When were women allowed in universities?

Answer 1

Difficult question to answer. Here are various sources with differing interpretations, or representations, of when (& how, & where) women were first enrolled as students at Harvard.

* * *

Two of the Seven Sister colleges made transitions during and after the 1960s. The first, Radcliffe College, merged with Harvard University. Beginning in 1963, students at Radcliffe received Harvard diplomas signed by the presidents of Radcliffe and Harvard and joint commencement exercises began in 1970. The same year, several Harvard and Radcliffe dormitories began swapping students experimentally and in 1972 full co-residence was instituted. The departments of athletics of both schools merged shortly thereafter. In 1977, Harvard and Radcliffe signed an agreement which put undergraduate women entirely in Harvard College. In 1999 Radcliffe College was dissolved and Harvard University assumed full responsibility over the affairs of female undergraduates. Radcliffe is now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Women's Studies at Harvard University. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

* * *

In 1874 Harvard faculty began to offer examinations but no instruction to women.

In 1894 the Harvard Annex was chartered as Radcliffe College, with the power to grant academic degrees. -No Small Courage, By Nancy F. Cott

http://books.google.com/books?id=wH81buiDNIMC&pg=RA3-PA514&lpg=RA3-PA514&dq=Harvard+began+admitting+women+undergraduate&source=web&ots=wZvJ36gL8R&sig=YeD0BVqJucwqr9ht66DXUKgvt30&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=8&ct=result#PRA3-PA513,M1

* * *

Harvard began admitting women to graduate programs in the 1940s, although it did not admit women to its undergraduate program until 1973. http://www.nwhp.org/news/drew_gilpin_faust.php

* * *

Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters schools, evolved from informal instruction offered to individual women or small groups of women by Harvard University

faculty in the 1870s. In 1879 a faculty group called the Harvard Annex made a full course of study available to women, despite resistance to coeducation from the university's administration. Following unsuccessful efforts to have women admitted directly to degree programs at Harvard, the Annex, which had incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, chartered Radcliffe College in 1894. The college was named for the colonial philanthropist Ann Radcliffe, who established the first scholarship fund at Harvard in 1643.

Until the 1960s Radcliffe operated as a coordinate college, drawing most of its instructors and other resources from Harvard. Radcliffe graduates, however, were not granted Harvard degrees until 1963. Diplomas from that time on were signed by the presidents of both Harvard and Radcliffe. Women undergraduates enrolled at Radcliffe were technically also enrolled at Harvard College, and instruction was coeducational.

Although its 1977 agreement with Harvard University called for the integration of select functions, Radcliffe College maintained a separate corporate identity for its property and endowments and continued to offer complementary educational and extracurricular programs for both undergraduate and graduate students, including career programs, a publishing course, and graduate-level workshops and seminars in women's studies.

In 1999 Radcliffe and Harvard formally merged, and a new school, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, was established. The institute focuses on Radcliffe's former fields of study and programs and also offers such new ones as nondegree educational programs and the study of women, gender, and society. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/256300/Harvard-University

* * *

From "Harvard's Womanless History":

Women were studying with Harvard faculty members at the "Harvard Annex" in 1879, 20 years before Henry Lee Higginson donated the money to build what was then called the Harvard Union (later to be transformed into Barker Center). Radcliffe College, chartered in 1894, predated the House system, the tutorial system, and most of the departments now resident in Barker Center. Because it never had its own faculty, its instructors--and sometimes its presidents--were drawn from the Harvard faculty. Radcliffe's history always has been an essential part of Harvard's history, yet few of our custodians of the past have acknowledged that.

. . .

In the 1940s (above), undergraduate women lived in dormitories at the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Not until the spring of 1970 did Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges experiment with coresidential living.

. . .

Part of the problem is that the history of women at Harvard is both extraordinarily long and exasperatingly complex. Does the history of undergraduate women at Harvard begin with the Women's Education Association in 1872, the establishment of the Harvard Annex in 1879, the chartering of Radcliffe College in 1894, the merging of classroom instruction in 1943, the awarding of Harvard degrees to Radcliffe students in 1963, or some time earlier or later?

. . .

Not long after the Barker Center dedication, Boston newspapers were full of plans for a gala event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the integration of women into the Harvard freshman dormitories in 1972. Under the direction of Harry Lewis, dean of Harvard College, the College organized seminars for undergraduates, published an expensive picture book honoring recent alumnae, students, and faculty members, and--in a moving ceremony--dedicated a new gate into the Yard to women. Yet where was Radcliffe, some wondered, in this celebration of Harvard's past? The inscriptions on the new gate added to the puzzlement. To the right was a cryptic quotation from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, who died in 1672, to the left a statement, beautifully engraved in gold, explaining that the gate "was dedicated twenty-five years after women students first moved into Harvard Yard in September of 1972." Intentionally or not, the organizers left a gaping hole between Bradstreet's death and the integration of Harvard dormitories 300 years later.

. . .

Walking into the Yard the Monday after the dedication of the gate, I saw two first-year women looking at the plaques. One of them had attended the dedication and was very excited about the day, but when I asked her what had happened in 1972, she said, "That was the year female students were first admitted to Harvard!" She was not alone in her confusion. Before the dedication of the gate, I attended a luncheon where a female faculty member who should have known better announced that the College was about to celebrate the "twenty-fifth anniversary of co-education at Harvard." A few days later, a professor in my department used the same newly invented anniversary to comfort me on the absence of women in the Barker Center brochure. "After all, coeducation at Harvard is only 25 years old," he reasoned. Ironically, the very effort to add women to Harvard's public history erased a full century of their presence.

. . .

In an exhibit mounted in November 1998 in conjunction with the conference "Gender at the Gates: New Perspectives on Harvard and Radcliffe History," Harvard archivists Patrice Donaghue, Robin McElheny, and Brian Sullivan took an even more innovative approach. Their introduction offers an expansive view of women's history:

Q: Since when have there been women at Harvard?

A: From the establishment of the "College at Newtowne" in 1636 to the present, the Harvard community has included women.

Q: Then where can we find them?

A: Everywhere--from the Yard dormitories, where they swept the halls and made the beds, to the library, where they cataloged the books and dusted the shelves--and nowhere, their documentary traces hidden between the entries in directories that include only faculty and officers, or missing from the folders of correspondence that they typed and filed.

Despite the obvious problem with sources, the archivists were astonished at how much they could document once they put their minds to it. "From our initial fear that an exhibition on women at Harvard would barely fill one display case," they wrote, "we found that we could amass enough evidence to fill twice as many cases as we have at our disposal." Vivid examples of such material turned up in the booklet Women in Lamont published last May by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Task Force on Women and Leadership. Using old Crimson articles, photographs, and "Cliffe" songs, the designers vividly recreated the controversy in the 1960s over admitting female students to Lamont Library.

. . .

Radcliffe president Matina Horner signed a "nonmerger merger" agreement with Harvard president Derek Bok in 1971

. . .

In 1920, the appearance of women in a photograph of students from the new Graduate School of Education underlines the fact that the school was "the first Harvard department to admit men and women on equal terms." In 1948, Helen Maud Cam "becomes the University's first tenured woman."

. . .

female students moved into Winthrop House in 1970

"Harvard's Womanless History" http://harvardmagazine.com/1999/11/womanless.html

* * *

1879 -- Harvard "Annex" opened in Cambridge, affiliated with Harvard (later Radcliffe)

1950s --Majority of Seven Sisters Colleges with male presidents; Harvard, Yale and Princeton appoint their first women full professors

1970 -- Radcliffe ceases to exist as an instruction-giving entity; single admissions policy established at Harvard for men and women http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/learn/timelines/women.htm

* * *

While there were a few coeducational colleges (such as Oberlin College founded in 1833, Antioch College in 1853, and Bates College in 1855), most colleges and universities of high standing at that time were exclusively for men. The first generally-accepted coordinate college, H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, (with Tulane University), was founded in 1886, and followed a year later by Evelyn College for Women, the coordinate college for Princeton University. The model was quickly duplicated at other prestigious universities. Notable nineteenth century coordinate colleges included Barnard (with Columbia University), Pembroke (with Brown University), and Radcliffe College (with Harvard University). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

* * *

New York Times article in 1920:

"6,000 AT HARVARD, A RECORD; Women Admitted for First Time to a Regular Department." New York Times, September 28, 1920, Tuesday. Section: Business & Finance, Page 24, 100 words. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9800E0DA1F31E433A2575BC2A96F9C946195D6CF

* * *

Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, asserts, on p. 88, that Harvard began admitting women in 1976. Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, p88. http://books.google.com/books?id=v-L7lQjrw54C&pg=PP1&dq=Feminist+Legal+Theory,++By+Nancy+Levit,+Robert+R.+M.+Verchick,+Martha+Minow&ei=uZkLScXNAomUzASqpbzmAw#PPA88,M1

* * *

Harvard began to administer Radcliffe's athletics program in 1972-73, and men's and women's admissions were combined for the class entering in the fall of 1975. http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/documents/sa-tx-0201.asp

* * *

Hopkins welcomed females. It began admitting women when it was created in 1893 with funds from a group of women who specified that women be admitted on equal grounds with men. Harvard, however, was very slow to start admitting women, accepting its first female in 1945. I did not even apply to Harvard Medical School, as there was a rumor among the Smith premeds that Harvard had no bathrooms for female students http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/117/20/4617

* * *

See: Harvard A to Z, By John T. Bethell, Richard M. Hunt, Robert Shenton, p. 147. http://books.google.com/books?id=vR40r6zIFroC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Harvard+first+admitted+women+undergraduates+in&source=web&ots=ks6IJdu0Nl&sig=qujbWUnwKObmIcQ2RalumqTViRc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result

* * *

See: In the Company of Educated Women, By Barbara Miller Solomon, pp 54-56.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1Q1NQf-FgCAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=In+the+Company+of+Educated+Women,+By+Barbara+Miller+Solomon&ei=UJoLSaCiE5TEzATGr6jkAw#PPA54,M1

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300036396

* * *

Harvard Business School did not begin admitting women until 1978 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081024114451AAWKzfM

* * *

First women in Harvard Law School (HLS): 13 women enrolled in the 500-person law school class of 1953 http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=348014

* * *

In the fall of 1963, eight women enrolled in the MBA degree program at Harvard Business School as fully matriculated students and the "daring experiment" begun by Radcliffe College in 1937 ended. By the 1965 graduation, the MBA, DBA, and Executive Education programs at HBS were fully co-educational.

http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/daring/co-education.html

* * *

This article has some interesting findings, according to the abstract:

"Many of Karabel"s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn"t an idealistic response to the Civil Rights Movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting "the second sex"; Harvard had a systematic quota on "intellectuals" until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century."* * *

More Recently:

1990

The Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination ruled last March that it had no jurisdiction to decide the case of a female student seeking admission to the Fly Club, one of Harvard University's nine all-male social clubs. Yale's most exclusive secret society, Skull & Bones, which numbers President George Bush as a member, recently voted to continue excluding women. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5D71539F937A35754C0A966958260

* * *

TODAY

More women than men admitted to Class of '08

Records set for percentages of Asian Americans, African Americans,and Latinos admitted

For the first time in Harvard's history, women comprise more than 50 percent of the students admitted to the freshman class.

Admitted students were notified April 1 by letter and by e-mail.

Women outnumbered men by only three: 1,016 to 1,013.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.08/03-admissions.html

* * *

Difficult question to answer. Here are various sources with differing interpretations, or representations, of when (& how, & where) women were first enrolled as students at Harvard.

* * *

Two of the Seven Sister colleges made transitions during and after the 1960s. The first, Radcliffe College, merged with Harvard University. Beginning in 1963, students at Radcliffe received Harvard diplomas signed by the presidents of Radcliffe and Harvard and joint commencement exercises began in 1970. The same year, several Harvard and Radcliffe dormitories began swapping students experimentally and in 1972 full co-residence was instituted. The departments of athletics of both schools merged shortly thereafter. In 1977, Harvard and Radcliffe signed an agreement which put undergraduate women entirely in Harvard College. In 1999 Radcliffe College was dissolved and Harvard University assumed full responsibility over the affairs of female undergraduates. Radcliffe is now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Women's Studies at Harvard University. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

* * *

In 1874 Harvard faculty began to offer examinations but no instruction to women.

In 1894 the Harvard Annex was chartered as Radcliffe College, with the power to grant academic degrees. -No Small Courage, By Nancy F. Cott

http://books.google.com/books?id=wH81buiDNIMC&pg=RA3-PA514&lpg=RA3-PA514&dq=Harvard+began+admitting+women+undergraduate&source=web&ots=wZvJ36gL8R&sig=YeD0BVqJucwqr9ht66DXUKgvt30&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=8&ct=result#PRA3-PA513,M1

* * *

Harvard began admitting women to graduate programs in the 1940s, although it did not admit women to its undergraduate program until 1973. http://www.nwhp.org/news/drew_gilpin_faust.php

* * *

Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters schools, evolved from informal instruction offered to individual women or small groups of women by Harvard University

faculty in the 1870s. In 1879 a faculty group called the Harvard Annex made a full course of study available to women, despite resistance to coeducation from the university's administration. Following unsuccessful efforts to have women admitted directly to degree programs at Harvard, the Annex, which had incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, chartered Radcliffe College in 1894. The college was named for the colonial philanthropist Ann Radcliffe, who established the first scholarship fund at Harvard in 1643.

Until the 1960s Radcliffe operated as a coordinate college, drawing most of its instructors and other resources from Harvard. Radcliffe graduates, however, were not granted Harvard degrees until 1963. Diplomas from that time on were signed by the presidents of both Harvard and Radcliffe. Women undergraduates enrolled at Radcliffe were technically also enrolled at Harvard College, and instruction was coeducational.

Although its 1977 agreement with Harvard University called for the integration of select functions, Radcliffe College maintained a separate corporate identity for its property and endowments and continued to offer complementary educational and extracurricular programs for both undergraduate and graduate students, including career programs, a publishing course, and graduate-level workshops and seminars in women's studies.

In 1999 Radcliffe and Harvard formally merged, and a new school, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, was established. The institute focuses on Radcliffe's former fields of study and programs and also offers such new ones as nondegree educational programs and the study of women, gender, and society. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/256300/Harvard-University

* * *

From Harvard's Womanless History:

Women were studying with Harvard faculty members at the "Harvard Annex" in 1879, 20 years before Henry Lee Higginson donated the money to build what was then called the Harvard Union (later to be transformed into Barker Center). Radcliffe College, chartered in 1894, predated the House system, the tutorial system, and most of the departments now resident in Barker Center. Because it never had its own faculty, its instructors--and sometimes its presidents--were drawn from the Harvard faculty. Radcliffe's history always has been an essential part of Harvard's history, yet few of our custodians of the past have acknowledged that.

. . .

In the 1940s (above), undergraduate women lived in dormitories at the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Not until the spring of 1970 did Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges experiment with coresidential living.

. . .

Part of the problem is that the history of women at Harvard is both extraordinarily long and exasperatingly complex. Does the history of undergraduate women at Harvard begin with the Women's Education Association in 1872, the establishment of the Harvard Annex in 1879, the chartering of Radcliffe College in 1894, the merging of classroom instruction in 1943, the awarding of Harvard degrees to Radcliffe students in 1963, or some time earlier or later?

. . .

Not long after the Barker Center dedication, Boston newspapers were full of plans for a gala event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the integration of women into the Harvard freshman dormitories in 1972. Under the direction of Harry Lewis, dean of Harvard College, the College organized seminars for undergraduates, published an expensive picture book honoring recent alumnae, students, and faculty members, and--in a moving ceremony--dedicated a new gate into the Yard to women. Yet where was Radcliffe, some wondered, in this celebration of Harvard's past? The inscriptions on the new gate added to the puzzlement. To the right was a cryptic quotation from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, who died in 1672, to the left a statement, beautifully engraved in gold, explaining that the gate "was dedicated twenty-five years after women students first moved into Harvard Yard in September of 1972." Intentionally or not, the organizers left a gaping hole between Bradstreet's death and the integration of Harvard dormitories 300 years later.

. . .

Walking into the Yard the Monday after the dedication of the gate, I saw two first-year women looking at the plaques. One of them had attended the dedication and was very excited about the day, but when I asked her what had happened in 1972, she said, "That was the year female students were first admitted to Harvard!" She was not alone in her confusion. Before the dedication of the gate, I attended a luncheon where a female faculty member who should have known better announced that the College was about to celebrate the "twenty-fifth anniversary of co-education at Harvard." A few days later, a professor in my department used the same newly invented anniversary to comfort me on the absence of women in the Barker Center brochure. "After all, coeducation at Harvard is only 25 years old," he reasoned. Ironically, the very effort to add women to Harvard's public history erased a full century of their presence.

. . .

In an exhibit mounted in November 1998 in conjunction with the conference "Gender at the Gates: New Perspectives on Harvard and Radcliffe History," Harvard archivists Patrice Donaghue, Robin McElheny, and Brian Sullivan took an even more innovative approach. Their introduction offers an expansive view of women's history:

Q: Since when have there been women at Harvard?

A: From the establishment of the "College at Newtowne" in 1636 to the present, the Harvard community has included women.

Q: Then where can we find them?

A: Everywhere--from the Yard dormitories, where they swept the halls and made the beds, to the library, where they cataloged the books and dusted the shelves--and nowhere, their documentary traces hidden between the entries in directories that include only faculty and officers, or missing from the folders of correspondence that they typed and filed.

Despite the obvious problem with sources, the archivists were astonished at how much they could document once they put their minds to it. "From our initial fear that an exhibition on women at Harvard would barely fill one display case," they wrote, "we found that we could amass enough evidence to fill twice as many cases as we have at our disposal." Vivid examples of such material turned up in the booklet Women in Lamont published last May by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Task Force on Women and Leadership. Using old Crimson articles, photographs, and "Cliffe" songs, the designers vividly recreated the controversy in the 1960s over admitting female students to Lamont Library.

. . .

Radcliffe president Matina Horner signed a "nonmerger merger" agreement with Harvard president Derek Bok in 1971

. . .

In 1920, the appearance of women in a photograph of students from the new Graduate School of Education underlines the fact that the school was "the first Harvard department to admit men and women on equal terms." In 1948, Helen Maud Cam "becomes the University's first tenured woman."

female students movedinto Winthrop House in 1970

Harvard's Womanless History http://harvardmagazine.com/1999/11/womanless.html

* * *

1879 -- Harvard "Annex" opened in Cambridge, affiliated with Harvard (later Radcliffe)

1950s --Majority of Seven Sisters Colleges with male presidents; Harvard, Yale and Princeton appoint their first women full professors

1970 -- Radcliffe ceases to exist as an instruction-giving entity; single admissions policy established at Harvard for men and women http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/learn/timelines/women.htm

* * *

While there were a few coeducational colleges (such as Oberlin College founded in 1833, Antioch College in 1853, and Bates College in 1855), most colleges and universities of high standing at that time were exclusively for men. The first generally-accepted coordinate college, H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, (with Tulane University), was founded in 1886, and followed a year later by Evelyn College for Women, the coordinate college for Princeton University. The model was quickly duplicated at other prestigious universities. Notable nineteenth century coordinate colleges included Barnard (with Columbia University), Pembroke (with Brown University), and Radcliffe College (with Harvard University). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

* * *

New York Times article in 1920:

"6,000 AT HARVARD, A RECORD; Women Admitted for First Time to a Regular Department." New York Times, September 28, 1920, Tuesday. Section: Business & Finance, Page 24, 100 words. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9800E0DA1F31E433A2575BC2A96F9C946195D6CF

* * *

Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, asserts, on p. 88, that Harvard began admitting women in 1976. Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, p88. http://books.google.com/books?id=v-L7lQjrw54C&pg=PP1&dq=Feminist+Legal+Theory,++By+Nancy+Levit,+Robert+R.+M.+Verchick,+Martha+Minow&ei=uZkLScXNAomUzASqpbzmAw#PPA88,M1

* * *

Harvard began to administer Radcliffe's athletics program in 1972-73, and men's and women's admissions were combined for the class entering in the fall of 1975. http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/documents/sa-tx-0201.asp

* * *

Hopkins welcomed females. It began admitting women when it was created in 1893 with funds from a group of women who specified that women be admitted on equal grounds with men. Harvard, however, was very slow to start admitting women, accepting its first female in 1945. I did not even apply to Harvard Medical School, as there was a rumor among the Smith premeds that Harvard had no bathrooms for female students http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/117/20/4617

* * *

See: Harvard A to Z, By John T. Bethell, Richard M. Hunt, Robert Shenton, p. 147. http://books.google.com/books?id=vR40r6zIFroC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Harvard+first+admitted+women+undergraduates+in&source=web&ots=ks6IJdu0Nl&sig=qujbWUnwKObmIcQ2RalumqTViRc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result

* * *

See: In the Company of Educated Women, By Barbara Miller Solomon, pp 54-56.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1Q1NQf-FgCAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=In+the+Company+of+Educated+Women,+By+Barbara+Miller+Solomon&ei=UJoLSaCiE5TEzATGr6jkAw#PPA54,M1

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300036396

* * *

Harvard Business School did not begin admitting women until 1978 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081024114451AAWKzfM

* * *

First women in Harvard Law School (HLS): 13 women enrolled in the 500-person law school class of 1953 http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=348014

* * *

In the fall of 1963, eight women enrolled in the MBA degree program at Harvard Business School as fully matriculated students and the "daring experiment" begun by Radcliffe College in 1937 ended. By the 1965 graduation, the MBA, DBA, and Executive Education programs at HBS were fully co-educational.

http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/daring/co-education.html

* * *

This article has some interesting findings, according to the abstract:

"Many of Karabel"s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn"t an idealistic response to the civil rights movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting "the second sex"; Harvard had a systematic quota on "intellectuals" until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century."* * *

More Recently:

1990

The Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination ruled last March that it had no jurisdiction to decide the case of a female student seeking admission to the Fly Club, one of Harvard University's nine all-male social clubs. Yale's most exclusive secret society, Skull & Bones, which numbers President George Bush as a member, recently voted to continue excluding women. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5D71539F937A35754C0A966958260

* * *

TODAY

More women than men admitted to Class of '08

Records set for percentages of Asian Americans, African Americans,and Latinos admitted

For the first time in Harvard's history, women comprise more than 50 percent of the students admitted to the freshman class.

Admitted students were notified April 1 by letter and by e-mail.

Women outnumbered men by only three: 1,016 to 1,013.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.08/03-admissions.html

* * *

Difficult question to answer. Here are various sources with differing interpretations, or representations, of when (& how, & where) women were first enrolled as students at Harvard.

* * *

Two of the Seven Sister colleges made transitions during and after the 1960s. The first, Radcliffe College, merged with Harvard University. Beginning in 1963, students at Radcliffe received Harvard diplomas signed by the presidents of Radcliffe and Harvard and joint commencement exercises began in 1970. The same year, several Harvard and Radcliffe dormitories began swapping students experimentally and in 1972 full co-residence was instituted. The departments of athletics of both schools merged shortly thereafter. In 1977, Harvard and Radcliffe signed an agreement which put undergraduate women entirely in Harvard College. In 1999 Radcliffe College was dissolved and Harvard University assumed full responsibility over the affairs of female undergraduates. Radcliffe is now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Women's Studies at Harvard University. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

* * *

In 1874 Harvard faculty began to offer examinations but no instruction to women.

In 1894 the Harvard Annex was chartered as Radcliffe College, with the power to grant academic degrees. -No Small Courage, By Nancy F. Cott

http://books.google.com/books?id=wH81buiDNIMC&pg=RA3-PA514&lpg=RA3-PA514&dq=Harvard+began+admitting+women+undergraduate&source=web&ots=wZvJ36gL8R&sig=YeD0BVqJucwqr9ht66DXUKgvt30&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=8&ct=result#PRA3-PA513,M1

* * *

Harvard began admitting women to graduate programs in the 1940s, although it did not admit women to its undergraduate program until 1973. http://www.nwhp.org/news/drew_gilpin_faust.php

* * *

Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters schools, evolved from informal instruction offered to individual women or small groups of women by Harvard University

faculty in the 1870s. In 1879 a faculty group called the Harvard Annex made a full course of study available to women, despite resistance to coeducation from the university's administration. Following unsuccessful efforts to have women admitted directly to degree programs at Harvard, the Annex, which had incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, chartered Radcliffe College in 1894. The college was named for the colonial philanthropist Ann Radcliffe, who established the first scholarship fund at Harvard in 1643.

Until the 1960s Radcliffe operated as a coordinate college, drawing most of its instructors and other resources from Harvard. Radcliffe graduates, however, were not granted Harvard degrees until 1963. Diplomas from that time on were signed by the presidents of both Harvard and Radcliffe. Women undergraduates enrolled at Radcliffe were technically also enrolled at Harvard College, and instruction was coeducational.

Although its 1977 agreement with Harvard University called for the integration of select functions, Radcliffe College maintained a separate corporate identity for its property and endowments and continued to offer complementary educational and extracurricular programs for both undergraduate and graduate students, including career programs, a publishing course, and graduate-level workshops and seminars in women's studies.

In 1999 Radcliffe and Harvard formally merged, and a new school, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, was established. The institute focuses on Radcliffe's former fields of study and programs and also offers such new ones as nondegree educational programs and the study of women, gender, and society. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/256300/Harvard-University

* * *

From Harvard's Womanless History:

Women were studying with Harvard faculty members at the "Harvard Annex" in 1879, 20 years before Henry Lee Higginson donated the money to build what was then called the Harvard Union (later to be transformed into Barker Center). Radcliffe College, chartered in 1894, predated the House system, the tutorial system, and most of the departments now resident in Barker Center. Because it never had its own faculty, its instructors--and sometimes its presidents--were drawn from the Harvard faculty. Radcliffe's history always has been an essential part of Harvard's history, yet few of our custodians of the past have acknowledged that.

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In the 1940s (above), undergraduate women lived in dormitories at the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Not until the spring of 1970 did Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges experiment with coresidential living.

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Part of the problem is that the history of women at Harvard is both extraordinarily long and exasperatingly complex. Does the history of undergraduate women at Harvard begin with the Women's Education Association in 1872, the establishment of the Harvard Annex in 1879, the chartering of Radcliffe College in 1894, the merging of classroom instruction in 1943, the awarding of Harvard degrees to Radcliffe students in 1963, or some time earlier or later?

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Not long after the Barker Center dedication, Boston newspapers were full of plans for a gala event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the integration of women into the Harvard freshman dormitories in 1972. Under the direction of Harry Lewis, dean of Harvard College, the College organized seminars for undergraduates, published an expensive picture book honoring recent alumnae, students, and faculty members, and--in a moving ceremony--dedicated a new gate into the Yard to women. Yet where was Radcliffe, some wondered, in this celebration of Harvard's past? The inscriptions on the new gate added to the puzzlement. To the right was a cryptic quotation from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, who died in 1672, to the left a statement, beautifully engraved in gold, explaining that the gate "was dedicated twenty-five years after women students first moved into Harvard Yard in September of 1972." Intentionally or not, the organizers left a gaping hole between Bradstreet's death and the integration of Harvard dormitories 300 years later.

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Walking into the Yard the Monday after the dedication of the gate, I saw two first-year women looking at the plaques. One of them had attended the dedication and was very excited about the day, but when I asked her what had happened in 1972, she said, "That was the year female students were first admitted to Harvard!" She was not alone in her confusion. Before the dedication of the gate, I attended a luncheon where a female faculty member who should have known better announced that the College was about to celebrate the "twenty-fifth anniversary of co-education at Harvard." A few days later, a professor in my department used the same newly invented anniversary to comfort me on the absence of women in the Barker Center brochure. "After all, coeducation at Harvard is only 25 years old," he reasoned. Ironically, the very effort to add women to Harvard's public history erased a full century of their presence.

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In an exhibit mounted in November 1998 in conjunction with the conference "Gender at the Gates: New Perspectives on Harvard and Radcliffe History," Harvard archivists Patrice Donaghue, Robin McElheny, and Brian Sullivan took an even more innovative approach. Their introduction offers an expansive view of women's history:

Q: Since when have there been women at Harvard?

A: From the establishment of the "College at Newtowne" in 1636 to the present, the Harvard community has included women.

Q: Then where can we find them?

A: Everywhere--from the Yard dormitories, where they swept the halls and made the beds, to the library, where they cataloged the books and dusted the shelves--and nowhere, their documentary traces hidden between the entries in directories that include only faculty and officers, or missing from the folders of correspondence that they typed and filed.

Despite the obvious problem with sources, the archivists were astonished at how much they could document once they put their minds to it. "From our initial fear that an exhibition on women at Harvard would barely fill one display case," they wrote, "we found that we could amass enough evidence to fill twice as many cases as we have at our disposal." Vivid examples of such material turned up in the booklet Women in Lamont published last May by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Task Force on Women and Leadership. Using old Crimson articles, photographs, and "Cliffe" songs, the designers vividly recreated the controversy in the 1960s over admitting female students to Lamont Library.

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Radcliffe president Matina Horner signed a "nonmerger merger" agreement with Harvard president Derek Bok in 1971

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In 1920, the appearance of women in a photograph of students from the new Graduate School of Education underlines the fact that the school was "the first Harvard department to admit men and women on equal terms." In 1948, Helen Maud Cam "becomes the University's first tenured woman."

female students movedinto Winthrop House in 1970

Harvard's Womanless History http://harvardmagazine.com/1999/11/womanless.html

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1879 -- Harvard "Annex" opened in Cambridge, affiliated with Harvard (later Radcliffe)

1950s --Majority of Seven Sisters Colleges with male presidents; Harvard, Yale and Princeton appoint their first women full professors

1970 -- Radcliffe ceases to exist as an instruction-giving entity; single admissions policy established at Harvard for men and women http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/learn/timelines/women.htm

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While there were a few coeducational colleges (such as Oberlin College founded in 1833, Antioch College in 1853, and Bates College in 1855), most colleges and universities of high standing at that time were exclusively for men. The first generally-accepted coordinate college, H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, (with Tulane University), was founded in 1886, and followed a year later by Evelyn College for Women, the coordinate college for Princeton University. The model was quickly duplicated at other prestigious universities. Notable nineteenth century coordinate colleges included Barnard (with Columbia University), Pembroke (with Brown University), and Radcliffe College (with Harvard University). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States

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New York Times article in 1920:

"6,000 AT HARVARD, A RECORD; Women Admitted for First Time to a Regular Department." New York Times, September 28, 1920, Tuesday. Section: Business & Finance, Page 24, 100 words. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9800E0DA1F31E433A2575BC2A96F9C946195D6CF

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Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, asserts, on p. 88, that Harvard began admitting women in 1976. Feminist Legal Theory, By Nancy Levit, Robert R. M. Verchick, Martha Minow, p88. http://books.google.com/books?id=v-L7lQjrw54C&pg=PP1&dq=Feminist+Legal+Theory,++By+Nancy+Levit,+Robert+R.+M.+Verchick,+Martha+Minow&ei=uZkLScXNAomUzASqpbzmAw#PPA88,M1

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Harvard began to administer Radcliffe's athletics program in 1972-73, and men's and women's admissions were combined for the class entering in the fall of 1975. http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/documents/sa-tx-0201.asp

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Hopkins welcomed females. It began admitting women when it was created in 1893 with funds from a group of women who specified that women be admitted on equal grounds with men. Harvard, however, was very slow to start admitting women, accepting its first female in 1945. I did not even apply to Harvard Medical School, as there was a rumor among the Smith premeds that Harvard had no bathrooms for female students http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/117/20/4617

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See: Harvard A to Z, By John T. Bethell, Richard M. Hunt, Robert Shenton, p. 147. http://books.google.com/books?id=vR40r6zIFroC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Harvard+first+admitted+women+undergraduates+in&source=web&ots=ks6IJdu0Nl&sig=qujbWUnwKObmIcQ2RalumqTViRc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result

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See: In the Company of Educated Women, By Barbara Miller Solomon, pp 54-56.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1Q1NQf-FgCAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=In+the+Company+of+Educated+Women,+By+Barbara+Miller+Solomon&ei=UJoLSaCiE5TEzATGr6jkAw#PPA54,M1

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300036396

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Harvard Business School did not begin admitting women until 1978 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081024114451AAWKzfM

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First women in Harvard Law School (HLS): 13 women enrolled in the 500-person law school class of 1953 http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=348014

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In the fall of 1963, eight women enrolled in the MBA degree program at Harvard Business School as fully matriculated students and the "daring experiment" begun by Radcliffe College in 1937 ended. By the 1965 graduation, the MBA, DBA, and Executive Education programs at HBS were fully co-educational.

http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/daring/co-education.html

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This article has some interesting findings, according to the abstract:

"Many of Karabel"s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn't an idealistic response to the civil rights movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting "the second sex"; Harvard had a systematic quota on "intellectuals" until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century."* * *

More Recently:

1990

The Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination ruled last March that it had no jurisdiction to decide the case of a female student seeking admission to the Fly Club, one of Harvard University's nine all-male social clubs. Yale's most exclusive secret society, Skull & Bones, which numbers President George Bush as a member, recently voted to continue excluding women. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5D71539F937A35754C0A966958260

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TODAY

More women than men admitted to Class of '08

Records set for percentages of Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos admitted

For the first time in Harvard's history, women comprise more than 50 percent of the students admitted to the freshman class.

Admitted students were notified April 1 by letter and by e-mail.

Women outnumbered men by only three: 1,016 to 1,013.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.08/03-admissions.html

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This research was compiled by Genève Gil on Friday, October 31, 2008.