The End Of An Era At Radcliffe

The new arrangement preserves the institutions for which Radcliffe is now best known, including the Schlesinger Library, the nation's pre-eminent women's history collection, and the Bunting Institute, a center for women scholars (it will now go coed). There will be a new richly funded institute for the study of women, gender and society. But the reorganization will do nothing to address the larger question of genuine equality for women at Harvard. Unlike the university's Dubois Center, which has revitalized African-American studies on campus, the new gender-studies institute will have no tenured faculty: a recipe for polite marginalization. Right now, it feels as if women have lost something--an institution that, for all its failings, looked out for women--without gaining a real commitment to the equality Radcliffe was never able to achieve. Once again, Harvard is telling women what's good for them.

Pollitt, Radcliffe '71, is a columnist at The Nation.

© 1999