In the Fall of 2001, Drew Gilpin Faust, the then Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who would go on to serve as Harvard University’s 28th President, addressed the Class of 2005:
Unlike women who graduated before 1999, none of you will have the signature of a Radcliffe president on your diplomas. You all, women and men alike, will receive the same piece of paper when you graduate on June 9, 2005….Women and men have both been at this university from the time it was founded... You enter an institution that has made a commitment to the equality of all members of the community, regardless of gender; this is a university that has articulated its dedication to the success of every student, male or female. But I invoke the past today to remind you that such commitments are not deeply rooted in Harvard’s history, that they require a transformation rather than an extension of tradition, and that such transformation requires work and attentiveness. An institution that less than a century ago defined itself as an incubator for virility is still working out how fully to incorporate women….I would suggest to you that Harvard is still in transition to a state in which men are not the norm, a norm that has been defined in no small part by the weight of Harvard tradition and expectation and culture as well as by the realities of Harvard life today. But you too must take advantage of this extraordinary moment at Harvard--must as both women and men affirm your equal right to be the norm, to define Harvard as being a woman’s as much as a man’s space. To do that, I believe you must understand not only the Harvard world you see most immediately before you but also the history that has produced it. When you hear--in this most wonderfully tradition-bound institution--that something is because it has always been that way, take a moment to ask which of the past’s assumptions are embedded in that particular tradition. If men and women are to be truly equal at Harvard, not all traditions can be viewed as equal. As women and men together at last in a truly coeducational institution, you all reap the benefits of the strivings of those who worked to make a Harvard education fully available to both sexes. Celebrate what they accomplished and fulfill their aspirations by claiming Harvard as at last truly the property of men and women alike.

The history of women at Harvard is a long and complicated one. For the past several hundred years, Harvard has not only repeatedly struggled to listen to the voices of women fighting for their needs and values, but the University has largely succeeded in rewriting parts of its own history. The merger of Radcliffe College and Harvard University was far from simple, and the existence, or lack thereof, of Radcliffe College as a women’s institution itself is fraught with controversy.

In 1869, President Charles W. Eliot explained in his inaugural address that, “the world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex…[and] only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of women’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities.” Despite Eliot’s continued assertion that Harvard bore no responsibility to educate women, a group of women from Boston and Cambridge, many of whom were affiliated with members of the Harvard community, decided to dedicate themselves to fighting for their belief that women held the equal right with men to the best possible education. On December 22, 1871, a group of like-minded women convened to discuss women’s access to higher education. This group quickly solidified themselves as the Women’s Education Association, adopting a formal constitution and scheduled a meeting with President Eliot in January, 1872 to discuss women’s access to Harvard College.

After years of failed negotiations and discussions, in 1879, the “Harvard Annex” was established by a number of Harvard professors who agreed to repeat their lectures to groups of private female students; however, this program had no official relationship to the University. By 1881, the success of the Annex proved that there was a strong demand for access to the College amongst Boston and Cambridge women. In 1882, after discussions with Eliot and the Corporation, Elizabeth Agassiz and the other managers of “the Annex” re-organized so that they would be best positioned to meet all the demands made by the Harvard administration. They incorporated themselves as “the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women” and began to raise an endowment in hopes that this would help convince Harvard to someday recognize them. Unable to raise enough money to feel they could approach Harvard, the Annex continued to grow independently into the early 1890’s when it became clear that it could not continue to be sustained without establishing an official partnership with Harvard. Agassiz once again approached Eliot to see if the University might take over the Annex--in response, Eliot explicitly stated that he had no authority on the matter since this issue fell into the purview of the Corporation and Board of Overseers. For the Corporation, the Annex held little-to-no value, and they refused to entertain the idea of integrating it into the University. Agassiz considered creating a distinct, female college, but she believed that a Harvard education should be open to women and was determined to fight for this. However, as Le Baron Russell Briggs later wrote, the Annex “had nothing to offer Harvard but girls, whom Harvard did not want.”

Finally in October 1893, the Corporation decided to approve the establishment of a self-governing new institution that would enable women to receive lectures from Harvard professors. Radcliffe College was established not to benefit the women who were fighting for an education, but to protect the men of the Harvard Corporation so that they could remain independent from the enterprise of educating women, which they saw as non-negotiable. Two months after Radcliffe College was recognized as an educational entity by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Harvard Board of Overseers voted to reaffirm their stance that the degree of Bachelor of Arts should not be given to women by the University under any circumstances.

From the beginning, Radcliffe was never an integral part of Harvard. The women attending Radcliffe throughout the mid-20th century were always aware of their “affiliate” status, a reality constantly reinforced by their lack of privileges and rights within the University. Even as women’s rights and gender issues came to the forefront of public discourse and other peer institutions adopted full coeducation, the Harvard administratration and student body resisted providing support for women. Unlike other women’s colleges and even most of the co-educational institutions throughout the 20th century, the purpose of Radcliffe was never to support women in their intellectual aspirations. In 1919, 80 percent of Vassar’s and 82 percent of Wellesley’s faculty were female. At Swarthmore and Oberlin, two colleges that accepted women alongside men, the faculties were 30 percent female. Harvard would not have a single female faculty member for another thirty years, and in 1970, Harvard would still have no tenured female faculty.

In Ruth Hubbard’s essay on her experience as an academic having graduated Radcliffe in the 1940’s, she discusses that, “from the beginning, Radcliffe apparently failed to recognize that, by proudly offering its students the privilege to sit at the feet of Harvard's Great Men, it lost the opportunity to awaken in us the expectation that we might someday become Great Women.” In her remarks, she remembers a professor who said to her, "if you go to graduate School...don't go to Radcliffe. You should not go to a school where you have no chance to become a faculty member." Reflecting on the how things have evolved since the '40’s, Hubbard reminds readers that Harvard is still far from a nurturing place for women. “Times have changed. But, we need to recognize that such nonsensical claims about ‘woman's nature’ get revived again and again. And also, that women and men will not truly be equal at Harvard until students are as likely to encounter women as men at all levels of the faculty and administration and until the images that look down upon us from Harvard's hallowed walls include many more women than they do now."

When talking to my peers about the history of Radcliffe, there is a general assumption that it was an all-female college that provided a supportive community for women and then during the later half of the 20th century merged with the all-male Harvard University. This is far from the truth. In a 1969 letter to the then Radcliffe president, Mary Bunting, one Radcliffe student discusses the universal feeling of loneliness and lack of community at Radcliffe; “Radcliffe is a paradox...It calls itself a college, and yet does not educate its student body. Instead, it collects tuition, provides a place of residence, and sends its students to another college for classes.” As Katherine Park ‘72 remembers about her Radcliffe experience, “working from hindsight, I can most easily characterize what it was not. It was not a women’s college, in any sense that alumnae of Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, or Mount Holyoke would understand. It was not a community of women. In fact, as I remember it, it was not a community at all….I doubt if I was friends with more than a handful of women from other Radcliffe Houses. Unlike the students I later taught at Wellesley, I do not remember having any sense of pride in Radcliffe as a college.”

As Harvard discusses the need to change tradition and fight against cultural traditions that are “a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male,” it is ignoring the over one hundred year period in which women were fighting to be integrated in the University or to have a space of their own. It was this feeling that women had both not been given the adequate supports to achieve equality at Harvard nor had they been given communities to connect with one another, that led to two important developments in the early 1990’s. First, traveling to Cambridge for their thirty-fifth and fortieth reunions, the women who graduated with Radcliffe diplomas in ’53 and ’58, came to a striking conclusion that Harvard had long lacked communities to support women. Perhaps in an attempt to historically construct Radcliffe College as one such community, the Harvard reunion organizers in the early 90’s decided that women who graduated before Harvard and Radcliffe began to officially merge in 1977 would have closer ties with Radcliffe, the institution they received their diplomas from and the endowment that solicited their money. Ann Shapiro ’58, discusses how as these Radcliffe women were forced to socialize together and reminisce on their college days, there was something clearly wrong. Recalling how she felt following the reunion dinner held in Radcliffe Yard were Radcliffe President, Laura Wilson, addressed the alumnae, welcoming them back to the college, Shapiro remarks, “What college? I had graduated from a male-dominated institution called Harvard and was being welcomed back to a woman’s college called Radcliffe. Thank God everyone was wearing a large name tag hanging from an elasticized string around the neck. These were my classmates but both names and faces were unfamiliar. We had been lost to one another in Harvard’s male world.” It was in the aftermath of this realization that Shapiro and her classmates decided to mobilize. Over the course of the following year, the women of the classes of 1953 and 1958 who had attended that Radcliffe Reunion in 1993, incorporated themselves as the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard. As Shapiro writes:
We cannot change what happened to us, but if sexual discrimination still exists at Harvard, we must change things for the young women who are there now--those women students who may still feel the sting of unequal treatment. If today’s students are like we were, they may be like the proverbial fish who do not see the ocean; they may not see the sexism that surrounds them and instead blame themselves. As alumnae, we may be uniquely qualified to understand what may be wrong, and we are free to insist on reform. After all, what can they do to us now?

Many women attending Harvard at this time did feel deficiencies and inequalities at Harvard. That same year, motivated by many of the same realizations, the first sorority was established at Harvard. In 1993, a group of women recognized the need on Harvard’s campus for a group that would provide a supportive community for women on campus. Additionally, they realized that partnering with an international organization that had long supported elevating the status of women at Universities would help empower them. With these two goals in mind, the Zeta Xi chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta was founded in 1993. The need for women’s communities was not limited to a few individuals. Three years earlier, in the spring of 1990, college women had gathered in the Radcliffe Union for students, gathering over 1,000 signatures in an attempt to petition President Wilson to build a women’s center building. It would take another sixteen years to create a women’s center, and the current women’s center is located deep in the basement of a freshman dormitory. Their attempt to build a female-controlled space having failed, the undergraduate women of the early 90’s switched to a new tactic. In 1991, a group of women formed an all-female social club they called the Bee. Looking back, Amy Salhauer ‘91, a trustee of the Bee, told the Crimson that the reason for forming this group was to make “our own community for people who identify as women.” To Salhauer, “the legacy of having a space that was controlled by the women, to me, is a really proud legacy.” Another founding member of the Bee, J. Suzanne Mosher ‘91 explained, “the formation of the Bee served as a model for other clubs to follow. The premise was to provide women with the same opportunity to come together in a welcome space where individuals can be heard and find a pathway to leadership.”

Unlike the male-final clubs and fraternities which were recognized and supported by the school for hundreds of years, and have a history deeply interwoven with Harvard’s own, pre-dating even the construction of a residential house system, the women’s groups have no roots in Harvard’s far past. In recent writings about the final clubs, Harvard notes that the final clubs have “a very different relationship to the campus than was the case a generation ago, and it cannot be seriously disputed that the overall impact is negative.” What impactful change occurred “a generation ago” that could have contributed to this negative shift? In 1984, Harvard severed ties with the Final Clubs, the “single most enduring feature of student life in Harvard’s history.” Unlike the all-male groups, the women’s organizations emerged entirely independently from the school in order to fill a void that was felt by large numbers of undergraduate women. These groups were founded and built by women and for women, and the rapid growth of the women’s organization system at Harvard over the past twenty-five years reinforces the demand and value that these groups hold. By 2016, there were nine all-female social organizations at Harvard, four-sororities and five female finals clubs. The rapid expansion of these groups, both in membership size and number of organizations, shows that these communities lack the intention to be exclusive. The system of women’s organizations at Harvard is a dynamic one, responding and growing to the demands and values of the current students with the hope that every woman at Harvard is able to find a community where they feel accepted and included.