<p>i was really surprised when i found out that radcliffe college only went coed in 1999 - 7 years ago. all of the radcliffe alumnae i have ever met are, well, getting up in age, and i assumed the merger between radcliffe and harvard had happened in the 70s when harvard went coed.
i go to barnard, and our relationship to columbia is quite similar to radcliffe's former relationship with harvard. there's been some discussion on the barnard/columbia boards about hostility between the two schools, and i was wondering, was there any such hostility between radcliffe and harvard? that is, after harvard went coed, and girls could choose one over the other.</p>
<p>Okay, I happen to be writing a paper on the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship and taking a class on the history of Harvard, so I'll try to keep this short :-).</p>
<p>Radcliffe went <em>officially</em> co-ed in 1999. In practice, however, nobody considered it a separate entity until quite some time before that. </p>
<p>Radcliffe was founded in, I think, 1890. It had separate housing and separate classes taught by Harvard faculty. During WWII, so many faculty were busy helping with the war effort, and enrollment at Harvard dropped so low, that everybody came to see that this was inefficient and President Conant began coeducational classes. A few classes at H were men-only and a few at R were women-only, but this was phased out during the rest of the 40s.</p>
<p>Harvard-Radcliffe effectively merged in, I think, 1971, with the "non-merger merger." The main reason for this was that Radcliffe was going broke, but there were others too. At that point, Radcliffe pretty much ceased to exist, handing over almost all its tuition money to Harvard. At this point, coed housing was instituted in a limited basis. However, admissions were still kept to a 4:1 male:female ratio, which led to awkward housing situations. This ratio was later lowered to 2.5:1 and in 1975, after lots of debate and protest, Harvard and Radcliffe began sex-blind admissions. By 1977 there were enough women to create the "Fox plan" which involved not allowing sex discrimination in house assignments. That pretty much destroyed the last vestiges of a separate Radcliffe identity, by bringing the male:female ratios in the Radcliffe houses to the same level as the Yard and River houses.</p>
<p>There wasn't really much animosity. Before coed classes were instituted, Harvard students didn't really know that Radcliffe existed. Afterwards from 1942-1969, there was a stereotype of the 'Cliffie as a man-eating brainiac (a stereotype partly fostered by the admissions policy that made getting into R harder than getting into H!) Some Radcliffe students were resentful about not having the same privledges as Harvard men--for example, they couldn't use Lamont, which is the central undergrad library, and they couldn't eat interhouse at the river, which is very inconvenient. There was also a sense among some that H and R students didn't really see each other as people, more as objects of sexual/romantic conquest. I discuss this at length in my paper.</p>
<p>Anyway, after the mid-1970s nobody really knew what Radcliffe was.</p>
<p>so were harvard and radcliffe admissions kept separate? was it like a tulane/newcomb college situation, where men applied to tulane and women applied to newcomb but it was de facto coed, rather than being a barnard/columbia situation, where women could apply to both schools but men could only apply to columbia?</p>
<p>Harvard admissions were not kept separate. There was one undergrad college from the 1970's onward, and it was de facto co-ed. I was class of '99, which was the last class that was called "Harvard-Radcliffe." The only difference other than the name is that the '99 women's diplomas have the signatures of both the Harvard and Radcliffe presidents, and from '00 onward, there's only a Harvard signature.</p>