y is sellia payne kapashkin whose 1925 thesis was declared undoubtedly the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy was the first woman to rise through the ranks of the faculty to become in 1956 full professor in arts and sciences. this leads us to equity. the campaign of the last 40 years. it's been a long and complicated struggle, and it's still going on. to get there it has required protests and innovation. many of the changes came from mary bunting's years as radcliffe's president, 1959 through '72. facing what she called, quote, the climate of unexpectation for girls, which resulted in the waste of highly talented educ e

educated women power, buntings fought it. many of the changes moving women into the center of harvard's life began in her administration. a key one was pure innovation, the radcliffe institute for independent study, later the bunting, the origin of the institutions sponsoring the lecture this afternoon. beginning at the end of bunting's radcliffe years, the women's movement brought to the fore issues she had begun to address, and with this the fight of the undergraduate level became open. sparked by key reports on the status of women that began in 1971. you, my audience, are likely more familiar with the milestones than i am, but certain moments are key. 1967 when lament library opened to women. 1971, the non-merger merger, leading to the gender integration of the houses in the yard in the quadrangle.

it's striking to me that this agreement came just as radical women entered their celebration of international women's day with a week-long building takeover. 1975, the merger of radcliffe and harvard admissions. the critical date for me, 1977, when the 4-1 ratio of men to women, harvard men to women, ended. with sex blind admissions. women's numbers gradually were allowed to increase to reach parity, and this was achieved finally in 2007. in 1999 came the agreement ending harvard -- ending radcliffe as a degree granting body and bringing into being the radcliffe institute as we know it today. and in 2007 its first dean, drew gilpin faust, became president of harvard university.

[ applause ] f.a.s. in its under graduate and graduate admissions set a pattern for increasining proportions of women in the student bodies of professional schools. all of this came at a time of commitment, not just to women as a category, but to women in all their racial, ethnic, religious and sexual diversity. during these very same years the number of african-american and latina schools grew, and these were intertwined in a central way. it has been argued that while women in emboldened by the movement for women's liberation, the men making the decisions were likely persuaded by this power of the civil rights movement's arguments for equity. once you reject a quota for jews and attempt to remove the barriers that had discriminated against african-americans. how can you justify a quota for women or bar them from a

library? the struggle wasn't easy, nor was the outcome necessarily assured. what raised the fiercest opposition was the fight waged at the turn of the 1970s by students and n.o.w. to attain a 1-1 male-female ratio. listen to powerful dean of harvard freshman. when i hear -- when i see bright, well-educated but relatively dull housewives who attended the seven sisters, i honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance of males versus females at harvard. quite simply, i do not see highly educated women making startling strides and contrib e contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. this is 1971, i think. they are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married or having children. they will fail in their present role as women if they do. i'm sure that his niece, the

great meso frederica van stoody would have shaken her head at this if her schedule permitted. moreover, within his official peterson report of 1970, harv d harvard -- excuse me. is that me making that noise? no. harvard admission's dean chased peterson in 1971 opposed change the 4-1 ratio with all the vigor of his strong rhetoric, but the 1975 strauss committee report in favor of sex-blind admissions gave harvard's president the needed ammunition to gain faculty support. the university saw other real and symbolic changes during that time in the years following, and i want to name just a few. 1968 saw the first time a woman would walk through the front

door of the faculty club. 1970, the first woman elected to the board of overseers. look at them now. 1987, the first woman to attain high office in university administration. 1989, the entry of the first woman into the harvard corporation. 2007, the first woman to serve as president of the university. moving an institution towards equity turns out to be very hard work. preston faust has stated that it's easier to change an administration than a faculty, and in the recent period there's been real success at the administrative level. of the 16 members of the harvard council of teens, seven are women, and these include teens of the law school and the school of engineering and applied sciences. what is impressive is not just those who are at the top but also those at the next level.

seeing to the hard work of running the university. for example, of the 15 associates and assistants in the provost office, eight are women. opening the faculty to women has proved to be a more difficult task. harvard got a boost for the demand for more female professors came during a period of rapid growth in the faculty, allowing the number of women to rise. by 2001 there were 134 women. by 2008 the high point, 185 comprising roughly a quarter of the faculty. women remain more heavily bunched in the ranks of tenure track rather than tenured, but what is important is that there is now a clear tenure track system in place in the university which means promoting from within, but a senior vice provost judith singer reported to a "new york times" reporter, quote, senior faculty is hard to change because 95% of them were here last year. so it's mostly a function of who you can bring in.

there's still an old guard, to be honest for whom this, ie gender equity, is not a priority. barriers seem especially high in mathematics and the sciences which remain largely male domains. the math department's first tenured woman sophie morale arrived just two years ago, about the same time that the earth and planetary sciences department tenured its first woman. in physics and chemistry female professors remain few in number. as the hard-hitting 1991 report on the natural sciences chaired by barbara gross stated, issues go beyond tenure to engage the whole pipeline that feed women into the sciences. all of which pose special difficulties for women. further reports made it clear that changes are necessary in departments of government and economics to keep young faculty women from leaving harvard prior to the tenure decisions they

believe are stacked against them. although each professional school has great autonomy all seem to be moving in the same direction with varying degrees of fits and starts, yet the gap between proportions in student bodies and faculties remains significant. this is important not just for equity for the women seeking professional positions, but also because of the way the imbalance may work in many students' minds. i'm haunted by ruth hubbard's statement about the impact on her generation of radcliffe students of not being taught by women. sitting, she wrote, at the feet of harvard's great men may mean students do not awaken to the expectation that we might some day become great women. i'm also haunted by what we are not seeing, what we are not able to see. as an historian i'm aware of the

traps of present consciousness. slaves were granted freedom, citizenship and suffrage at the close of the civil war. the passage of the amendment for women's suffrage meant the struggle for freedom for women was unstoppable. world war i was the war to end all wars. as i read the more recent reports dealing with attaining faculty and graduate student equity, i become aware again of the unresolved issues linked to family formation and care giving. i'm remind eed of the remarkabl article inside men's careers. women and men have different biological clocks and different experiences as spouses and parents. this poses for women a special set of problems as they negotiate their lives in their adult years. to achieve equity requires that educational institutions provide women with a wide range of

services and a flexible career clock enabling them to balance work and care giving. to be gender blind about this is to be blind about the reality of many women's lives. what else do i worry about? right now it's the drum beat of popular culture's hypersexuality with its impact on high school students and undergraduates. it's the new mommy culture with its impossible demands that now pull women out of the still inflexible workforce. will the loss of distinctive women's institutions such as radcliffe college and the bunting leave women more vulnerable in the future? this is one of my concerns. what else is out there? put in the context of women and harvard, now 375 years in existence, what bars to true equity are now hiding in plain sight? today, compared with 25, 50 or 75 years ago, there's a lot to

celebrate, but there's a lot to try and change and a lot to worry about, too. yes, the history of women at harvard is complicated. [ applause ] >> now, we have time for questions and answers -- which helen has very generously agreed to participate n.would i like to ask you to identify yourself when you speak and to ask a question, not make a statement, and also to be as concise as possible so we can get as many voices speaking as we can. thank you. >> my name is susan ware, and getting ready for this lecture i pulled a favorite book off my

shelf, barbara solomon's "in the company of educated women" and i noticed that of her four themes, the fourth one was what she called the uneasy relationship between feminism and women's educational achievement. and i wondered if you felt that the word uneasy also applied to the relationship between radcliffe and feminism or if you had other words you might like to supply at different times? >> thanks for that wonderful question. yeah. i think that uneasy is a very good word. i like that. i'm sorry i didn't review that. we -- susan ware and i both benefited so much from barbara solomon's influence in our lives. and i think she got it right. it is an uneasy relationship.

let's just leave it there. who is next? >> nancy malchio, princeton university. does the history of radcliffe mean that the situation of women undergraduates, faculty and administrators at harvard today is less complicated than at princeton or yale that had no such history? more complicated or what would you say? >> nancy spent much of her professional life after graduate school as a harvard as a major force in princeton's administration, so i'm honored you are here today, nancy.

princeton, you know, had a woman's institution. evelyn college, and it lasted only ten years. i think had it been able to gather the resources it needed in the way that radcliffe was able, it would have had an important impact on princeton's life. it is complicating because i look around me and i know that there are many women here in this audience that are very loyal to the institution that educated them and probably feel a little bit bristly about some of the issues that i raised because in -- because in some way it might challenge their experience. each institution as it has faced

full co-education, as harvard now has full co-education, has a special experience. they are all different. you could -- i would love to engage you in a conversation about what happened at prince phono, because you know it better than anyone. were you there at beginning and worked through it. but i think it has been a great strength for harvard to have had such strong alumni for so many years, and it -- i hope it is a source of pride what is happened in the period that has followed, and i hope it's a source of pride also that with its tenure track system, harvard is now really addressing the question of the promotion of junior members of the faculty up, and

that's going to lead to more women on the faculty and a better balance. i don't know the proportions on the princeton faculty of women, but it's always seemed to me that you had some stellar figures there, and i -- and so i think it would -- one thing would be really interesting would be a more dynamic kind of conversation about this, which we can't have, but thank you for your question. >> hi. i'm megan mar shampt i was the fellow at radcliffe a few years ago, and i think i was a member of the last class to the be admitted under the radcliffe admissions office. i know i went to that office. famously margaret fuller was allowed to do research in the harvard library in 1843 and it's been writ enabout how the

undergraduates gawked at her never having seen a woman in their midst. do you know if it was 1843 not until 1767 when lament allowed women in. were women allowed to use harvard libraries as independent scholars in between that time? >> well, weidner library. you had the undergraduate. >> yes. >> libraries. weidner library was fully open to women. i don't know when that began, but probably always. and -- and as a main scholarly resource, and so that -- but in 1894 when harvard opened its graduate courses to women, i would imagine that the library went along. >> well, you know, i'm remembering that there are novels, you know, i think rona

jaffe's, whatever those are, class reunion, they talk about not being allowed to go into weidner. i think the radcliffe undergraduates were not -- >> no. >> no, is that wrong? >> please answer. >> i hope that's wrong. >> okay. >> someone will answer. >> good, i'm glad i'm wrong. >> i think miss jaffe may have gotten it wrong. >> i'm jean levanthal, harvard/radcliffe class of '63. we were certainly allowed into weidner. what i do remember from my undergraduate years is that you weren't allowed into the stacks, but that wasn't women, it was any undergraduate. wait a minute. wait a minute could you get permission from your thesis adviser and then you were allowed into the stacks. you had otherwise to sit and wait for them to bring you the books. that's now changed. it's open stacks. any undergraduate can walk into the stacks, but it's true. were you not allowed into lament because, of course, there was

the radhi libes, the radcliffe library that was the schlesinger library. why would you go to lament because it was full of all these smelly socks, right? i'm not sure it was open to midnight then. anyway, the other thing is i do think the graduate libraries were probably open, i don't know how far back. the other thing i wanted to mention, helen, was my class, harvard radcliffe '63 is the first class officially to have a harvard diploma, and you didn't mention it, but i have always wondered why, and the only reason i've ever -- it was way before co-educational living, just my diploma has puzy's signature above budget's signature, and i think it may relate to the fact that a few years earlier harvard college made their diplomas english rather than latin, and we suspected that it was a way to finesse the women and give them harvard -- harvard diplomas and then they wouldn't complain that they are in english.

>> my name is judy smith, and i am an historian and also was a radcliffe student from '66 to '70. i wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about your idea of the costs of invisibility. that was a very interesting idea to me, even as late as i was at radcliffe. so could you expand on that had a little bit. >> thank you, judy. the cost of invisibility. here's something that may have been fairly short lived because, you know, by 1910, the buildings were being built between shepherd and linehan, that i look out upon each day, the radcliffe dorms, and so radcliffe then became quite visible presence. early on, and -- and as i was

actually delivering this talk, i was thinking, well, some of what i may be saying may be the kind of thing you say for some years but not for others. like what was mrs. agassi saying? was she just talking to elliot and the corporation, and she said something else quietly to women? you begin to get a student life at radcliffe like every other place and then young women are no longer invisible. they are giving plays. they are doing all the things that people do. they have organizations. and participating. so it was something of its earliest years, but it meant a certain lack of assertion, i think, that had to do with the way that the education was carried on. as most of you know, in 1944

harvard and radcliffe merged classes and put them in the yard, so professors were no longer marching to the radcliffe yard in order to be able to give their lectures a second time, and this had to do with the fact that the men were away at the war so why talk to an empty classroom when you can have women in the classroom? and that never was changed after the war. there's a certain -- what i sense is a certain lack of assertion that i found, for example, at wellesley or at smith, mt. holyoke, about the power of women's presence and the value placed on those female faculty members that were teaching them, as well as the men. >> well, i just want to add an anecdotal thing which is when i arrived here i came by myself

from kansas city, missouri, and i took a cab from the airport and the cab driver couldn't find radcliffe. >> that's a wonderful story. it was invisible then. >> i'm gabriela schlesinger, radcliffe college. i'm asking my question with a particular perspective because for the last almost 19 years i've been working with a group of the alumni called the committee for the equality of women at harvard, largely concerned about the lack of tenured women faculty which is now only 23% of the faculty of arts and sciences. i wonder whether you think that the alumni can be marshalled in any effective way to produce more effective change among departments which may be particularly stagnant or reluctant to tenure women?

i kind of think i shouldn't interfere in this. i think that this is a domestic dispute that had best be carried on within the parties here. certainly something that i respect and i would urge, but that would be as an advocate for women's equity, not someone who can make a pronouncement, so my advocacy side says yes. my speaker side says you talk about in this gathering. i'm glad you raised the issue. >> i'm phyllis wilner, also class of 1963 with that -- >> it was a great year, wasn't it? >> i'm the class of '63. >> with the extra signature on the diploma, although our commencement was held in sanders theater, the women were not yet allowed to march in the yard,

but that year the harvard commencement got rained on. just to fill in a fact about lament that -- that -- pardon me for making a statement when i was supposed to ask a question. >> yes. >> the summer school opened lament to all comers, including women, and the radcliffe women who were enrolled in the harvard summer school were rather annoyed, to say the least, that it was the external women who had the summer access, of course, of any radcliffe woman attending the summer school had the access to lament during the summer school long before it was opened to women all year round. >> right. >> i remember that very well because i was a graduate student and could go into lament in the summer only. and there was also a -- a rumor, it may have just been a rumor because i was just a student, that a big paint job had to go

on in the bathrooms before the women entered, to deal with the graffiti. yes. >> susan falutti and holder of harvard and radcliffe stamped degree in 5081. might have been one of the last years that you got two stamps, and, first of all, helen, thank you for a lovely, thoughtful talk, and i loved your image of radcliffe as sort of -- was it a hostage which made me wonder about other situations like say barnard and columbia where -- did it work out differently? did columbia handle or did barr na -- barnard handle itself in a way that opened the doors differently for women? >> thanks for the question.

barnard always had its own faculty and that made a difference because that faculty could be women and men. so it wasn't quite as vulnera e vulnerable. it was a school within a university and, therefore, the woman's college of the university until columbia went co-education. >> barnard still exists. >> absolutely. barnard still exists and is very powerful and is a wonderful resource. it's interesting that barnard had a very long-term dean. i think she served from 1947 to '11, virginia guildersly and she was able to negotiate agreement that enabled barnard students to take courses in the graduate school in a way that was -- that

was unusual. and she also was pivotal in opening up professional schools to women earlier, for example, than in the case of harvard, so i think barnard was in a stronger position or it had stronger -- a stronger head in that position. and so, therefore, it has never been the kind of, quote, hostage. it's interesting to me, and maybe i mentioned this, that princeton established a woman's institution very similar to radcliffe but it didn't last but ten years and that's because unlike radcliffe which was able to get donors, as you can see by the substantial buildings here and in the quad, evelyn college wa't