Annex Anecotes

In the days when Harvard faculty members were asked to repeat their courses for studious young ladies across the Common, Professor Charles Townsend Copeland refused to lecture to Radcliffe classes. "We can't obliterate a natural tendency," he growled, "but why cultivate it?"

He, like others, was unsuccessfully fighting a trend which began in 1879 and has culminated today in coordinate Radcliffe-Harvard education. David McCord's informal history of the Annex traces this gradual integration with the University, but concludes that by its individuality the College is still "anchored against the whole teaching force of Harvard."

McCord's history, issued in honor of the College's seventy-fifth anniversary, is consistently interesting and amusing. By a liberal use of quotations, anecdotes and his own light verse, McCord avoids the simple recitation of names and dates which overburdens many official college histories.

A series of anecdotes describes the Annex's early struggle against a storm of masculine protest. But McCord notes that a "satisfying outburst of remonstrance and expostulation" at the idea of higher education for women subsided very quickly in the Cambridge community. The earliest bluestockings "showed ladylike behavior in all respects," he writes, citing an early report from one of the College's founders which states, "We have had as yet no flighty students."

McCord emphasizes Radcliffe's growth as an institution with separate traditions of its own. It was known as the Annex from its beginnings in 1879, and adopted its present name in 1882 when an agreement giving it formal status was signed with Harvard. Radcliffe, the maiden name of an early donor to the University, was suggested as appropriate "because of a certain picturesqueness."

The whimsicality of his reaction to certain unique aspects of Radcliffe give the book an additional charm. McCord's appreciation of the unusual breadth of selection of courses, for instance:

Should one eschew the Physics lab,

There's always Spanish Bab and Dab.

Are you a hab-not or a hab?

An Acre for Educations is, inevitably, less interesting when McCord records the material aspects of Radcliffe's expansion rather than historical tidbits. He might well have given more space to its early fight for recognition and less to outlining the General Education program and plans for the Graduate Quadrangle. But his book will certainly be worthwhile reading not only for Radcliffe students and alumnae, but because of McCord's generally excellent choice of material, for others as well. CARLOTA G. SHIPMAN