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Women students were allowed into Harvard classrooms for the first time 
in... 1943! But, even after that, the diploma for women was from Radcliffe 
College, nicknamed "The Harvard Annex", until 1963! 
 
In the 50s, Barbara Bergmann says that the doctorate classes she attended 
were identical for men and women, but the Ph D for women was officially 
from Radcliffe. She notes that it must have been too expensive to maintain 
separate classes for men and women at the graduate level even at the time 
of Elisabeth Boody Schumpeter and Elisabeth W Gilboy. (The Radcliffe 
website says that in 1963 "Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 
is opened to women and Radcliffe Graduate School closes"; but I dont know 
what exactly this means, when contrasted with first-hand information from 
Barbara Bergmann) 
 
Barbara Bergmann was appointed Instructor at Harvard Economics Department, 
after completing her Ph D in 1958. (In 1952, when she arrived, women were 
not allowed to be teaching fellows). She thinks that she was not the first 
to get such a degree: Alice Rivlin and Soo Chaung Kahn may have got their 
Ph D degree before her. 
 
Anne Carter was the first woman assistant professor of economics at Harvard 
in the late sixties. (She was by then senior enough for a higher post: she 
was a Senior Research Associate, Director of Research of the Harvard 
Economic Research Project, established by Wassily Leontief; and had a 
rather respectable CV, so it was impossible for John Dunlop, then Professor 
of economics, to claim, as he usually did, that there were no suitable 
women to appoint). 
 
The first tenured female professor was... appointed much later; probably 
Claudia Goldin, in the late eighties. 
 
I find all this rather shocking. Allen's affirmation "Harvard was not very 
broad-minded about hiring women" (_Opening Doors_, vol. II, p. 30), talking 
about Elisabeth Boody (later E. B. Schumpeter) in 1934, clearly fell short. 
The same struggle took place in England half a century before. Even in 
Francoist Spain, conservative women were proud of attending to University 
classes in the 40s. So, my question is, is this a Harvard or Boston 
peculiarity, or were most Universities at United States similar in their 
policy about hiring women? 
 
Thanks to Anne Carter and Barbara Bergmann for their invaluable first-hand 
information, and to Robert Dimand, Johanna Bockman and John Reeder for 
their kind and useful information. 
 
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