In Celebration of Women's History

In celebration of the Editorial Board’s 100th anniversary, we turn our attention this month to women’s history at Harvard and at The Crimson. If we can generalize about either, it seems to safe to say that, for the most part, both have been a constant struggle against a firm patriarchal edifice and age-old tradition.

In his 1869 inaugural address, for instance, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, told his audience that the University would not yet take on “the difficulties involved in a common residence of hundreds of young men and women of immature character and marriageable age.” In many ways, this sentiment set the tone for the position of women at Harvard in the coming decades.

The Crimson, as a news organization whose views changed with each graduating class, vacillated on the “issue” of women at Harvard. In an 1873 editorial, for instance, the editorial board argued that a woman’s physical attractiveness would distract any serious male student and that an education would make a woman “uninteresting.” This perspective—obviously informed by nineteenth century sexual politics—also appeared six years later in an editorial whose argument was, essentially, that a Harvard education would be unfair to women: “We have too much respect for women to wish to have their association with us in our college course.” In 1889, The Crimson’s editorial board even went so far as to maintain that, in life, “women ought not receive the same salary as men…because they are personally weaker and cannot endure what men can.”

In the 1950s, issues The Crimson concerned itself with consisted primarily of parietal hours, the restrictions on female guests in male dormitories. John Kenneth Galbraith, then a professor of economics, wrote the following of parietal hours in the early 1960s: “I can’t tell you how depressing it is to find Harvard having another discussion of these so-called parietal rules,” he wrote. “Those who (one hopes on the basis of some special competence) are fascinated by the question of whether undergraduates are improved or damaged by fornication can organize private discussion groups or, if married, talk about it with their wives.”

Needless to say, a certain sexist culture persisted in The Crimson’s coverage of women in these years, even though Harvard women had begun to be elected to the newspaper’s Executive Board after years of inferior status in the so-called “Radcliffe Bureau.” In the late 1950s, for instance, The Crimson published a series of patronizing articles on the Seven Sisters schools. We have reprinted here an excerpt from the piece on Wellesley College—along with a response to it from a particular Wellesley College freshman it offended, the writer and director Nora Ephron.

In the 1970s, after debts from Radcliffe’s expansion led to the famous “non-merger merger” between the two bodies, Harvard then took full control of Radcliffe’s operations. The political philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum—herself a former Harvard professor—was a graduate student in the classics department here during these years. We have reprinted here with her permission an excerpt of a piece on the challenges of raising a child in an academic environment somewhat hostile to women with children.

In the 1980s and 1990s, after the heyday of the women’s rights movement, women at Harvard lived in the odd limbo of a campus ostensibly merged but technically still separated. Valerie M. Steiker ’90—now the culture editor at Vogue—has contributed a piece below describing her experiences as an undergraduate during these years.

In 1999, Harvard and Radcliffe merged officially, fulfilling, as The Crimson reported at the time, “a promise its founders made 120 years ago.” Since then, numbers of tenured female faculty have grown, female social organizations proliferated on campus, and a Harvard president—Lawrence H. Summers—resigned in large part due to the outrage over comments he made about why women may be underrepresented in tenured positions at research universities.

As we look forward to our future, we invite you to celebrate with us the history of women at Harvard and at The Crimson in the last century.

(Sources: Pusey Archives, The Harvard Crimson Anthology: 100 years at Harvard, ed. Greg Lawless.)