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New Shock. Whatever men mean to college girls, the girls certainly have less time for them. Almost everywhere, girls are working much harder. At least in the grade sense, they have to be better students. Admission standards are tougher all over. For example, boys usually outdo girls on math ability tests (a reflection of unexpectation). But at Stanford this year, the freshmen girls entered with math scores equal to those of the freshmen boys in 1957. At better colleges, the competition is often a shock to blase freshmen who got all the honors in high school. In many a girls' dormitory, lights burn all night. "When I get home," says a weary Oberlin senior, "my mother says, 'Welcome, Cadaver.' "
What goes for ordinary college girls does not, of course, necessarily go for the top i% of high school girls who get into prestigious Radcliffe College,-female annex of Harvard. For Radcliffe's 1,155 undergraduates are unusually mature as well as fearfully bright: 66% of last June's graduates left with honors, against 53% at Harvard, and 37% of the " 'dimes" went on to graduate school.
Radcliffe got started when a Miss Abby Leach of Brockton, Mass., brashly persuaded three eminent Harvard scholars to give her private lessons in Greek, Latin and English (she later became a Vassar professor). From that start grew a college with such alumnae as Gertrude Stein ('97), Actress Josephine (Arsenic and Old Lace) Hull ('99), Helen Keller ('04), Philanthropist Mary Lasker ('23), Novelist Helen Howe ('27), new Barnard President Rosemary Park ('28), Poet Adrienne Cecile Rich ('51). To all these eminences, Harvard long pretended indifference, choosing to type all Radcliffe women as flat-chested neuters in flat-heeled shoes. One explanation for this was that since Radcliffe had few dormitories and did not attract many girls from afar, its students tended to be "just Boston types." A whole literature of slanderous jokes flourished: "Was that a Radcliffe girl, or did a horse step on her face?"
Beauties with Brains. Starting during World War II, all that began to change. The wastefulness of running similar classes at Harvard and Radcliffe, only a ten-minute class-break apart, led to joining the schools "in everything except theory." Today the girls even take their exams with the boys, and some share the same tutorial sessions. Under a complex concordat between the two schools, Radcliffe gives 90% of its tuition ($1,520) income to Harvard.
To old Harvardmen, the results are astonishing. "Gross generalizations, such as that 'Cliffies are all dogs, no longer apply," says a gallant Harvardman. Radcliffe attracts beauties with brains from all over the world. The reason is simple: all those Harvardmen (5 to 1)—and Harvard itself, of course. The class of 1949, for example, reports that 42% of its husbands are Harvardmen, and going steady is now endemic in the Yard.