Radcliffe Breaks the Curfew

On the night of November 8, 1960, Crimson photographer Judith H. Blitman ’61 watched the returns roll in at the Kennedy Compound, the culmination of months of work covering the campaign for the newspaper.

“I met a lot of famous reporters. The whole national press was there. It was very, very exciting,” Blitman remembered.

But the next afternoon, when Blitman returned to campus after watching the victory speech of John F. Kennedy ’40 at the Hyannis Armory, she faced a consequence that her male colleagues on the paper did not have to deal with—Radcliffe’s rules.

“They made me stay in for the next weekend,” she recalled.

As a Radcliffe student in the early 1960s, Blitman’s social life and behavior, including how late she could stay out each night, was dictated by an extensive catalog of rules, bound in a 100-page volume known as The Red Book.

The Red Book contained guidelines for nearly every situation that might arise for Radcliffe women. According to one by-law, “when a student visits a man’s apartment or room not in a college dormitory, another girl or couple should be present,” while another regulation set out that “an older couple should be present at any private party which lasts later than 1 a.m.”

By staying out all night, Blitman had violated one of the core precepts of The Red Book: the code of parietal rules that was laid out over five pages of the handbook.

Though Blitman was punished under the rules of the 1960-’61 edition of The Red Book, by the following fall many of the traditional regulations that the book mandated were increasingly being called into question by the students that they affected.

During the 1961-’62 school year, debates over the purpose of these curfews and other rules for the proper conduct of a Radcliffe student were symptomatic of the emerging revolution in the role of women on Harvard’s campus and beyond.

LIFE UNDER CURFEW

As a senior, Blitman no longer lived with a specific curfew mandated by The Red Book. Her infraction during the Kennedy election, instead, had been failing to “secure permission for an overnight absence.”

According to the regulations set down in The Red Book, sophomores and juniors had to sign in to their residence halls by 1 a.m. unless they had special permission from the head resident or hall president in their dormitory for an event like a cast party or a formal. Freshmen could stay out until 10 p.m., although they were allowed to be in the library until 11:15.

“We just sort of accepted it,” Blitman said of the curfew that dictated her life at the University. “And fighting it was out of the question. Somehow in 1960 it just didn’t occur to me to get active, nor did it occur to any of my female colleagues.”

The rules had been intended to protect the students of Radcliffe by both preserving their reputations and keeping them safe from sexual advances.

But rather than make life easier, women who attended Radcliffe in the early 1960s have said that the rules perpetuated a culture in which they felt like second-class citizens on Harvard’s campus.

At the time, Harvard’s attitude toward women, according to Patricia A. Marks Greenfield ’62, was based on the idea that “‘The problem is women.’ Not, ‘The problem is men.’”

For the women of Radcliffe, the curfew was inextricably linked with the deeper feelings that male members of the Harvard community had about their presence there.

“We were ‘tolerated’ but we were also put down to some degree. There were things we weren’t permitted to do,” Caroline R. Herron ’62 said.

Moreover, by the beginning of the 1960s a feeling arose that the increasingly available ways to get around the curfew had rendered the rules useless.

Herron recalled missing the curfew twice during her time at Radcliffe. Once, she remembered, she was in a car that broke down, and another time she and a group of friends had trouble getting back from Revere Beach.

“Once I managed not to be detected and once I went and confessed,” she said of the incidents. And when she did turn herself in, the consequences were not very severe.

“I don’t remember being chained to my bed or anything,” she said. “I believe I may have gotten a talking-to.”

REVOLUTION OF ’62

In November of 1961, the Radcliffe Student Government Association announced a plan to restructure student government at the college.

As the school year progressed, the debates over legislative representation for Radcliffe students had opened up into a discussion of the value of The Red Book and the larger relationship of Radcliffe students to the University.

Increasingly, students demanded that the proposed student government have more control over the rules at Radcliffe, especially concerning their curfew.

Then, in December, the Freshman Class Committee demanded later curfews and less restrictive policies on exceptions to the curfew rules. The SGA backed the proposal, and upperclassmen commented to The Crimson at the time that the rules for freshman should be relaxed past even what the freshmen had proposed.

In February, Radcliffe student leaders and administrators discussed academic and social issues facing the college at the Cedar Hill Conference, a biennial meeting between the SGA and Radcliffe deans. In 1962, the big occasion at the forum was the presentation of a new constitution, penned by Ruth Wyler Messinger ’62, which would establish a new central governing body for the college’s students: the Radcliffe Government Association.

The official proposal would already mark a major shift in control of the school’s parietal rules. Under the new system, the RGA would set social regulations of the college, a duty that traditionally fell under the jurisdiction of the Dean of Residence and Student Affairs along with the Board of Hall Presidents.

But at the conference, Elizabeth Holtzman ’62 and Deborah Stone ’62 presented their own ideas about new freedoms for Radcliffe’s women: an end to curfew hours for upperclassmen, the abolition of the college’s chaperonage rules, and the elimination of the series of permissions that Radcliffe women had to obtain to sign out for a night.

TAKING SIDES

Holtzman and Stone’s proposal set off a flurry of debate among Harvard and Radcliffe students, one that would come to represent the changing views of Radcliffe and its students’ proper role on campus.

For some, The Red Book, and in particular its parietal rules, served its intended purpose as a means of maintaining the reputation and safety of Radcliffe women.

“At the time I thought it was not a terribly good idea to end the curfew,” Thalassa Hencken

Ali Walsh ’62 remembered. “I’d seen too many people getting in trouble. With no curfew, you had the possibility of date rape and other things like that.”

In addition, the curfew was for some an essential part of keeping up the Radcliffe woman’s veneer of propriety.

In February of 1962, one Radcliffe junior told The Crimson, “Abolishing the curfew might give Radcliffe an awfully bad reputation, not necessarily because of immoral behavior but because of what boys expect to go along with a great deal of freedom.”

Essentially, some argued that Radcliffe students were just not ready.

“The supposition that Radcliffe girls are intelligent, responsible adults is largely false,” Carol E. Hagemann-White ’64 told the Crimson in March of 1962.

But for many students, the changes that Holtzman and Stone proposed would address an already broken system and bring Radcliffe’s policies in line with a cultural demand for greater equality.

According to Holtzman, one of the greatest problems with the curfew was that it was often ignored, with many women coming in after curfew and self-reporting an earlier return to their dorms. The proposal to abolish the curfew was merely about adapting policy to reality.

“The parietal rules were a nuisance,” she recalled. “The question was whether we were going to go with an honor system, whether we were going to change the rules, or whether we were going to, as an alternative, simply fudge.”

For others, the proposed eliminations of the parietals would be an important step in increasing the equality of Radcliffe and Harvard students. Crimson reporter Mary Ellen Gale ’62, for example, found that the curfew, the very issue that she spent much of her time writing about, made it difficult for her to pursue her journalistic aspirations.

“I wanted to have the same opportunities that the men did,” she said. The fight to eliminate the curfew, according to Gale, “was important, from the point of view of someone who wanted to be a part of that man’s world.”

According to Crimson editor Michael Churchill ’61, the men of Harvard were split on the issue: a majority believed that the curfew should be abolished, but others maintained that it was a necessary “protective” measure for the women at Radcliffe.

But the curfew, he recalled, was not at the forefront of the average Harvard student’s mind.

“Most Harvard men didn’t understand how second-class it made the women seem. On the other hand, I don’t think they thought about it a terrible lot either,” Churchill said.

BREAKING CURFEW

In May of 1962, the women of Radcliffe prepared to vote.

First, they voted on the inception of the RGA, which would give students more control over the rules at Radcliffe. When the vote came back in favor of a student government, they took up the issue of the curfew. After months of planning, they brought the measure to a vote. The women voted 500-200 in favor of unlimited sign outs for everyone past the first eight weeks of sophomore year.

But that wasn’t the end of the negotiations. The plan also had to get past the Radcliffe administration.

By early June, the students and the faculty had reached a compromise: the curfew was abolished for juniors, as it had been seniors.

Of her own life under the curfew, Herron said, “We sometimes took it for granted. We sometimes worked around it.”

For Herron and the other members of the class of 1962, the change would have no direct effect on their lives. Before the new rules came into effect, they had already left the Quad behind.

But Herron and her classmates understood—and still understand—the significance of their actions.

“We sometimes—increasingly— moved with one foot in the ’50s and ’60s. We sometimes trialed and we sometimes triumphed and moved things forward,” she said.

That spring, the members of the Class of 1962 trialed and triumphed, and the women of Radcliffe—many of whom had been trained their whole lives to stay within the rules laid out for them—took a step forward with a small part of their lives in their own hands.

—Staff writer Maya S. Jonas-Silver can be reached at mayajonas-silver@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessica C. Salley can be reached at jsalley@college.harvard.edu.