"If We Can't Fix the Plumbing, We Can't Stay in Here"

WHEN A GROUP of women seized a Harvard building on International Women's Day in 1971, most Radcliffe women were at class or in their dormitory rooms on the other side of town. It was mostly Cambridge and Boston women who led the takeover of the delapidated architectural building at 888 Memorial Drive. And if you only read The Crimson account, you would have thought the action was characterized by disputes between gay women and straight women.

But what went on inside the building as women from the International Women's Day March swelled the number of occupants to nearly 500, was vastly more important than the first few moments of the takeover. And the relationships that resulted were not just "gays" against "straights."

Although there were moments of confrontation during the nine days of the occupation, the tensions were consistently undermined by the irrepressible energy of women working together. Instantly, sign-up lists went around collecting the names of women who would take shifts on Day Care. Self-defense classes and instruction in automechanics started the very next day--but not before the women cleared the building, swept away the mattresses, and gave the place a quick paint job to add a little color and joy.

It was cold in the building: Harvard had turned off the heat. Nevertheless, meetings were held around the clock so that at any time of the day, a woman could walk upstairs and find information, ask questions, give opinions, and become directly involved in an exchange of experience and ideas.

There were always children around, as enthusiastic as the women who took care of them, the same women who were doling out food, making music, making their own decisions, making the place their own. All this, even though at any moment, an invasion by Cambridge police could bring it all to an end. It was the collective will of the women inside that maintained the momentum.

OUTSIDE THE BUILDING, amid a frenzy of picture-taking by the press and by Harvard officials, a crowd of curious onlookers kept watch over the scene. Some of the more hostile of their number muttered or ran up to the windows to scream about "what these women need." Other sympathetic men automatically sat vigil in case of a bust, offering to assist in protecting the building. But the women inside said no; they had taken the building, made it habitable, and should they decide to defend it, they would do it themselves.

But it was not just a building that the women had taken over: Rather, they had seized a part of themselves that had previously existed only in fantasy or in the faces of "those other women." There was a sense of urgency among the women, channeled only by a new-found confidence in their ability to make something work. In the bathroom, a tall dark woman was struggling with some pipes. As she dried her hands, she looked up and shrugged, "If we can't fix the plumbing, we can't stay in here."

But although it was a Harvard building that was seized, Radcliffe women were noticeably absent. Perhaps it was because it wasn't spring, or perhaps it was because the building itself was far away, even farther south than Mather House, so that most of the action seemed outside the spectrum of our lives. The Boston Globe gave the impression that 888's inhabitants were foul-mouthed harpies who were accosting straight women. There was no mention of the vitality or life of the place. The women inside were just not us, and we were a little afraid to soil our hands with building takeovers and demands.

INSTEAD, WE STUDIED for places at medical schools and law schools, places that really didn't exist for women. At the time there was no real pressure to admit more women to the institutions that we sought to make our graduate schools. The Committee on the Status of Women at Harvard was floundering, making well-intentioned, but feeble pleas that Harvard start to include women as a vital part of the community. And we Radcliffe women forged on, the unseen spectres of the libraries. We continued to get A's, clinging to the hope that when our turn came around, jobs and post graduate places would miraculously appear.

And now it's happening. Affirmative Action compels the Federal government to cut off funds to universities that don't give equal access to women. Equal pay for equal work is now a logical demand, and last month saw a near aboutface on the legal question of abortion. Although real access to Day Care Centers remains available only to those who can afford exorbitant fees, the widespread acceptance of the philosophy of Day Care and its growing desirability promise a real expansion of services in the future. And academic institutions, in an effort to beef up their numbers of women, search frantically for qualified women to fill graduate schools and faculty positions. We would be fooling ourselves if we didn't admit that they are going to look for those women at Radcliffe College. Indeed, our old fantasies are on the verge of being realized.

But we are not emerging because we sat in the library two years ago today. We thought we could merely depend on the strength of our own concepts of justice. We were sure we had the right to study, a right to be lawyers and doctors, and that the stated contention that we had those rights was obvious enough to sway the powers that be. But the present favorable trend is the result of far more than the reiteration of our theories of justice, however persistent and articulate they might have been.

In the late sixties and early seventies, women like those in 888 Memorial Drive had been creating women's centers and marching in the streets because they understood that unless they made the theory of equality more than just a theory, women's rights would be just a textbook phrase. Radcliffe women have been getting A's for years. But the women in the streets, some of them bizarre, most of them angry, took the initiative to change the conditions we all agreed were dismal. They had impact, and now we're going to law school.

IT WOULD BE PLAIN silly to suggest that Radcliffe women should reject the opportunities that now await them, that we should throw it all away and say "How can we cruise through graduate school, when we never fought for the right to be here?" But we can grasp the connection between ourselves and the women who made us shudder two years ago. We can begin to understand what it was that influenced the swing toward granting some women their due: it was the phenomenon of women pooling talents and resources to make themselves heard.

At other campuses--across the river at B.U. or westward at the University of Minnesota--women are the best organized student group on campus. Newsletters abound, women are constantly meeting each other and becoming attuned to a new political and psychological sensibility. And the growing circulation of Ms. magazine suggests that more and more women are getting involved in what other women are doing across the country. The recent takeover at Boston State College breathed new life into the notion that the women's movement is alive, not ready to roll over and play dead.

But at Harvard, not really a haven for women, Radcliffe students have never been more cut off from each other. The Radcliffe Women's Center fizzled from the lack of energy, interest, and communication. And RUS, our only viable political resource, is still struggling for recognition among the women of the college. Perhaps we are scattered too thinly throughout the college. Maybe if we had the facilities, paper, mimeograph machines, we could pull ourselves together. Then again, we just might be too busy trying to make it.

But exercising our ambitions makes some sense. We've never had a chance to sharpen our competitive edges for the sake of our careers. And even if by some quirk, we had such a chance, we faced the prospect of being labelled social deviants. Now it's kind of exciting to be able to scramble with the rest for a piece of the pie. We've received social sanctions for our efforts, to boot. We're the first generation of Radcliffe women to enter the fray with zeal and confidence.

But if we are sinking into a syndrome in which we are competing with each other for positions that were handed to us through the efforts of women who were not competitive but cooperative, then we have to pull out of it. For one thing, the irony is unbearable. For another, we are doing ourselves a gross injustice.

THERE IS MORE FOR US than the choice between being barefoot and pregnant and being bare-knuckled and sharp-clawed. And there is far more in us than the stories of women who don't see each other before science exams suggest. I don't expect it will be pleasant to discover that each of us has inculcated the stereotyped career woman's mode. It seems impossible for us to imagine that we would allow that to happen to ourselves; already we cringe at the mention of the term "Radcliffe bitch." But we are not really tring to dissolve the impression. Instead, we are scurrying about in college, developing career goals only, when we could be developing friendships and strength within the context of asserting the potential that we know we have, and that has been denied in other women for centuries.

We can envision the walls of Harvard Law School in total isolation, or we can approach that same milieu with a persistent awareness of what is happening to us during this long-awaited period of transition. But we cannot ascribe our failure to adopt the second alternative totally to the peculiar arrangement between Harvard and Radcliffe. The non-merger presents us with more than our share of difficulties. But whatever it is here at Radcliffe that is preventing us from collecting our energy, it goes far beyond corporate contracts, geography and leaflets. For the time being, the will is just not there.

But there is a Women's Center; RUS does exist as a potentially viable student government and as a funding source for women. And Radcliffe is a women's college: there are women in the university. We should gather our energies now, and avoid falling prey to misconceptions like the one Archibald Cox perpetuated in his report on the 888 Memorial Drive takeover when he said that the women involved seemed to have "no connection whatsoever with Harvard or Radcliffe."