Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and held the popular reputation of having an intellectual, literary, and independent-minded female student body.
Radcliffe conferred Radcliffe College diplomas on undergraduates and graduate students for approximately the first 70 years of its history. Beginning in 1963, it awarded joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas to undergraduates. In 1977 Radcliffe signed a formal "non-merger merger" agreement with Harvard and completed full integration with Harvard in 1999.
Within Harvard University, Radcliffe's former administrative campus, Radcliffe Yard, is home to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Former Radcliffe housing at the Radcliffe Quadrangle, which includes Pforzheimer House, Cabot House, and Currier House, has been incorporated into the Harvard College house system. Under the terms of the 1999 consolidation, the Radcliffe Yard and the Radcliffe Quadrangle retain the "Radcliffe" designation in perpetuity.
Early history
The "Harvard Annex," a private program for the instruction of women by Harvard faculty, was founded in 1879 after prolonged efforts by women to gain access to Harvard College. Arthur Gilman, a Cambridge resident, banker, philanthropist and writer, was the founder of what became The Annex/Radcliffe. At a time when higher education for women was a sharply controversial topic, Gilman hoped to establish a higher educational opportunity for his daughter that exceeded what was generally available in female seminaries and the new women's colleges such as Vassar and Wellesley. These schools were in their early years and had substantial numbers of faculty who were not university trained.
In conversations with the chair of Harvard's classics department, Gilman outlined a plan to have Harvard faculty deliver instruction to a small group of Cambridge and Boston women. He approached Harvard President Charles William Eliot with the idea, and Eliot approved. Gilman and Eliot recruited a group of prominent and well-connected Cambridge women to manage the plan. These women were Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Mary H. Cooke, Stella Scott Gilman, Mary B. Greenough, Ellen Hooper Gurney, Alice Mary Longfellow, and Lillian Horsford.
Building upon Gilman's premise, the committee convinced 44 members of the Harvard faculty to consider giving lectures to female students in exchange for extra income paid by the committee. The program came to be known informally as "The Harvard Annex." The course of study for the first year included 51 courses in 13 subject areas, an "impressive curriculum with greater diversity than that of any other women's college at its inception. Courses were offered in Greek, Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish; philosophy, political economy, history, music, mathematics, physics, and natural history." The first graduation ceremonies took place in the library of Longfellow House on Brattle Street, just above where George Washington's generals had slept a century earlier.
The committee members hoped that by raising an endowment for The Annex, they could persuade Harvard to admit women directly into Harvard College, but the university resisted. In his 1869 inaugural address as president of Harvard, Charles Eliot summed up the official Harvard position toward female students when he said, "The world knows next to nothing about the capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman's natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities...It is not the business of the University to decide this mooted point."
When confronted in 1883 with the notion of females receiving Harvard degrees, the university's treasurer stated, "I have no prejudice in the matter of education of women and am quite willing to see Yale or Columbia take any risks they like, but I feel bound to protect Harvard College from what seems to me a risky experiment."
Some of President Eliot's objections stemmed from 19th-century notions of propriety. He was strongly against co-education, commenting that "The difficulties involved in a common residence of hundreds of young men and women of immature character and marriageable age are very grave. The necessary police regulations are exceedingly burdensome."