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The First Women in Harvard Yard Remember a Campus Built for Men

When women in the Class of 1976 became the first female first-years to live in Harvard Yard, they found both history and a campus still built for men.

Not long after Katherine Richardson ’76 moved into Grays Hall, men began knocking on her door.

They were not classmates. They were older alumni, curious enough about Harvard Yard’s newest residents to come see them for themselves.

“We had these old men coming and knocking on our dorm room doors just to see if there were really women in my room,” Richardson said.

For more than three centuries, Harvard Yard had been almost entirely male. That changed in the fall of 1972, when President Derek Bok approved a plan to house roughly 200 freshman women from the Class of 1976 in the Yard alongside about 1,000 men.

For some first-year women, the moment felt historic.

Carol J. Spack ’76 remembered walking into her room in Stoughton Hall for the first time.

“It wasn’t just moving into a building at this location,” she said. “We were making history.”

But the Yard had not been built with women in mind.

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Spack described the unusually large beds in Stoughton Hall, used to accommodate men much taller than she was. In Hollis Hall, where Marcia A. Angle ’76 lived, the closets were too short for dresses. Angle said she circulated a petition asking Harvard to install longer closet space.

“Seems a little comical in retrospect,” she said.

The petition did not lead to any immediate change, Angle said.

In Grays Hall, Richardson said janitors were shocked by the amount of toilet paper the women used. And in Thayer Hall, Maria T. Escalera ’76 and her floormates improvised in bathrooms designed for men.

“They had paid no attention to what women might need,” Escalera said. She added, “We used to all wash our underwear and hang them on the urinals. That’s what we had.”

Richardson said women in some dorms found another use for the urinals: They were the right height for shaving their legs.

“There was a good deal of accommodating,” she said.

Still, some women said the experience quickly began to feel ordinary.

“It was clear to us that this was an experiment,” Richardson said. “But, since we hadn’t known anything else, it was college.”

Elizabeth L. Haven ’76 said the change felt less like a break from tradition than the start of college life.

“I can see where it might have seemed like a very radical change,” she said. “But to us, it was just sort of a norm.”

The gender imbalance was harder to miss. The ratio in the Yard was about five men for every woman, and Natalie L. Wexler ’76 said it was immediately visible in the freshman dining hall.

“Walking in there was kind of like running a gauntlet,” she said. “There’d be a lot of stares from the guys.

The imbalance lingered beyond the dining hall. Katie Klapper ’76 wrote in a statement that the gender imbalance was harder to navigate than she had expected.

“If I had it to do again, I’d have chosen to live at the ‘Cliffe with dorm-mates of different ages and experience,” she wrote.

Beth P. Stephens ’76 said the uneven ratio cost her something she did not fully understand until later.

Source: The Harvard Crimson