Harvard, Radcliffe Classes Reunite After 25 Years

Nobody has ever been able to figure out exactly who is in the Radcliffe class of 1950: full class listings have varied from 246 to 222, but the yearbook lists only 165 names. Nobody has cared much about it either until recently, when a few people have tried to put together a reunion, to impose order and unity on what is basically a fragmented collection of doggedly individualistic women.

"I Knew you couldn't get them together, even for a 25th reunion," says Joan Braverman Pinck, president of the Radcliffe student body in 1950 and now an assistant dean at the Business School. "It is a very individualistic group of people."

The reunion organizers have been only moderately successful in attracting the class of 1950 back to Cambridge--about half of those contacted bothered to return the 25th year questionnaires. Only a third of the class is planning to come to Harvard this week, even though a very large proportion still lives in the Boston area, and a majority of the class lives somewhere in the East.

That is not the only thing the members of the Class of '50 have in common, however, for despite their individualism the general outlines of their lives in the past 25 years have been remarkably similar. Almost all of them got married immediately after college--Pinck estimates that 90 percent of them were married within a year of graduation--and very shortly had three or four children in rapid succession. This left them little time to pursue careers, and most of the women who are working now are resuming careers after a 10-or 15-year hiatus and often a divorce or else are beginning a completely new career. One doesn't find among the Radcliffe class of '50 the female counterparts to Henry A. Kissinger '50 or James Schlesigner Jr '50; the alumnae just haven't had time.

Of course the women in the class of '50 were never expected to become Kissingers or Schlesingers. Food with Hundreds and hundreds of veterans just back from World War II and eager to settle down and make up for lost time. Radcliffe women in the late '40s for the most part were swept along by the general current. They were expected to get married; they expected themselves to marry.

"It was kind of in the Water supply," says Pinck. "It wasn't a conscious choice between marriage and career. It was being propelled in one direction without being aware of it."

Radcliffe, the institution, for the most part just went along with this current. Ellen Bower Feingold, who did not marry right out of college, says that as a student she had no sense that she needed a women's institution, that she was getting anything of value from the "pretense" of a women's institution. "I'm not sure now that's true," she says, "but all the people of importance around the University were men." She says that she had an aunt who had gone to Radcliffe and one who had been to Barnard, and both were convinced that Barnard was a much more supportive place for women to be.

"I didn't get a single helping hand from Radcliffe," says Marie C. Fleming, one of the two members of the class who went straight on to medical school, and who feels that at the time she was making a conscious choice between that and marriage. Indeed, there was no such thing as pre-professional counseling at Radcliffe in 1950, and a student had to make a special appointment with the dean of the college if she wanted to discuss career plans with someone.

"Women who wanted to go on got real support from the administration," Feingold, now an urban planner and president of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, remembers. "But I don't think that the administration held that out as the thing to do."

"We carved out careers for ourselves without help from Radcliffe," says Muriel Levin Laskin, who after six years went to medical school and now practices as a psychiatrist in New York, teaches on the faculty of two medical schools and has full-time practice. "Not having found a man I wanted to marry, I could pursue a career."

Some at least think it was their own fault and not Radcliffe's that they didn't pursue careers, right away. Pinck says that Radcliffe President Wilbur K. Jordan was not and still has not been given the credit for interest in careers for women that he deserves. "He used to tell use how good we were, how we owed it to ourselves and society to do something. We chose to ignore him and then pretend nobody ever said it to us."

Most of the women who did go on went to graduate school--Harvard Law had just opened to women, but the Business School was still closed to them--and got education degrees. "One became a teacher; it was very Victorian," Laskin says. Abigail Caplan Beutler, for example, who was the class bridge, marrying on graduation day, had majored in physics, but got a masters from Boston University's School of Education with the idea of getting a teaching job so her husband could go on for his doctorate. It was only later, in 1960, that she went back to school in physics. She is now a research physicist.

But most of the members of the class of '50 who work now--69 out of the 108 who returned the questionnaires--are teachers, many at the college level. A handful of writers, social workers, school administrators and librarians and a sprinkling of women in medicine and business, law and politics round out the occupational picture of the class. "We seem to have entered 'women's fields' because these fields are preferred by women, and not because we were pushed into them by discrimination," reads the introduction to the Radcliffe 25th Reunion Directory. Several women feel, however, that this preponderance of teachers reflects an emphasis while at Radcliffe on scholarship and academics.

Few give any importance to anything other than academics when they talk about their college years. "It is still the most important things I ever did." says Beth Anne Bowman Hess, who in 1970 got a Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers. "It stamped me as an intellectual I don't think any women in the 40s was ever challenged intellectually as I was during those years."

Sylvia Rice Johnson, a free lance writer who worked on the Radcliffe News for a while, remembers that most of her classmates weren't really very involved in activities outside their studies. "But there really wasn't that much else besides academics. People didn't want to get involved in causes, but there weren't any causes around anyway."

A few dimly remember that they once picketed someplace called the Club 100 because it wouldn't let blacks in, but they can't recall much else about the incident. "It stands out in my mind because it was so unusual," one woman says. Many remember the years between 1946 and-1950 as a time when nothing was really happening politically: the war had just ended, and the Korean War and the McCarthy era had not yet begun, "there were a few Communists around, they would arrive very early in the morning and put literature in people's mailboxes," says Fleming, making an effort to remember. Politics were not a big issue, and they were especially not so for Radcliffe women: the 1950 Yearbook gushed about the few political clubs, "through them girls are kept in touch with the hard cruel world."

"It was a very cloistered existence." Hess says, although she adds that many women she knew had the idea that they were going to change the world. Saving the world, she says, was "a generalized, diffuse possibility" with no direct career implications. "It was a pretty cool abstract idea, something you to do with your head. It had nothing to do with social movements of any kind," she says. "The idea of any group concern was totally alien."

"I can't imagine there being a riot," says Johnston. "There wasn't anything to demonstrate against." Even not being allowed to use Lamont, then a new building that seemed to Radcliffe students. Pinck remembers, like the Garden of Eden, wasn't considered at the time to be anything to demonstrate against. "It didn't occur to anybody to feel excluded from anything," Johnston says. No one can remember any tradition of feminism that might have been associated with a women's college, or any trace of solidarity as women in a male atmosphere. "There was no sense of being interested in the rights of women or of being somehow deprived." Hess, now a coordinator of the National Organization of Women,4CrimsonPaul E. Donahue