Finding Their Proper Place: Three '74 Alumnae Lead RCAA's Transition

In the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association (RCAA) house, a pleasant wood-frame building off of Radcliffe Yard, people chuckle that the Class of 1974 might as well move in.

"There's a lot of jokes about '74 being a power--that we're going to take over Radcliffe," says RCAA President Jane E. Tewksbury '74. "Every time you turn around there's a '74 getting involved."

Just ask RCAA Executive Director Mary M. Carty '74. Or RCAA First Vice President A'Lelia P. Bundles '74, who will take over Tewksbury's position in June.

"We talk about it almost sheepishly," Carty says. "As if it doesn't seem right to take up more than one's proper place."

Today, these members of the Class of 1974 fill the three most important positions in RCAA as the alumnae association starts to chart a course without Radcliffe College at its side. But if you'd asked these women when they were undergraduates, none of them would have said the "proper place" for them would be at Radcliffe--let alone in the middle of the most wrenching change in the institution's history.

Worlds Apart

Though they are close friends today, Bundles, Carty and Tewksbury never met as students. They all lived in the Radcliffe Quad--Bundles and Carty in Currier House, Tewksbury in North House (now Pforzheimer)--but their social circles did not overlap.

For Bundles, who grew up in Indianapolis, coming to Radcliffe fulfilled a dream that began with her mother, who was rejected from Wellesley College because, as she puts it, "they had admitted one or two black women already."

"Radcliffe had a sort of romanticism about women being comfortable being smart," Bundles says. "Every college didn't really emphasize the importance of women's brains...There was a sense that you were kind of special because you had been admitted to Radcliffe."

In college, Bundles hosted an early morning jazz show on WHRB, the campus radio station; she eventually became director of the jazz department, and much of her daily routine revolved around music.

"My fun activities were going to the jazz workshop," she says.

But other than dorm life, Radcliffe was far from Bundles' mind.

"I enjoyed the Strawberry Tea, but I can't say I did much else with Radcliffe," she says.

Like Bundles, Tewksbury plunged into extracurricular activities after coming to Radcliffe from Saugus. A dabbler in various activities, she did community service through the Phillips Brooks House Association, managed Harvard Student Agencies' ring agency and was the head of intramural sports in North House.

Tewksbury affectionately recalls her days as a member of the fledgling--and struggling--Radcliffe basketball team.

"We were a totally motley crew," she says. "We were horrible...It looked like a pick-up game."

The team's ragged appearance even caught the attention of a Mad Magazine photographer who snapped a picture of the squad during their 1971-72 season.

"We didn't have any funding for women's athletics," she adds. "It's so hard to imagine that things were that backwards."

Carty's college experience was very different from her colleagues,' thanks to an unusual decision she made in the summer between her sophomore and junior years. It was then that she married Brian T. Carty'71, whom she began dating as a first year student.

"It wasn't a rational decision. I certainly didn't know anyone else who was doing it," she says. "But it felt like an emotional mandate to me."

Carty says her college experience was characterized less by extracurricular activities than by the friends she made. What she remembers most about college, she says, was "wearing a silly bathrobe and talking for hours." One evening, a friend who was a gourmet cook was baking a chocolate cake from scratch. Before being served, the cake caved in like a disappointing souffle.

"She was devastated," Carty says. "But I ate the whole thing. I really gained her respect, though I felt pretty sick."

Carty was also a devoted student, who left her hometown of Pleasantville, N.Y., to attend boarding school in Massachusetts.

"I was not one of those people who didn't go to class," she says.

'Everything Seemed Possible'

After graduation, Carty went to work as a personnel officer at a small insurance company. Carty says she felt like part of the real world, unlike many of her classmates who went to professional schools because they were unsure what to do with their lives.

"I remember feeling a little self-satisfied that I was facing up to having to pay the rent," she says.

When Carty became pregnant with her first child, she realized that the agency would not let her work part-time. She decided to stay at home with her baby, and she remained there as she raised two more children until she came to work for the RCAA in 1991. Two years later, Carty was working full-time as the chief administrator of the nearly 30,000-member organization.

"I felt conflicted about staying at home when all my friends and certainly all of my school friends were working," she says. "I felt out of step with the world."

But Carty says her return to the RCAA, around her 20th reunion, provided her with a group of women who understood the choices she faced.

"They helped me think about the big life decisions, the kinds of things you talk about as an undergraduate," she says.

While Carty wanted to get out into the real world, Tewksbury says she felt compelled to go to law school, an arena just opening up to women.

"Going to professional school was just big," she says. "There was this incredible push to take advantage of that--somehow going to law school seemed [to mean] you could be more of an activist."

While working on her sociology senior thesis, Tewksbury watched a public defender working in a juvenile courtroom and was immediately inspired to enter the law.

"She handled the case like it was the most important case she had," Tewksbury recalls. "I thought, 'Jeepers, she really made a difference in the way justice was carried out."

Tewksbury joined the staff of former Massachusetts Attorney General L. Scott Harshbarger '64, then a district attorney; she remained in his office until his run for governor last year. Today she is a vice president and general counsel with the Justice Resource Institute in Boston.

Her volunteer position with the RCAA has at times seemed like a second job, where she has worked on and off since her 1984 reunion. But Tewksbury says working with her classmates and other Radcliffe women has been a pleasure.

"They are the reason that I've given 11 of the last 15 years to this institution," she says.

Bundles also returned to the Radcliffe fold at a class reunion, her fifth, when she became secretary of the class.

"I was living in Houston, feeling pretty isolated from lots of friends," she remembers. "Getting back to Cambridge...was a very pleasant experience for me."

She says Radcliffe was an essential resource for her as a young professional woman in the television news business.

"When we graduated everything seemed possible", she says. "We were supposed to go work in corporate America or be journalists and lawyers and doctors...but five or 10 years after school, we realized that the old-boys network hadn't fully opened up."

Bundles became a network news producer at NBC and later at ABC. During the mid-'80s she worked for "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings," and in 1996 she became deputy bureau chief of ABC News in Washington, D.C.

This February she stepped down from her job to work full-time on a biography of her great-great-grandmother, Madam C.J. Walker, a civil rights activist and pioneer in the hair care industry. An expert on Walker, Bundles successfully lobbied the U.S. Postal Service to feature her ancestor on a stamp last year.

Bundles says she enjoyed her time as a trustee of Radcliffe College in the late 1980s. So when Tewksbury and Carty approached her in 1997 to serve as first vice president of RCAA, she thought it sounded like a pleasant way to spend time in Cambridge.

"I had no concept that I was walking into a huge transition time. I don't think any of us did," Bundles says.

No Picnic

Although rumors had begun to mount, virtually no one at RCAA expected the bomb that dropped in April 1998, when the Boston Globe reported that Radcliffe's Board of Trustees was in secret merger talks with Harvard.

Since then, the women have been bombarded with questions from their constituents and the press about the future of Radcliffe, its highly touted programs for students and the alumnae organization itself.

"We envisioned a very different two years," Tewksbury says wryly.

"We thought this would be a jolly old time, talking and chatting, going to programs," she adds. "It's been a job."

Without any clues from the Radcliffe brass, RCAA was hamstrung in planning for the future, let alone in dealing with frazzled alums.

Tewksbury especially felt the pressure--as a member of the Board of Trustees she was honor bound not to talk about the negotiations, even to her RCAA colleagues across Radcliffe Yard.

"The closed process was difficult for someone like me," she says. It's just hard to wear "two hats," as she likes to put it.

Although she is too diplomatic to say so out-right, Bundles, the journalist, has clearly been chafed by the lack of openness.

"Many of us felt that if we were being asked to help raise money for the school and take its good message to our members, then we deserved to have more information," she says.

And Carty, who worked day in and day out with alumnae clamoring for details, says she felt the squeeze as well.

"The process of getting here was at times frustrating and sometimes just overwhelmingly unpleasant," she says.

All three say they are excited about the outcome of the talks and looking forward to the new Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

"I think one thing we'll all be grateful for is that our time here was notable," Tewksbury says.

But being notable comes with a price.

"All that collegiality that comes from being Class of '74--we never had time," she says.