When I applied to college, women weren't admitted to Harvard College. Girls who wanted a Harvard education had to apply to Radcliffe College. The ratio of Harvard students to Radcliffe students in the class of 1979 was set at 2 1/2 to 1, having been allowed to rise gradually from the 4 to 1 ratio of a few years earlier.
In my sophomore year, one of my roommates asked if I could swim. She had been talked into swimming intramurally for our dorm, Quincy House. The student who talked her into it, whom I'll call K, had been a competitive swimmer in high school. To swim intramurally, K needed to put together a team of four (for the relay), all affiliated with Quincy House. She already had three: herself, my roommate, and the secretary to the House "Master". The latter two weren't serious swimmers and hadn't swum on a team. The Master's secretary wasn't a student, but the powers-that-be had declared her eligible, to help us get to four.
While I like to swim, I wouldn't say that I'm good at it. Not only had I not swum on my high school's team, but I hadn't even realized my high school had a swim team (it didn't have a pool).
K took me to the pool to try to teach me what I needed to know. I wasn't successful at learning the butterfly. I think we eventually decided I'd be the one to do the crawl.
K told me I'd have to dive off the starting blocks. I climbed up on the block, looked down at the water, and said, "No way! I'm afraid of heights. I can't do this." K tried cajoling and berating me, but neither one got very far with me; I can be quite stubborn. She resigned herself to letting me dive from the pool's edge.
We probably didn't do very well at the swim meet, but we had fun. It was nice that Quincy House was represented at the women's swim meet.
Quincy was one of the largest Harvard Houses. If we could barely scrape together an intramural women's swim tean, I wonder what the other Houses did.
In my senior year, I saw a call for female swimmers for intramurals, on a Quincy House bulletin board. In a fit of nostalgia I decided to take part, thinking that I'd be doing a good deed by helping them put together a team of four.
To my surprise, a ton of sophomores and juniors showed up. I asked around, and was told that these were mostly women who usually swam on the varsity team, but weren't on it that semester due to injuries or other reasons. I was embarrassed by how much slower I was than everyone else.
What changed between my sophomore and senior years? The year after mine was the first class with "gender-blind admission" (though the gender ratio took years to equalize, perhaps at least partly because Harvard continued to aggressively recruit from prep schools that were still heavily male). When the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions offices merged, it wasn't an equal merger. Essentially, the Radcliffe admissions office was devoured by the Harvard one. Radcliffe had admitted students almost purely on the basis of academic ability. Harvard College, and then the merged Harvard-Radcliffe admissions office, looked for a mixture of academic and athletic prowess. How heavily they weighed athletics hit home for me when I compared my tall, strong, athletic teammates during my senior year with the Radcliffe bookworms in the class of 1979 and earlier.