Fair Radcliffe at One Hundred

After a century of progress she is, and is not, Harvard

"The world knows next to nothing about the mental capacities of the female sex," said Harvard President Charles Eliot in 1869.

That was ten years before Radcliffe College set up shop for the first time, a stone's throw from Harvard Square. Harvard Medical School Professor Edward Clarke proved how right Eliot was by warning, in Sex in Education, a treatise typical of the time, that women, endowed by nature with smaller brains and more delicate physiques than men, could be seriously injured if exposed to the stress of higher education.

While Radcliffe College was celebrating its hundredth anniversary, its sixth president, Psychologist Matina Horner, 39, cited these observations as a low-water mark against which to measure Radcliffe's 100-year drive toward equality with Harvard. "The intriguing thing," says Horner, "is that we have been working out at the institutional level the very things that men and women are facing today in their relationships, such as power and control, autonomy and commitment, the clashing of priorities, and self-esteem."

With no faculty of its own, Radcliffe was from the start a slightly anomalous appendage to Harvard, a few rented classrooms that offered extra dollars to Crimson faculty members who chose to come and lecture to the ladies. The school was chartered to offer women "equal access" to a Harvard education, but not until 1943 did Harvard, its enrollment reduced by the war, let most Radcliffe women into its classes. Harvard's undergraduate library remained closed to Cliffies until 1967; the first joint commencement of men and women was held in 1970. Declaring that "there is not enough trust, not enough respect" between the two colleges, Horner's predecessor, Biologist Mary Bunting, resigned her post in 1972.

By then Radcliffe had moved to the brink of merger with Harvard by agreeing that Harvard would manage Radcliffe's income, while in return Radcliffe's president would be granted the ex officio title of a Harvard dean. Student housing in both schools was to be integrated.

Then, as now, Radcliffe regularly drew top-flight applicants. But when Horner took office in 1972, admissions policy was one important bone of contention.

Though Harvard had reluctantly agreed to lower the percentage of men in its student body from 80% to about 70%, that was still short of "equality." Many people doubted that Radcliffe's young, soft-spoken new "president would win further concessions, especially since Harvard's old guard feared that alumni donations would drop if more women replaced Harvard's sons. "I listened to the arguments very carefully," Horner recalls, "and finally said how interesting it was that all the evidence seemed to show that Harvard alumni had only male children."

Homer's barb, gently and cheerily spoken, had a telling point. In 1975 the admissions offices combined, and the two schools declared "there are no longer any limits on the number of women students who can be admitted." (The freshman class is now 65% men, 35% women.)

Was Radcliffe becoming Harvard?

Significantly, Horner last year dropped the title of Harvard dean on grounds that it was "too confusing." She also reclaimed control of Radcliffe's finances (though students pay tuition direct to Harvard) and negotiated a joint-policy declaration. Its point: "Radcliffe will continue as an independent institution," with full "rights and privileges" of Harvard enrollment for all Radcliffe students. "The trend while we were having our discussions was toward coeducation," Horner says, recalling the rush of women's colleges either to take men students or merge with male institutions. Instead, she opted for at least titular dual citizenship. Says Horner: "A student can say she goes to Radcliffe, or Harvard, or both... without the need to defend herself against being labeled a feminist or a 'Cliffie' by neuterizing herself into a Harvard 'person.'"

The distinction may not be as real to Radcliffe undergraduates, who by and large think of themselves as Harvard students, as it is to President Horner, who is concerned about a larger role for Radcliffe in the education of women generally. Appalled by the scarcity of women among Harvard's tenured faculty, she has used Radcliffe's independent existence to encourage opportunities for junior faculty women and has established the Radcliffe Biography Series, a special book-publishing program. One of its first titles, Robert and Jane Coles' Women of Crisis, became a bestseller last year.

Horner's own research studies documented a widespread "fear of success" among talented women more than a decade ago. But now that the idea of careers for women has won acceptance, Horner notes that careerism can become a trap. Says she: "We are seeing many women who have made a very definite career choice having a crisis of confidence."

Horner herself is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too role model for students. She is a wife and a mother of three, as well as a respected research scholar. But "things are changing so fast," she says, "that the traditional models for partnering and parenting are no longer sufficient." Her students are groping for new ways to strike a better balance between the traditional alternatives of family and career, without jumping from one extreme to the other: "It's very interesting now to watch young people who are asking: 'Does it have to be either/or?' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.