To the Women of the College

That this is “Women’s Week” might not strike you as a miracle, but this is a good thing. This is how it should be, but not how it always was. It is normal that we now have a women’s center and a female president. The historical gender inequality at Harvard is thing of the past.

For the vast majority of its history, Harvard was a clubhouse with a “no girls allowed” sign on the door. In 1957, when Radcliffe women took the same classes as the Harvard men, they received a different degree. All ’Cliffies lived in the Quad, and there was no shuttle for transportation to the Yard. There were complex curfew rules, to which the men were not similarly subject. Absurdly, they were not allowed to wear pants unless the temperature was officially below freezing. It was “separate and unequal.”

In my father’s undergraduate classes in 1967, women still could not receive a Harvard diploma and were not allowed to even enter Lamont Library, for fear they would “distract” the boys from studying. By 1977, the feminist movement was in full swing nationally, but it was still a fight for a woman to be taken seriously as a student here. But, after the initial merger agreement with Radcliffe that gender-integrated Harvard College, women began demanding a women’s center. They were the first stirrings of a push that would continue for 30 years. This phase might have been “second-class citizenship.”

In 1997, I came to Harvard in a time of great transition for the college, when there were early experiments in “equal status.” But I realized within weeks that “my kind” didn’t seem to belong here, a feeling I heard echoed in comments of some of my black and brown friends. Pictures and statues were of white men, as were nearly all of the tenured professors whose famous classes I shopped. History recounted their stories. There were stories of negative administrative responses reports of sexual harassment and assaults on women. There were a number of gender-related resources (peer counseling groups for issues like eating disorders and sexuality, rape crisis resources, certain tutors sympathetic to women’s issues, the BGLTSA resource center, the Women’s Studies program, women’s and feminist student groups, and more), but these were disconnectedly spread across the campus. It was up to the individual with a gender-related difficulty to seek the available resources.

Yet it was a time of flux: Mine was the first class to experience the full effects of House randomization, which aimed to end the intensive racial segregation of the Houses. There were attempts to remedy racial disparities, but less attention to gender. Indeed, every time we raised the case for a centralized women’s center, we were referred to the Dean of Coeducation, Karen Avery, whose job was to ensure that “women’s stuff” didn’t interfere with more important work. The higher-up deans and officials were all men. For us, the idea of a woman president of the university was as inconceivable as the thought of a black man in the Oval Office.

There was an active feminist community, but it was relegated to Radcliffe. Everything changed with the final Harvard-Radcliffe merger in 1999, when Radcliffe ceased to exist as an undergraduate college, and Drew Faust became the first dean of the new Radcliffe Institute. Most of the woman-specific funding and programs disappeared or shifted to Harvard, and their future was shrouded in mystery. It seemed as though it would be hard to make Harvard treat us as well as Radcliffe had. We were afraid that Harvard would assume titular responsibility for us as full and equal students but would not accommodate needs that may have differed from those of our male classmates.

After unsuccessful meetings with Avery and other deans, we asked Drew Faust for help. Despite the severed connection between Radcliffe and undergraduates due to the merger, Faust helped by arranging a series of “women’s teas,” where she met undergraduates and received their concerns. Then she arranged a brunch with the heads of all the women’s groups and invited Dean Avery. Universally, we all felt we needed more institutional support and funding, a centralized place to meet, new support for sexual violence issues, more faculty mentors and role models, and a women-friendly campus. Faust asked Avery how she was to address these students’ concern.
It was a political masterstroke. Students formed a coalition that included RUS, Association of Black Radcliffe Women, Latinas Unidas, the Coalition Against Sexual Violence, Students for Choice, the Women’s Leadership Project, and some interested women from the Undergraduate Council and from the Women’s Studies program. They all needed, as Virginia Woolf put it, a “room of one’s own.”

Harvard was moving toward “equal status” for women, but it was not fully there. The women’s center was to centralize the existing piecemeal resources, support student action and activism around gender issues, and send a message: You belong here. In 1997, Harvard did not feel like “my” place. It did not feel like a friendly place for the women here in 1987, 1977, 1967, or 1957. There has been plenty of backlash to the idea of a women’s center and to the existence of Women’s Week. But this isn’t reverse discrimination; it helps women to feel like they are equal citizens of this college.

Harvard was a boys’ club for centuries before women finally broke in. The disparities are not totally overcome; a forthcoming report from the Women’s Center on gender gaps in student group leadership suggests that men still tend to run the most “prestigious” student groups, defined by students themselves. But female freshmen come into the Women’s Center in their first few weeks to find a welcoming space for them as women. Full equal status has yet to come, but everyday miracles like Women’s Week and the Women’s Center bring us ever closer.


Shauna L. Shames ’01 is a third-year government PhD candidate and a graduate intern at the Women’s Center.