Retro Romance: A Harvard-Radcliffe Affair

Elizabeth A. Beverly-Whittemore ’70 considers her relationship with Dr. Robert D. Whittemore II ’69 an anomaly. When Beverly-Whittemore and Whittemore studied in Cambridge, Harvard men normally looked outside the Yard for potential love interests.

“Radcliffe women had the reputation of being…the brain trust,” Beverly-Whittemore explains. “We were actually in classes with these guys and often doing much better than they were academically; we had the reputation of being not nearly as appealing for purposes of dating and mating.”

But Cupid worked his magic just before Valentine’s Day of 1967, and Beverly-Whittemore and Whittemore struck up a romance. On February 7th, they met at a Gilbert and Sullivan Players party, and a week later, Beverly-Whittemore asked her roommate whether she should send him a valentine. “The making of the individual valentine was still a ritual that people didn’t take lightly,” she says. “They might have done it kiddingly or happily, but clearly there was a significance given to it because it opened the doorway to the next step.”

Finally, Beverly-Whittemore made her fateful decision. She recalls “fashioning that valentine to be perfect and then…taking it down to Leverett House and having the man in the booth [give the valentine to Whittemore]—because of course I wasn’t allowed into Leverett House to put it in his mailbox.”

She adds with a laugh, “He obviously knew it had to be me. I of course thought that he must have had many, many young women and girls madly in love with him.” Whittemore in turn sent her a valentine of his own—a piece of fudge with a heart on top. After they exchanged valentines, Whittemore asked Beverly-Whittemore to accompany him to a Rembrandt exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. The rest is history.

In the days before Harvard and Radcliffe merged, cross-campus relationships posed a romantic possibility. “We were young women who had been raised on Seventeen magazine,” Beverly-Whittemore says, noting that most of her friends believed in “that idea that you could really meet a soulmate.” She continues, “The sexual revolution, the feminist revolution—those things were actually positively influencing that sense of romance…in terms of lifting gender-prescribed roles and freeing people to be themselves transparently with one another.”

“It was a very different era,” says Candace Gaudiani ’67. “One of the things that we often miss is that it was culturally a lot harder for men and women to just be pals.” Students had the opportunity to forge those not-so-platonic relationships at mixers, one of the few occasions on which men and women mingled outside of the classroom. (Classes became coeducational in 1944 as a response to decreased enrollment during World War II.) Otherwise, male and female students lived separate lives: For example, women resided apart from men in the Radcliffe Quadrangle (now an oft-undesired housing draw for underclassmen), and they were not allowed in Harvard libraries: “We were told...that the sound of our heels or the smell of our perfume would distract the young men from their ability to concentrate on their work,” reports Beverly-Whittemore.

But perhaps the scarcity of Harvard-Radcliffe interactions heightened the sense of romance on campus. Although Gaudiani does not remember any specific Valentine’s Day traditions at Radcliffe, she suggests that every amorous interaction between Harvard men and Radcliffe women felt like February 14. She concludes, “We did fewer things in groups back then, and every date became almost like a Valentine’s [Day] occasion because the man…had to do something to be impressive, to take you out to dinner, to bring you something.”