It's Tough to Be a Woman at Harvard

A year before I arrived in Cambridge I talked with the Newsweek bureau chief in Atlanta--a warm, good-natured gentleman who couldn't give me a job but who was willing to share some philosophical thoughts about the South that I, a Northerner, was visiting the first time.

As I rose to go, he smilingly shook my hand, wished me well for the year off I would take before entering Radcliffe, then cautioned, "Watch out for the pigeons!"

"The pigeons?" I asked, smiling also because ever since I came across Emily the pigeon in Eloise I could never share other people's distaste for the birds.

"Don't you know," he came back, "that Radcliffe girls are so intense that they never see the pigeons as they're walking along, and always step on them?"

I hadn't known. But during my freshman year, I tried to emulate the archetypal Radcliffe absorption described to me in Atlanta. Failing to leave bruised pigeons in my wake, I learned instead why a Radcliffe woman--a woman at Harvard--might well be preoccupied. In fact, it took me more than just my freshman year to conclude that her legendary powers of intimidation, which the pigeon anecdote illustrated, are more a defensive posture than anything else.

Here are some of the things that may absorb you, soon to become women at Harvard yourselves. It should be added, however, that what follows may not necessarily touch you this year, nor will it necessarily comprise the dominating experiences of your next four years.

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You may, in your quest for a bathroom at Lamont Library, be informed by the young man (your peer) at Desk I that it is on the east side of the fourth floor; and he may add the gratuitous reminder (should you visibly wish that it were closer) that it was not until recently that Lamont had to worry about providing a bathroom for women at all.

You may find yourself engaged in a conversation with a Harvard man who will tell you in all sincerity that the worst thing that ever happened to Eliot House was admitting women--a comment that the same person would not rephrase and foist upon a black man or woman.

You may receive an invitation to join the Hasty Pudding Club, but you should remember that certain bleak financial prospects dictated that concession to liberation. You might also keep in mind that a similar situation prevailed when Harvard chose to teach men and women in the same lecture halls rather than continuing the practice of letting Radcliffe pay a few faculty members to give the same lecture twice--first in the Yard, and then at the "Annex."

Having lived at the Radcliffe Quad, you may be struck by the fact that River House women rarely congregate at the same table in the dining halls unless by prior arrangement Admittedly there are many Radcliffe women who do not mind being outnumbered, who enjoy testing themselves against Harvard's challenges and conflicts and who do not find themselves wanting. Their sense of ease cannot be scorned. But according to a 1971 study of Radcliffe Quad life by University Health Services psychiatrist Elizabeth A. Reid, coeducation increases the likelihood that women will find friends and intellectual companions within their own sex. And the magic number for that formula is one-to-one. No other ratio works.

Having enthusiastically taken advantage of the option of living in the Yard your freshman year in order, perhaps, to secure an edge on the quintessential Harvard, you should be forewarned of the current wisdom, formulated since women began living in the Yard: There are no Harvard women; at best only Harvard girls. The flippancy of the semantics masks a conviction that Harvard deep down does not accept women, and consequently, any woman who accepts Harvard as it now is, is still a girl.

You will find that you cannot, and should not, take comfort in the possibility that because of the unequal male-female ration here, you may in fact be 2.5 times smarter than your Harvard classmate. The people who actually believe things like that are aggravated Harvard undergraduates who will dismiss you as a snotty-Ali McGraw-bitch. Worse, though, are the professors who would never even entertain thoughts about your intelligence. With the same lack of awareness that leads them to believe that Radcliffe students pay a different tuition than Harvard students, they have never fully absorbed the fact that Harvard has been educating men and women in the same classrooms, sections and tutorials since 1943 As Radcliffe President Matina Horner says, Harvard professors don't view Radcliffe women as potential competitors for, and inheritors of, their academic chairs.

You should need no reassurance that you are intelligent, but at Harvard you may find yourself judged in academic matters as a woman and not as a mind. You may be taught by a professor or a tutor who, for any number of reasons, simply doesn't like women and cannot separate an academic relationship from his personal predilections. Conversely, you may find yourself the recipient of an inflated grade and unable to keep from wondering whether something besides your class performance was behind it.

The Harvard Faculty doesn't know about the women it has been educating for the past 31 years, a fact that makes a difference because these women do not partake of Harvard's protective, unchallenged assumption about men--that they are future leaders, worthy of a Renaissance man's education. It has only been within the last two years that Harvard Faculty members here sat on the Radcliffe admissions committee--a small step that has been apparently long on enlightenment.

You will be expected to have at least a conversational familiarity with Matina Horner's "fear of success" theories. Be able to refute the popular misconception that they developed out of research on Radcliffe students. Fear of failure is unrivaled as a dominant emotion at Harvard and it knows no distinctions of sex. In fact, failure is especially inadmissable for women, who should have an interest in dispelling the belief that Radcliffe women go on to become only well-educated housewives. Radcliffe women have reportedly left less of an imprint on the public arena than Vassar or Wellesley graduates, but this should not condone the cultural and political lag that characterizes Harvard attitudes.

Indeed Harvard, more than 300 years old, is altogether too fond of its traditions, of the examples of the past.

You may hear an argument for more women undergraduates whose premise is that more women would make life much easier for all the men undergraduates here. And you may hear a counter-argument that knowingly rests on the fact that women haven't made the kind of money in the past that can be tapped for Harvard-scale alumnae giving. Twenty-five years is the best estimate that you will get from a higher-up in the Alumni Association: 25 years before there are equal numbers of men and women undergraduates to make all of us feel more comfortable, 25 years before enough women will have made enough inroads into the economy to be counted among the substantial givers to Fair Harvard. This institution doesn't, after all, educate future leaders just for the glory of it.

However, having achieved success in Harvard's terms, you may also find yourself face-to-face with the reminder, this time from your peers, that if you were a man it would be a cop-out to go to Law School. Only because you are a woman is it a victory. The specter of reverse discrimination may lead you to conclude that some sort of double standard is a fact of life.

You will undoubtedly have to decide for yourself what Radcliffe "means," particularly because the 1971 non-merger-merger contract will be reviewed during your freshman year. When people ask you where you go to college, will you say Harvard, or Radcliffe? Some women, even those who are not militantly anti-merger, claim Radcliffe as their school simply because the feeling of being an outsider is inescapable and supercedes the fact that Radcliffe only admits you while Harvard will teach you and give you a degree.

To be a Radcliffe student is to be a professional woman--even without that degree. Professional, because Harvard fosters situations in which you will feel as if you represent something larger than yourself: an embodiment of all womanhood. Radcliffe administrators know this feeling more intimately than we students. It defines the crucial difference between Presidents Bok and Horner: Both are full time administrators, fund-raisers, and general top dogs, but only she is a full-time advocate.

You may hear a good deal of jargon from other women--talk about women's "special needs," the necessity for "role models," the value of "resource people," the usefulness of "support structures." Admittedly offensive language--it accounted for the overnight conversion of many women to a pro-merger, anti-Radcliffe stance--but put into different words, these phrases describe a reality for women at Harvard.

No one who uses this jargon seriously will go so far as to say that women in general have "special needs," but they are saying that it is unnecessarily tough to be a woman at Harvard, that Harvard is a sexist institution--and not because everyone seems to experience some sort of warped male/female relationship here.

Translated, the jargon charges that there are outrageously few women--undergraduates and especially faculty and administrators--here proportionate to men. It means that the increasing number of older women who are accepted by Radcliffe find themselves being regarded as "role models"--possible links to the future, possible clues to the lot of women in today's world, outside the University's walls. It means that women in each of the Houses have felt compelled to form women's tables, however undirected, in the face of Male Chauvinist Pig counter-dinners. And if it doesn't mean that the Radcliffe Union of Students has managed to unify women undergraduates, it does mean that the Radcliffe administration is beginning to re-establish itself as a presence in the lives of the students it admits.

For instance, the Office of Women's Education (OWE)--one of President Horner's major visible accomplishments of her first year in office--is, very simply, your friend. Headed by Judith Walzer and staffed by Connie Gersick and Shannon Randall, the office is Radcliffe's built-in insurance that administrators and students will not stare at each other across a gap, but will regularly interact.

Amidst the flurry of its fact-finding--about concentration patterns, discrepancies in the prize money available to, and won by, Radcliffe students, women who are older than the usual college age and minority women--the OWE cannot help but make a difference for women at Harvard. Facts help to dispel myths, or at least to make them comprehensible.

But apart from its research, the OWE seeks out women and tries to address some of their problems: It will give special attention to women who are potential concentrators in the sciences so that Harvard does not dissuade them from fields not generally associated with women, continue its meetings on crimes against women, and investigate the Radcliffe student's experience as a minority in Harvard classrooms.

The OWE publishes a regular newsletter, "'Cliffe Notes," it will bring you "A Woman's Guide to Harvard" in your registration folder, and it is behind the distribution of the prize booklet to all students at registration. All in all, it is the most viable liason Radcliffe women have to other women in the University.

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Freshman year is one long initiation rite. Its lesson, never fully learned and put aside, is that it is not easy to be a person at Harvard. But there are additional built-in features of the Harvard experience that mean that womanhood, on top of personhood, can be a complicating factor in making your peace with Harvard. Living with sexism is not an expectation that many of us bring to freshman registration. A consciousness of it tends to develop only gradually, checked ironically enough by such things as fear of failure, the love-it-or-leave-it dogma, the feeling that a Radcliffe woman should have the inner stuff to take on every aspect of Harvard.

Of course, people who have been at Harvard over the last five to ten years will tell you that conditions for women have improved vastly, and they are right. You will not, for instance, see your college address printed under your picture in the Freshman Register, while your Harvard classmates smile out from the pages with their intended concentration listed below. You will not be treated to catcalls and whistles every time you set foot in the Freshman Union. And should you ever have cause to eat at the Faculty Club, you will not have to go in via the back entrance.

If you are an athlete, your predecessors have done some major advance work for you just within the last year. Athletics proved to be an ominous testing ground for full merger, but the result is that women's sports are better financed now and that some progress is being made towards sharing facilities and decent practice times. Even though Harvard still equates the seriousness of a Radcliffe athletic team with its successes, equality of athletic opportunity is not such an impossible dream.

As entering Radcliffe students, you will be drawn into the Freshman Core program, which places each woman in a small group of her classmates headed by a woman faculty member or administrator. There are no guarantees that you will like the people, that you automatically need a support group or a role model, but the point is that they are there if you do need them.

And as future Radcliffe upperclassmen, discussions of inequities in prize and fellowship money may be obsolete by the time these things affect you personally. You may also be around to witness the effects of a joint Harvard-Radcliffe fund-drive to establish a $5 million endowment for Radcliffe financial aid. In the midst of it all, there are people like Harvard Corporation member Hugh Calkins '45 and former Radcliffe admissions officer Ann C. Calkins '49, co-heads of the drive, who believe that equal treatment for women should not be linked to the loaded questions arising from the merger issue.

It is said that if you want to change a man, you should start with his grandfather. Whether Harvard is training future grandfathers is unclear. Yes, it's tough to be a woman at Harvard. But pigeons are no longer fair game for you, because the time of stereotypes, of intimidating legends and of imposed defensiveness is best relegated to the past.