‘A messy experiment’: The early days of Radcliffe
It was called “a messy experiment” by its founder. It became a hub of creativity that helped propel forward the women it engaged, and the women’s movement, in crucial ways. The timing was right for Mary Ingraham Bunting and her audacious new plan. It was 1960, and a cultural war had been brewing since the late 1950s. Women were seeking higher education in increasing numbers and pushing back against strict gender roles in the home and the workplace, and the approval of the birth control pill by the Food and Drug Administration in 1959 was allowing them, for the first time, to take charge of their child-bearing years and careers. That was the backdrop against which “Polly” Bunting, the newly minted president of Radcliffe College, launched the new Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (since reincarnated as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). A microbiologist by training, Bunting was eager to create a...