Sixteen Attempts and Fifteen Failures

The first Radcliffe undergraduate publication appeared in 1898, nineteen years after the Annex was founded. Since then there have been sixteen attempts to start magazines or newspapers at Radcliffe, of which the most recent is Percussion, replacing the defunct Radcliffe News.

The recurring difficulty all these publications have faced is to discover a function to perform. As Radcliffe's activities become more and more merged with Harvard's and as Radcliffe editors become more numerous on Harvard publications, the scope and readership of a purely Radcliffe literary venture narrows. Yet the persistence of the Annex over the years tends to lessen any idea that her press will ever stop completely.

1898 was the year of the first Yearbook. Although yearbooks have continued to be published up the present time, their form has changed considerably. The 1898 book was mainly composed of a very long poem, men tioning each girl in the class by name. It also contained a picture of the class officers.

The Radcliffe Magazine appeared the next year, with an imposing board of fourteen editors. It grew out of an English Club which had been in the habit of meeting to read aloud the best themes submitted during the week. The Magazine lasted until 1920, and printed Alumnae notes as well as prose and poetry compositions. The fiction was highly romantic and by modern standards quite naive. Most contributions seem to reflect the Radcliffe girl's longing for a Great Emotional Experience, and implies that a chaperoned walk from Shepard Street to Agassiz every day was not particularly exciting.

In 1910 a monthly magazine, Shop, was published. This was designed to reflect "serious thinking at Radcliffe, chiefly in connection with courses, but also in regard to important questions of the day, political, social, and artistic." It contained about two or three essays in each issue, with such titles as "The Concept of Personality," and "A Comparison of the Political Theories of Dante and Machiavelli." Shop only lasted a year; its demise was owed either to a lack of cash or perhaps of serious thinking.

The following year saw another brief venture entitled The Crucible. It had three editors who announced that they proposed "to give an opportunity to publish essays or reports that have been written in the various courses, for many of them attain a degree of excellence of which we may well be proud." The Crucible, too, endured but one year.

Prior to the First World War, these publications all had a definite and unique role in the community. Every girl at Radcliffe was a pioneer; this magazine which called itself "the undergraduate magazine of Radcliffe College and Harvard University." It thus made the initial mistake of competing with Harvard. By 1949, financial difficulties forced it to appear in mimeographed form, and more than 50 per cent of the contributions were from Harvard students. It collapsed in 1950, mainly because of student apathy.

In the present era of "merged" education in Cambridge, a Radcliffe publication must be exceptional indeed to survive. If the Annex is an unique--as many say it is--there should be a place for a unique publication. The editors of the latest experiment, Percussion, now in its fourth week, must discover this role, or their paper, like its many predecessors, will be extinguished