"A number of Professors and other Instructors in Harvard College have consented to give private tuition to properly qualified young women who desire to pursue advanced studies in Cambridge. No instruction will be provided of a lower grade than that given in Harvard College."

With these words, the long, productive, and singularrelationship between Harvard College and its women's "Annex" began in 1879. From the start, the founders of the new school for women proceeded cautiously in their quest for, at first, a Harvard education, and, eventually, a Harvard degree. While other institutions for women had been established ? Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley ? none had the close ties with a men's college that Radcliffe had.

Resistance against coeducation was powerful and entrenched, and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz and Radcliffe's other founders chose to walk a thin line between two obvious alternatives: coeducation and the establishment of a separate women's college. In 1894, through Agassiz's unstinting efforts, the "Annex" was incorporated by the Massachusetts Legislature and authorized to "confer on women all honors and degrees as fully as any university or college in the Commonwealth." So the newly named Radcliffe College achieved a certain authority but not autonomy: Harvard faculty taught Harvard courses to Radcliffe women, and Radcliffe degrees were approved by the President and Fellows of Harvard.

Agassiz described the partnership thus: "Virtually then they say to us, 'Keep your independence ? the management of your property, and of all the other general interests of your establishment. We will assume the guardianship of the instruction, and endorse the work of your students as approved and certified by the professors and teachers of Harvard.' This places us, as it seems to me, just where we wish to be."

As Radcliffe's first president predicted, the relationship proved congenial to both institutions. Gertrude Stein (Class of 1897), for instance, could look back on her college years and remember that the "most important person in . . . [my] Radcliffe life was William James."

And for its part, the University could be grateful to Radcliffe for innovations in, among other areas, the arts. When George P. Baker decided to offer a course in playwriting in 1904, he chose Radcliffe as a try-out venue. After the course had a successful "out of town" run, Baker offered it at Harvard. English 47 soon begot the 47 Workshop, which developed a host of theatrical productions, many of which ended up on the stage in Boston and New York.

In 1899, the new Radcliffe Choral Society, together with the Harvard Glee Club, became the first university chorus to sing with a major orchestra. Archibald Davison, who conducted both groups (1915-25), recalled years later, "I sometimes wonder how much, if anything, Harvard realizes that it owes to Radcliffe. . . . Without the early and enthusiastic cooperation of the 'young ladies of Radcliffe' the impressive tradition of college choral singing, which is now nationwide and which is always associated first with Cambridge, would almost certainly have been established much later here or would have originated elsewhere."

Radcliffe women began taking classes at Harvard alongside men during World War II. "In 1943 . . . a lot of faculty members and students were in the service and overseas fighting," said Mary Maples Dunn, who served as interim Dean at Radcliffe. "It was just more efficient for women to take their courses at Harvard. At that point, Radcliffe gave up its responsibility to provide a curriculum for undergraduates."

In the same year, according to Dunn, what is now known as the Schlesinger Library was founded. "Looking back, 1943 is a very symbolic year. . . . [T]hat's when [women] undergraduates began moving toward Harvard, and Radcliffe began moving toward research and advanced study," she said.

In 1963, Radcliffe undergraduates received Harvard diplomas for the first time, and in the 1970s, Houses at both colleges became coeducational. From the late 1970s until 1999, a joint Harvard and Radcliffe admissions office selected women and men on an equal-access basis, and Radcliffe delegated all responsibility for undergraduate education and college life to Harvard. In 1999, Harvard College formally assumed all responsibility for educating Harvard's women undergraduates, completing the process begun more than a century earlier.

Women undergraduates represent 48.5 percent of the Class of 2003 - identical to the proportion of women in the class of 2001, which was the largest share in the history of Harvard College. Harvard has the most extensive women's athletics program of any Division I school in the country, with 20 varsity teams and seven junior-varsity squads.

Creating space for women at Harvard's graduate schools demanded long and hard-fought battles. The debate over the admission of women to the Medical School began in 1847; not until 1945 were "women of superior ability" first eligible for admission. The Law School has a similar history. There, the first application by a woman for admission was made in 1871; the first women students were enrolled in the fall of 1950.

Although there had been women teaching at the College for a number of years before, the first tenured position for a woman at Harvard was created in 1947 ? with a tie to Radcliffe, and in 1956 Harvard appointed its own first woman full professor, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Ph.D. '25, in the Astronomy Department. Earlier, in 1919, the School of Public Health, in conjunction with the Medical School, gave a nontenured teaching appointment ? the first at Harvard ? to Alice Hamilton. Hamilton, a pioneer in the field of workplace safety oversight, subsequently established the Department of Industrial Medicine at the School of Public Health.

Currently, 13 percent of senior faculty of the University are women; this proportion has increased in recent years, and Harvard is determined to build the ranks of outstanding women on its faculty.

Many of Harvard's nine faculties have taken steps to encourage the appointment of women faculty and to support their careers. Measures include expanding recruiting efforts, modifying leave policies for junior faculty to provide more flexibility for those with family obligations, and working to promote a congenial professional environment for all faculty. In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard's largest academic unit, more than one-third of junior faculty are women.

President Neil L. Rudenstine established the President's Outreach Fund in 1994 to enable departments to make tenured appointments of women and minority scholars in fields where these groups are underrepresented and where departmental resources may be insufficient to support such appointments. This fund has been used several times in recent years.

In October 1999, Radcliffe College became the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a scholarly community where individuals pursue work across a wide range of academic disciplines, professions, or creative arts. Within this broad purpose, and in recognition of Radcliffe's historic contributions to the education of women and to the study of issues related to women, the Radcliffe Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender, and society.

The Radcliffe Institute includes a residential fellowship program, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and offers a broad range of public lectures and conferences.

As author Ursula K. Le Guin '51 wrote, "When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change."
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