Spring 1970 A group of Harvard and Radcliffe students volunteered for a radical social experiment: co-educational living. The student-led move came amid tumultuous cultural and political changes—the fight for civil rights and the sexual revolution, for starters—that were rapidly altering the lives of undergraduates. Classes and many extracurricular activities had been shared for years. Already gone, or fading fast, were the long-held parietal rules governing how men and women interacted in the Radcliffe dorms (e.g., curfews, sign-ins, and the much giggled-at “one foot on the floor at all times” requirement). Yet the dorms and dining rooms were still segregated; to eat with the men, women had to be signed in as “dates” through a personal invitation.
Amid these incongruities, and a Harvard-Radcliffe Policy Committee’s formal recommendation to College leaders, the test was launched. About 150 men from Adams, Lowell, and Winthrop Houses traded places with 150 women from what were then known as South, East, and North Houses. The swap yielded positive enough results that it was continued and expanded. By 1972 co-residency was a University-sanctioned option for undergraduates. As the Harvard-Radcliffe Policy Committee report lauding the “educational advantages” of permanent co-ed living and dining put it, such progressive arrangements ultimately enabled men and women “to view each other more as people than dating objects.”
