Re-Centering Harvard Women

Over the past month, the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) has revived a 30-year-old campaign to establish a women’s center at Harvard, and specifically at Hilles Library, which is currently awaiting drastic renovations. Our commitment to this project is largely fueled by pride in the almost-forgotten history of women at Harvard—and the now-complete loss of what was once the Radcliffe Quad as women’s space.

Founded in 1879, the institution soon to be called Radcliffe College was comprised of female students who were taught separately by Harvard’s male professors. Starting during World War II and continuing into the 1970s, Harvard’s and Radcliffe’s classrooms and undergraduate Houses were fully integrated, and by 1977, Radcliffe ceded many of its educational responsibilities to Harvard. Radcliffe still existed in name, though, through women’s formal admittance to and graduation from “Harvard-Radcliffe College.” In 1999, a second phase of merging involved the removal of “Radcliffe” from the certificates and diplomas of graduating women, and the transformation of what had been a women’s college into the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Radcliffe’s evolution has serious ramifications for women’s lives at Harvard. While some effects of the merger can be read as positive signs of gender equality, others leave a gaping inequity that it is the University’s responsibility to emend. Until the 1970s, women at Harvard enjoyed a huge amount of physical space designated as theirs. They also had guaranteed administrative support for, among other things, maintaining such places. While men had and still retain the option of joining final clubs for social space and networking, women’s prior access to their own House common rooms and libraries has been neutralized due to gender integration. When their predecessors’ renowned women’s college yielded to the tide of integration, female students lost access to any space over which they had primary control, including classrooms. (Single-sex classes, while debatable in theory, in practice ensured that males could not dominate their female peers’ academic experiences.)

The Quad remains the only part of the College where the buildings are named for prominent women, and whose walls proudly display their portraits. But what is perhaps one of the most blatant signs of Radcliffe’s institutional disappearance is the new sign on the corner of Garden and Shepherd Streets. Whereas the old one proclaimed, “The Radcliffe Quadrangle,” the sign erected this fall merely reads “The Quadrangle.” The name change is indicative of the gradual erasure of Radcliffe, which precipitates declining student awareness of the long history of women at Harvard.

Women comprise half of the undergraduate student body but this demographic group—cutting across lines of ethnicity, class, and religion—lacks visual representation of its contribution to Harvard. Consequently, institutional memory loses a long and rich tradition of female scholarship here, a tradition to which current students are never exposed. In contrast, students are reminded on a daily basis of the celebrated history of Harvard men—portraits, statues, names of buildings and other iconography laud nearly four centuries of male success at Harvard. Yet, at the same time, the Radcliffe name is becoming a relic recognized only by some female athletes and history buffs.

At a recent RUS meeting, one student joked, “Yale and Princeton may each have one women’s center, but Harvard has 24!” This remark accurately reflects the lengths to which students must go in order to acquire information about women’s resources, but that problem could be easily remedied. Establishing a physical space to mark the living legacy of women at Harvard would be an important milestone in Harvard-Radcliffe history. A women’s center at Harvard would not only explicitly demonstrate a commitment to the support and betterment of women’s experiences here, but would also memorialize Radcliffe history.

Such a space would be a non-discriminatory destination for students of all genders who are committed to the advancement and well being of women at this university. In addition to a museum-quality display commemorating the history of women at Harvard, a well-funded Harvard-Radcliffe Women’s Center (HRCW) would centralize groups concerned with issues relating to women, ranging from ethnicity-based groups to community service programs. One of HRCW’s important goals would include improving relations between various groups, strengthening administrative and faculty involvement in female students’ lives, and more generally improving and expanding all students’ experiences at Harvard.

Women’s centers are established at all of Harvard’s peer institutions and hundreds of others, none of which find them incongruous with their firm nondiscrimination policies. Indeed, Harvard is the only Ivy League university that lacks this important space. Thus far, 16 student groups have pledged their support to this struggle, along with the Office for Sexual Assault, Prevention, and Response, and the Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

This weekend we are going public with our movement. RUS will create and staff a HRCW camping tent on the lawn of the Science Center. Our hope is that this rickety, temporary structure will raise awareness of our campaign while demonstrating that a camping tent is absolutely no substitute for a real, institutionally-supported women’s center. Come grab a snack, read a flyer, learn about Radcliffe history or just hang out. Let’s show pre-frosh and each other how great Harvard with a women’s center can be.

Ilana J. Sichel ’05 is a literature concentrator affiliated with Dudley House. She is co-chair of the Radcliffe Union of Students.