papers gave me the clue that the independence of my thinking was not accepted."

Radcliffe women were plagued with the same old stereotypes, according to one 1950 Harvard graduate.

"The Radcliffe women had a reputation for being homely and not washing their hair and for taking notes to excess and doing better than a lot of the Harvard chaps on the exams," says Alex Hoagland '50, a Crimson editor, who adds that he knew many attractive 'Cliffies.

They were perceived as academically 'threatening,'" he remembers.

"One also had a serious respect for the Radcliffe contingent," he says.

Let's Get Together

While memories of distant classes may have faded, the strange social intersections between Harvard Yard and Radcliffe Yard created a indelible mark on the classes' collective memory.

One is the first-year dance, something virtually every 1950 graduate remembers. Radcliffe mixers, called "Jolly-Ups," drew Harvard first-years down Garden Street to meet their feminine counterparts.

"The dances were an absolute disaster," Davies says. "Like any get-acquainted dance, everyone was slightly ashamed to be there. They were very...white bread, soft drinks and lousy cookies. No upperclassman would ever be seen at a Jolly-Up."

Opel remembers the "canned music."

"It was awkward at the very beginning until someone broke the ice and asked someone to dance," she says.

Socializing was not easy for the women at Radcliffe. They had to sign in and out of the dorms. The men had no such restrictions.

"We didn't really think much about [signing in]," Davies says.

"We didn't have the same expectations then that young women do today. I wasn't one of the ones who questioned," Opel says, adding that she feels she should have spoken up. "We were much too naive and accepting of the status quo."

Survey Says

The Harvard Yearbook editors for the Class of 1950 edition described it as a "stroke of genius."

For the 1950 yearbook, they decided to administer their annual survey not only to Harvard students, but also to Radcliffe students--with one catch. The 'Cliffies were to answer the questions as they thought the average Harvard man would. The answers showed that the women were not the only misunderstood students in the Yard.

"Their answers, we reasoned, should reflect two things: first, Radcliffe's particularly warped impression of this vital modern creature, and second, the extent to which the information that the Harvard man passed along at Radcliffe corresponded with that he passed to us," the editors wrote.

The language of the yearbook also reflects the sentiment of the times. The 'Cliffies are referred to as "girls" (one was also referred to as "this young thing") while their counterparts were ubiquitously referred to as Harvard men.

The "girls" were considerably off the mark in assessing their male counterparts, the editors noted with some satisfaction.

"Radcliffe's cheerful estimate of the money we spend each week compliments our capacity to impress on a shoestring," they wrote. The 'Cliffies ball-parked the budget at $21. In fact, it was half that.

Among other misconceptions, Radcliffe thought Harvard was full of inebriated fellows. The editors waxed indignant on this point.

"In the matter of drinking, too, we are unjustly made out to be nourishing ourselves from the bottle," they wrote.

"The Radcliffe maiden has in general two sources of information: her own imagination, and her date's. Neither one of these agencies seems to be very reliable," they concluded.

An Unequal Status Quo

In the end, Radcliffe women say, they felt segregated from Harvard--whether in their classes, in their friendships or simply by the remote location of their dormitories.

"There was no relationship [between Harvard and Radcliffe]. In the dormitories, we were totally Radcliffe," Shayes says. "We had these ridiculous parietal rules...in the second year I got married so I was free."

Even in marriage, however, Shayes says the Cliffies remained under strict surveillance.

"I had to get the approval of the dean to get married. She finally gave me her grudging approval," she says.

Shayes got married at 18 and went on to have five children.

And for many Radcliffe students, any attempt to break the mold which Harvard and society dictated quickly revealed the double standard that was implicitly implied to the 'other' sex.

"The expectations of women were so low and so stereotyped that if you tried to break the mold you hit on a certain amount of consternation from everybody, including one's own family...that's rough," Shayes says.

"It made me a feminist before my time...any woman who chose a profession became a feminist before Betty Friedan ever thought about the subject," she concludes.