ON HOLMES' LETTER

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Although we feel that a certain maturing process takes place during a student's four years at college, we disagree with the implicit definition of this process expressed in the "Holmes letter." Hopefully, maturing is not a matter of eventual compliance to rules that one has been coerced to follow. It involves a personal decision as to one's individual position, not passive conformity to social pressures.

Some girls may be in need of guidance, but it is doubtful that blind faith in impersonal rules gives them any sort of real direction. If "most girls come to Radcliffe knowing nothing about the student government rules," how does the existence of the present rules safeguard the future reputation of graduates of the college? If those who are planning to spend the next four years of their lives here are unaware of these rules how many people in the outside world can be expected to be informed about the proposed changes?

We are pleased to note that the letter writers from Holmes, all of whom are juniors and seniors, have passed safely "from the chaos of late adolescence to the more ordered world of young womanhood hopefully achieved in the junior and senior years." We wonder about the alchemy in the Radcliffe environment that magically transforms confused adolescents into mature young women at the completion of sixteen half courses. We are more dubious that any group has a right to assert its own maturity while doubting that of others. In the informal RGA poll being conducted today on the subject of rule changes, each student should reply according to her confidence in herself, and not according to possible deleterious effects on her fellows of this opportunity for responsible social decision. None of us, we feel, can effectively or justifiably act as her sister's keeper. Gail Thain '64   Judith Dollenmayer '63   Bay Schleffelin '64   Marcla Tillotson '62   Caroline Herron '62   Cornella Lewls '63   Donna Levine '62   Jill Huston '65   Suzie Stockard '65   Myra Rubin '62   Anne Ellsworth '62   Janie Seligson '64   Barbara Graf '62