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What Radcliffe's individualistic girls have in common are English bicycles, guitars and extremely hard work, made harder by their compulsion to do even more than asked. "They go to the library and underline and underline," observes a Radcliffe senior. They are too busy for newspapers and politics: "So there's a Harvardman in the White House, big deal." In their overcrowded dormitories, they get on one another's nerves, and there is "no place to cry."
"Dinner-Table Education." Mary Bunting plans to change all that. To bring students and faculty together, she wants to remake Radcliffe with a house plan similar to Harvard's. Remembering her own yeasty days at Wisconsin, she would like to raise the level of "dinner-table education" at Radcliffe. Moreover, the house system will include families with children—carefully selected people who live two lives well. Some day one Radcliffe girl will be able to discuss man's fate with her tutor as another girl feeds the tutor's baby.
The forerunners have already arrived: 21 women artists and scholars, working part-time under Mary Bunting's new Institute for Independent Study, which aim to give talented women all the facilities they need to work for a year on some consuming project that marriage interrupted. All women with a doctorate or "equivalent in achievement," the new Associate and Affiliate Scholars get up to $3,000 and all of Harvard-Radcliffe to work in. Their fields range from archaeology, law and philosophy to painting, poetry and psychiatry. When she announced the idea last fall, Mary Bunting was startled at the response. Letters flowed in from all over the world, along with 2,400 applications. "To use a Quaker phrase," she says, "we must have spoken to their condition."
From the day she arrived at Radcliffe, President Bunting has served as quite a model herself. "She's not much of a dresser," sniffed one trustee on first seeing her, but soon people were speaking of "infectious charm." To keep in touch with freshmen, she started teaching a seminar in genetics. When the porch light is on at 76 Brattle Street, said she, drop in. The girls do in droves. "A marvelous woman," was the verdict. "She's the kind every Radcliffe girl would like to be."
After the 19th Amendment. By now, if such doughty igth century feminists as Susan B. Anthony had had their way, the U.S. might be full of women running banks, corporations and research laboratories while their husbands stayed home and tended the children. Instead, militant feminism in the U.S. crested with the passage of the igth Amendment ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex") and rippled away. American women, says Mary Bunting, became "somewhat like a dog I knew who, long after the front fence had been removed, ran down the road to the place where the gate used to be."