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Subject:
From:
[log in to unmask] (Manuel Santos)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:20 2006
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----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
My information about women being allowed to attend classes at Harvard at 
1943 comes from the official website of Radcliffe College (now Radcliffe 
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard): 
[http://www.radcliffe.edu/about/sig.html]. I quote: "1943--During World War 
II, Harvard and Radcliffe sign an agreement allowing women students into 
Harvard classrooms for the first time." 
 
This must refer to undergraduate classes. What happened to graduate 
courses? It must have been too expensive to duplicate these courses, as 
Barbara Bergmann points out. She is quite clear: "women and men sat 
together in the same classrooms, both as graduates and undergraduates, at 
least in the 1950s. They also took the same exams." But they got different 
diplomas: male from Harvard, female from Radcliffe. The official website of 
Radcliffe says that this situation changed... in 1963! I quote: 
"1963--Radcliffe students receive Harvard diplomas signed by both 
presidents. Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is opened to 
women and Radcliffe Graduate School closes". 
 
If Eleanor Dulles finished her dissertation in April 1926 (as Roger 
Sandilands points out), it must have been from Radcliffe; so did Elisabeth 
Boody in 1934, with Schumpeter and A. P. Usher as supervisors.  
 
What is not clear to me is how graduate studies were organized for 
Radcliffe women students: The situation described by Barbara Bergmann may 
well have been usual since the 20s. This would be consistent with the 
information from the dairy of a Harvard graduate student in 1926. (I hope 
in the 50s women students didn't have to sit at the back). But I have not 
managed to fit together all this (apparently) contradictory information. 
 
The book _A biographical dictionary of women economists_ edited by Robert 
W. Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand and Evelyn L. Forget is a wonderful set of 
information, but I cannot solve the question of how graduate classes and 
exams were set for Radcliffe women economists within Harvard faculty. (The 
idea I got from another entries in the Dictionary is that Berkeley or 
Chicago were decades ahead of Harvard in having women economists in its 
faculty) 
 
The contributors to the dictionary have a lot more information about the 
women who appear in it and more about others who were not finally included. 
I want to thank specially Jim Thomas, of the LSE, who wrote the entry on 
Elisabeth Waterman Gilboy. 
 
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