The Women's Entrance

The College (and College song) transformed

One of two plaques at either side of the new gate quotes testimony of an earlier settler on alien ground. The plaque is the work of stonecutter John Hegenauer of Rhode Island. Photograph by Flint Born

Among the events constituting "A Celebration of Women at Harvard College" on October 4 was the dedication of a newish gate--by Canaday Hall, opposite the Science Center--breaching the brick and ironwork fence around Harvard Yard. Unlike neighboring gates, its ornamental pickets are topped by tulips, not by the points of spears.

Wind-whipped balloons affixed here and there added to the animation of the cheerful scene as more than 300 graduates, faculty, and friends gathered at the gate to help mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of full coresidence. Radcliffe women began attending Harvard classes in 1943, got Harvard degrees starting in 1963, and in 1970 moved into the River Houses, welcoming, in turn, resident men at the Quad; but it was not until 1972 that the dormitories of Harvard Yard housed resident women undergraduates ("Coresidence: An Anniversary," September-October, page 75). Several of the pioneering 200 women of the class of '76 were on hand to recall those stirring times.

Dedicated last fall, this gate by Canaday Hall commemorates 25 years of coresidence in Harvard Yard. Photograph by Flint Born

"We are celebrating not merely the anniversary of coresidence," said Harry R. Lewis '68, Ph.D. '74, dean of Harvard College, "but all of the changes that have occurred for women over the years since 1972, a period of change that will not be matched by anything likely to happen over the next 25 years of Harvard's history." Joining Lewis on a platform at the dedication were presidents Neil L. Rudenstine and Linda S. Wilson; Renée Landers '77, former president of the Board of Overseers; Porter University professor Helen Vendler; Jeremy R. Knowles, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Cambridge mayor Sheila Doyle Russell; and Marie Kargman, A.M. '51, first to suggest the dedication of a Harvard gate to women.

Top: A spread from 25: A Celebration of Women at Harvard College, an opulent 40-page publication presenting interviews with 25 women students, alumnae, or faculty members, along with charts and graphs showing some ways in which, since 1972, "women's full inclusion in the life of the Harvard community has changed the College dramatically." They comprise 48.5 percent of the class of 2001, for instance. Harvard printed 35,000 copies of the publication for distribution: at the gate dedication, and to all undergraduates, admissions interviewers, feeder high schools, fundraisers, and 9,000 women donors across all academic classes. Featured here is Lamelle Rawlins '99, of Charleston, Illinois, and Adams House, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, the first woman to hold that job. Bottom: The cover features Helen Shaw '98, of Lawrence, Kansas, and Lowell House, president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club. WIDENER PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICES

Also on hand was Joanne Kronauer, a direct descendant of Anne Dudley Bradstreet. Bradstreet came to America from England in 1630 with misgivings, Vendler explained, but thrived and bore eight children, two of whom went to Harvard. Both her father and husband were governors of the colony and Overseers of the College. Bradstreet lived in Harvard Square approximately on the site of the recently defunct Tasty restaurant and wrote the first book of original verse in the colonies. A piece of Bradstreet prose appears on a plaque on a brick column just to the right of the gate, facing the Science Center. The inscription reads, "I came into this Country, where I found a new World and new manners at which my heart rose." A plaque at the left of the gate commemorates the anniversary of women students moving into the Yard.

The newly dedicated gate, designed by architect Michael Teller, went up in 1995 as part of a multiyear, $2.3-million restoration and upgrading of the fence enclosing Harvard Yard (September-October 1995, page 70, and "The College Pump," page 73). Since 1974 unlovely chain-link had stood behind Canaday Hall. The gate was revised last summer to include the date 1997 in its ironwork; the tulips preceded any thought of dedicating the gate to women. The Yard now has 26 gates, all but this one dating from the late years of Charles William Eliot's presidency. All the others are named, although some names are merely dates, but the new gate on the block has no official name so far. "I hear people refer to it as 'The Bradstreet Gate,'" says Lewis.

At the end of the ceremony, the celebrants sang "Fair Harvard," whose first line--"Fair Harvard! thy sons to thy jubilee throng"--had been officially and permanently changed for the occasion.