Representing Radcliffe: Perceptions and Consequences of

Journal of Adult Development, Vol 5, No. 3, 1998

Representing Radcliffe: Perceptions and Consequencesof Social Class

Joan M. Ostrove1,3 and Abigail J. Stewart2

Using retrospective data from a sample of women who graduated from Radcliffe College in1964, this paper examines the perceptions (what women notice) and consequences (how itmakes them feel) of social class during college in these women's lives. The majority of womenacknowledged that social class was salient at Radcliffe by stating so directly, by noticingmembers of different class groups, and/or by mentioning their own class backgrounds. Inaddition, women consistently perceived two markers of social class: exclusivity and the dif-ferences between public and private high school graduates. Surprisingly, there were no dif-ferences by social class background in the rates of these perceptions; social class indicatorswere equally apparent to women from different social class backgrounds. However, mostcommonly among women from working-class backgrounds, there were psychological conse-quences of social class that were manifested in feeling bad about themselves. In order tounderstand the psychology of social class most fully, it seems important to distinguish be-tween perception and consequence in the psychological study of social class, and to payattention to the impact not only of people's backgrounds, but of social class cues in theenvironments in which they operate.

INTRODUCTION

The Cliffie: many faces, one soul. Beneath yards ofstraight hair, behind pale lips and eyes, she smilesan eternally self-satisfied secret smile. She is sure ofherself even in railroad stations. She walks loudlyand firmly on polished floors. She is a Cliffie.(Levine, Harvard-Raddiffe Yearbook, 1965)

An artifact of the recent but distant past, thispassage points to the gender, race, and social classfeatures of Radcliffe College in the early 1960s. Itwas an environment almost exclusively populated byWhite women from economically and educationallyprivileged backgrounds.

1University of California, San Francisco, California 94143-0844.2University of Michigan.3Correspondence should be directed to Joan M. Ostrove, Program

in Health Psychology, University of California, San Francisco,1350 7th Avenue, CSBPS 211, San Fransisco, California 94143-0844. e-mail: [email protected]

Historically, higher education has played a criti-cal role in the social class structure of the UnitedStates. College has served as a vehicle both for socialmobility and for the maintenance of social class po-sition, although it remains difficult to talk about theclass-based nature of university life and culture. AsMaher (in press) noted, "In the academy, a placewhere expert thinking about social matters is meantto take place, class is a particularly obscure topic.University is the place where working people go pre-cisely to change their class by gaining credentials. . . middle class people go to maintain and enhancetheirs" (pp. 14-15).

As one of the oldest and most prestigiousschools in the country, Harvard University is perhapsthe epitome of this pattern: it is the ultimate sign ofhaving "made it" for some, an expectation from birthfor others. Regardless of one's origins, Harvard rep-resents the elite in higher education and it serves animportant function in the maintenance of U.S. upper

1831068-0667/98/0700-0183$15.00/0 © 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation

KEY WORDS: Social class; college; women.

184 Ostrove and Stewart

class culture. As Domhoff (1983) noted, the sociali-zation of members of the upper class is accomplishedin part by a "distinctive education" including privatepreschools, day schools, and boarding schools. Forthose in the upper class, higher education is obtainedat one of a small number of private universities, and"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford head thelist" (p. 24).

While there is an important "social class story"to be told here, part of which will be the primaryfocus of this paper, this is also a raced and genderedtale. The history of racial segregation and persistentracial discrimination in the U.S. meant that collegesthat were once only open to Whites (who also hadto be Protestant, particularly at the elite schools likeHarvard, Yale, and Princeton, mentioned above)have remained predominantly White through thepresent time, with relatively few exceptions. In 1927,there were more than 13,000 Black college studentsin the U.S., but only 11% of them were in predomi-nantly White colleges (Solomon, 1985). In 1961, asurvey of 135 (historically White) colleges in the U.S.found that these schools had 3% African-Americanand 2% Asian-American students in their graduatingclasses that year (Harris, 1972). Today, students ofcolor comprise 28% of those enrolled in institutionsof higher education (U.S. Bureau of the Census,1997). At elite women's colleges, this pattern held.In 1926, W. E. B. DuBois noted,

Vassar had graduated but one Negro student and didnot know it at the time. Bryn Mawr and Barnardhave tried desperately to exclude them. Radcliffe,Wellesley, and Smith have treated them with toler-ance and even cordiality. Many small institutions orinstitutions with one or two Negro students havebeen gracious and kind toward them, particularly inthe Middle West. But on the whole, the attitude ofnorthern institutions is one which varies from toler-ance to active hostility, (quoted in Solomon, 1985,p. 143)

In 1900, women earned 17% of all bachelor'sdegrees in the United States; by 1964, women rep-resented 38% of the fall enrollment in colleges anduniversities; now women represent a bit more thanhalf of all college students (U.S. Department of Edu-cation, 1996). Until relatively recently, women werealso educated differently than men were (see Fox,1989; Solomon, 1985), and the social class mobilityor maintenance function of higher education wasslightly different for women until the middle part ofthis century. As Solomon (1985) explains,

For the poorest Americans, college was out of thequestion and beyond expectation. Yet the availabilityof money did not make college a given in familiesthat discounted either the intellectual or economicadvantages for their daughters. The established east-ern elites . . . preferred to educate daughters pri-vately at home, in boarding school, and throughtravel abroad. New rich millionaires obsessed withmaking good marriages for their daughters imitatedthe patterns of the older families . . . . Both sets offamilies prepared daughters for a life of leisure, notwork. (p. 64)

While there were considerable fluctuations inphilosophies of women's education and in how thosewomen who did attend college used their collegeeducations, the late 1940s saw a backlash against themore progressive attitudes that had prevailed sincethe 1920s (see Solomon, 1985 for an extensive his-tory). During this time, and particularly during the1950s, "few college women had clear vocationalgoals, and most attended for the general education,prestige, and social life" (Fox, 1989, p. 220). Whilecollege was providing men with access to certain pro-fessions, it was in large part providing women withaccess to certain men. It offered a chance for womento "marry up" or to "find one of their own kind."Before the 1970s and the changes in gender role ex-pectations brought about in large part by theWomen's Movement, relatively fewer of the womenwho attended college —par t icu lar ly elite col-leges—used it to pursue their own careers. As onewoman who attended Radcliffe described it:

I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1963 fresh froma [private, all girls] boarding school that still boastedmuch of the same faculty as it had had in mymother's era and all of the same rules. It had pre-pared me perfectly for life in the 1930s. I did notexpect to do anything after college, or to be anythingexcept a wife. I wasn't happy about that expectation,mind you, but I believed in it. I certainly expectedto be pure when I married, and I hoped at least tomarry a Harvard man. (quoted in Zweigenhaft,1993, p. 111)

In fact, this was the very message imparted to Rad-cliffe women. Throughout the 1950s, the presidentof Radcliffe, W. K. Jordan, "informed entering fresh-men . . . that their education would prepare them tobe splendid wives and mothers, and their rewardmight be to marry Harvard men" (Solomon, 1985, p.192). No doubt absorbing this perspective, Harvardundergraduates themselves echoed this view. Onewrote in the "Radcliffe" section of the 1962 HarvardYearbook,

Representing Radcliffe 185

[The Harvard undergraduate] seeks companionshipin Radcliffe, the Adam's rib of Harvard. At the endof his search is a substitute mother, a playmate, anintellectual inspiration, a status symbol, or a wife.All the way along his search, he will wonder whathe means when he calls home . . . and says, "It'sokay, Mother, she's a Radcliffe girl."

In addition to the gender differences in thefunction of education in the United States, co-edu-cation itself was not the norm at elite private collegesand universities in New England until the late 1960sand early 1970s (see Fox, 1989; Solomon, 1985).Many elite private men's colleges, including Harvard,had "sister schools" with whom they had dances andother social events. Harvard's sister school, Radcliffe,was among those with the closest geographical prox-imity to its brother school and Radcliffe women tookclasses with Harvard men. However, they lived inseparate dormitories, ate in separate cafeterias, andwere excluded from entry into Harvard's under-graduate library. In an essay in the 1965 Harvard-Radcliffe Yearbook, Faye Levine described theRadcliffe experience:

Radcliffe is nowhere. Its essence is its own nonex-istence . . . . We were never part of something. Itjust was, here, inorganic, like a great hulk withoutbeginning or end. We passed it by. We touched itlike home base, for four years, but we didn't dwellin it. It was nothing, blank, dumb. Harvard was re-ality, the beginning and the end, everything: but forus always a dream. Harvard was reality, but througha glass.

Levine makes clear—as do others—that the experi-ence of attending Radcliffe was partly about gender,and partly about social class. In a response to a ques-tion about social class at Radcliffe in the early 1960s,a member of the Radcliffe Class of 1964 said, "Ithink social class was still a real, but subtle phenome-non at Radcliffe though perhaps ... it was a bit lessobvious than at Harvard . . . because ... in the early60s we were all 'lower class'—we were women!"Levine wrote, in a similar vein,

Being at Radcliffe means nothing more than beinga girl at Harvard. It is a tricky business, since eve-ryone knows there are no girls at Harvard. Just whenyou are beginning to forget, to enjoy the myriad re-sources of this exciting community, Pow! Somebodytriumphantly points out that you are just a girl andmakes you go back to start.

What can we learn both about gender and aboutsocial class by examining women's retrospective rep-resentations of social class when they were studentsat Radcliffe College in the 1960s? Admittedly, this

is a very particular group of people, at a particularplace during a particular time. At the same time, un-derstanding more about their relationship to the in-stitution that perhaps more than any other representsthe U.S. upper class in higher education can teachus a great deal about the perceptions and conse-quences of social class—an underexplored area ofboth women's and men's psychological lives.

There is a growing empirical, autobiographical,and anecdotal literature about the consequences ofclass background with respect to individuals' experi-ences of college (see, for example, Ryan & Sackrey,1984; Tokarczyk & Fay, 1993; Torgovnick, 1994),some of which has focused specifically on Harvard(e.g., Mar, 1995, Zweigenhaft, 1993) and Radcliffe(e.g., Maher, in press; Ostrove, in preparation; Os-trove & Stewart, 1994; Stewart & Ostrove, 1993).The vast majority of this work highlights the experi-ence of people from working-class backgrounds, bothmen and women, people of color and Whites: theirfeelings of marginality and isolation in worlds thatwere so different from those they were raised in. Ashooks (1993)—an African American, raised working-class scholar—described her experience at StanfordUniversity,

Though I hung with students who were supposedlyradical and chic, we did not discuss class. I talkedto no one about the sources of my shame, how ithurt me to witness the contempt shown the brown-skinned Filipina maids who cleaned our rooms, orlater my concern about the one hundred dollars amonth I paid for a room off-campus, which wasmore than half of what my parents paid for rent. (p.101)

In describing her first year at Smith College, aftergrowing up a "town" granddaughter of a collegemaid, Smith (1993), a White woman, said, "my firstyears were bewildering, marked more often than theymight have been by shame and despair" (p. 135).

In research about the role that social class back-ground played in women's experiences at both Rad-cliffe and Smith Colleges, Ostrove (in preparation;see also Stewart & Ostrove, 1993) found that womenfrom working-class backgrounds were significantlymore likely than women from middle- or upper-classbackgrounds to report feelings of intimidation, isola-tion, and unpreparedness. In contrast, women fromupper-class backgrounds were more likely to reportan assumption of belonging and entitlement: it wasexpected that they, like their mothers and aunts be-fore them, would attend colleges like these (Ostrove,in preparation).


In 1995, the Harvard Alumni Magazine publishedan article entitled, "Blue collar, crimson blazer: Re-flections of class on campus." In it, Elaine Mar, achild of working-class Chinese immigrants, sharedher own—unexpected—experiences of surprise andalienation at Harvard in the 1980s, provided anec-dotes from other raised-working-class studentsthroughout Harvard's history, and traced Harvard'shistory of scholarship awards. In 1840, Harvard in-stituted a loan system. With the end of World WarII and the introduction of the G.I. Bill, the universitybegan to admit students without regard to their abil-ity to pay. More and more students from poor andworking-class families were therefore able to attendthe school, although in Mar's class of 1988, only 11%of the students came from families in which neitherparent had attended college. As sociologist LeeRainwater explained in an interview with Mar, "Itseemed clear to me [when I was teaching a class onthe urban working class] that Harvard was not aplace where it was easy to be a working-class student.Although Harvard has moved toward admissions thatare not based on ability to pay, its culture has notmoved to that point. Harvard has not taken its ownculture into account" (1995, p. 49).

We (JMO and AJS) came to this project aboutunderstanding women's relationship to the "classed-ness" of Radcliffe College with our own personalconnections to elite, private, New England colleges.We each arrived at college (in 1983 at Williams Col-lege for JMO; in 1967 at Mount Holyoke Collegefor AJS) from particular locations and at particularhistorical moments that made us aware of the class-based nature of these schools. For JMO, as a White,upper-middle class Jewish woman, entering Williamswas an immersion in the unfamiliar—and somewhatstrange—world of reserved, upper-class Gentiles. lbAJS, also White, from a marriage of mixed religiousbackgrounds (Jewish and Catholic) and her ownmixed class experience (educational and culturalprivilege combined with extended periods of eco-nomic instability), the world at Mount Holyoke ap-peared to be filled primarily with bright, wealthy girlswith few personal ambitions beyond marriage. Ourown experiences of felt "difference" in college have,then, both stimulated and fed our interest in otherwomen's experience at Radcliffe in a slightly differ-ent time.

We wondered whether generally women noticeaspects of the environment that are related to socialclass. We also wanted to consider how an individual's

own social class background might affect what theynoticed. As is clear from other work described above,social class background does seem to have psycho-logical consequences for the ways students experienceelite college environments. Is the same true for stu-dents' ability to perceive, describe, or articulate theclass-based nature of the college environment? Isperception also differentially linked to social class po-sition? In the remainder of this paper, we will usedata from a sample of women who graduated fromRadcliffe College in 1964 to examine the personalconsequences, as well as women's perceptions, of thecollege environment.

METHOD

In 1996, 102 women (virtually all of whom wereWhite) from the Radcliffe Class of 1964 for whomwe could identify social class background providedresponses to a question asking them to describe whatthey noticed about social class at Radcliffe while theywere there. These women were participants in a lon-gitudinal study of women of their graduating classconducted by Stewart (see Stewart, 1978, 1980; Ste-wart & Salt, 1981; Stewart & Vandewater, 1993 forfurther descriptions of the study and the sample). Interms of their current social class status, this was ahighly educated sample: 36.5% had earned master'slevel degrees, and another 46% had doctoral leveldegrees (MD, JD, PhD). The vast majority (89%)participated in the paid labor force, primarily (about80%) in administrative and professional careers (e.g.,education, law, medicine, social work). In 1996, theiraverage personal income was between $40-50,000per year; their average household income was be-tween $100-120,000 per year.

Social class can be defined, and therefore meas-ured, in a number of different ways (see, for exam-ple, Coleman & Rainwater, 1978; Hollingshead &Redlich, 1958 for classic sociological and psychologi-cal discussions of assessing social class and socialstanding; for more recent reviews, see Mueller &Parcel, 1981; Nakao & Treas, 1994). Income, educa-tion level, and occupation are among the variousquantitative indicators most often thought to be rele-vant to social class. In addition, Domhoff (1983) sug-gested that private secondary school attendance is auseful marker of membership in the upper class.

In the Radcliffe sample, the women were askedabout their parents' educational and occupational


histories, thus providing two of the three standardsocial class indicators with which to code their classbackgrounds. Information about the kind of secon-dary schools they attended before college was alsoavailable from books prepared on the occasion of im-portant class reunions (decades, twenty-fifth, etc.).Using a combination of all of this information,women were considered to have been raised in work-ing-class families if they attended public secondaryschools and neither of their parents graduated fromcollege, or if their fathers had a rating of skilled la-borer/clerical worker (4) or lower (semiskilledworker, unskilled worker, not in paid labor force; oc-cupations in these categories include security guard,tool and die maker, postal worker) on the 7-pointHollingshead and Redlich (1958) scale of socioeco-nomic status. Women whose fathers had a rating ofadministrative worker (5) or higher (minor profes-sional or major professional; occupations in thesecategories include certified public accountants,schoolteachers, physicians) on the Hollingshead andRedlich SES scale and who had at least one parentwho went to college were classified as being frommiddle-class backgrounds. All women who were clas-sified as middle class went to public high school, withtwo exceptions: eight women (13% of the middle-class women) went to private secondary schools (pri-vate day or boarding, not parochial,4 schools) buttheir fathers were not major professionals, and tenwomen (16%) went to private high schools (privateday or boarding, not parochial, schools) and their fa-thers were academics (a notoriously difficult occupa-tion to classify in terms of social class). Finally,women who attended private secondary schools(prep schools or boarding schools, not parochialschools), whose fathers received a rating of majorprofessional (7; e.g., corporate executive, attorney,physician) on the Hollingshead and Redlich SESscale, and who had at least one parent with a collegeeducation were considered to have been raised in up-per-class families. Using this classification scheme, ap-proximately 13% of Radcliffe women wereconsidered to be from working-class backgrounds;61% of them were from middle-class backgrounds;and 26% of them were classified as having beenraised in the upper class.

4None of the women who participated in this wave of data col-lection attended a private parochial high school. For women inthe entire Radcliffe Class of 1964 for whom we have secondaryschool information, only one attended a parochial high school.

Eighty-nine of the 102 women for whom we hadsocial class background information answered thefollowing question: "We would like to ask you aboutthe role that social class played in people's experi-ences at Radcliffe. Was social class important at Rad-cliffe? Did it affect you directly, or did you observeits effects on others?" All responses to this questionwere typed by research assistants and could thereforebe coded separately from the complete question-naires. We (JMO and AJS) read through all of theresponses once and developed a coding system thatwill be described below to capture the variety of re-sponses. Without knowing anything about the socialclass background of the participants (except whatcould be discerned from the participants' responses)both authors coded a subset of the responses (n =20) and the remainder were coded by the firstauthor. The first author's interrater reliability was .91(percent agreement).

Our coding system was derived from the data inorder to capture the range of answers to our ques-tion. Responses fell into three broad categories. Twoassessed perceptions of class: (1) the ways in whichwomen acknowleged that social class mattered; (2)the kinds of markers they noticed about social class.One assessed consequences: (3) how they personallyfelt in terms of social class.

Under the domain of perception, five themes in-dicated an acknowledgement that social class mattered:(1) salience of class in general (social class is de-scribed as at least somewhat important, as opposedto being explicitly described as unimportant); (2) no-ticed upper class students (response indicated anawareness of wealthy classmates, their activities orlifestyle); (3) noticed middle class students; (4) no-ticed poor or working class students (including de-scriptions of people who had less money); (5) anymention of their own class background.

Also related to perception, two themes servedas markers of social class: (1) descriptions of exclu-sivity (e.g., "Prep private school students hang outwith each other only") and/or appearances or pre-tense (e.g., "I pitied the upper crusties for having toworry about white shoes before Memorial Day andsociety-type social life"); and (2) noticing a distinc-tion between public and private high school gradu-ates (e.g., "Girls from private schools did not easilybecome friends with girls from public schools").Categories were not mutually exclusive; thus, the pre-vious example would score for reference to upper


class students ("upper crusties") as well as for refer-ence to appearance.

Finally, one theme captured a consequence ofclass: how class made women feel. This category in-cluded all descriptions of feeling bad (left out, dif-ferent, etc.) in some way connected to class ("Ibelieve that social class affected me by exacerbatingmy lack of self-esteem and anxiety").

RESULTS

As noted earlier, 89 out of 102 (87.3%) of theparticipants about whom we had social class back-ground information answered the social class ques-tion (i.e., they did not leave that question blank ontheir otherwise completed questionnaire). Answeringthe question was not a function of class background:84.6% of the raised working class; 85.5% of theraised middle class; and 92.6% of the raised upperclass women answered the question (X2 = .95, n.s.).

Perceptions of Social Class: Acknowledging thatClass Mattered

Of the women who provided a response to thequestion, "We would like to ask you about the rolethat social class played in people's experiences atRadcliffe. Was social class important at Radcliffe?Did it affect you directly, or did you observe its ef-fects on others?" three-quarters (77.5%) describedsocial class as having been important in some waywhile they were at Radcliffe. Again, describing classas salient did not vary according to the social classbackground of the respondents (X2 = 1.65, n.s.). Onewoman from a working class background said thiswas a "Great question!" and went on to say that so-cial class was a key reason for her leaving Radcliffein the middle of her time there. Another womanstarted with, "Social class was one of the great un-mentionables of the '60s and had as much impact onme as my formal education." Women from upper-class backgrounds had responses such as, "Very im-portant!" or "Very [important]—it forms the wholecharacter of Harvard-Radcliffe (this would take abook)." A middle-class respondent said, "It was veryclear that there were social class stratifications ofvery intricate sorts." Women from different classbackgrounds were also just as likely to explicitly saythat social class did not matter at all at Radcliffe(about one-quarter of the respondents who answered

the questions): "Did not seem relevant to me"(raised working class); "I was totally unaware of so-cial class at Radcliffe" (raised middle class); "I can-not remember any role or effect on me" (raisedupper class).

Clearly, something about social class at Rad-cliffe resonated strongly with many of our respon-dents. How, exactly, did they articulate this salience?For most people, regardless of class background, themost salient aspects of class at Radcliffe had to dowith the upper class: 36.4% of the raised working-class, 45.3% of the raised middle-class, and 32% ofthe raised upper-class women mentioned noticing theupper class women. They said things like "I, who hadsold Christmas ribbon door-to-door yearly from age10, [now] went to school with the wealthy and social"(raised working class). "Going to Radcliffe was myfirst exposure to the upper class and those with 'oldmoney'" (raised middle class). "Obviously, some peo-ple were rich" (raised upper class).

While the upper class was quite salient to peoplefrom different class backgrounds, considerably fewerpeople explicitly mentioned middle- or working-classstudents, though they were more likely to noticeworking- than middle-class ones. Thirteen percent ofthe raised middle-class and 8% of the raised upper-class women mentioned women from poor or work-ing-class backgrounds in their answers ("Folks fromblue-collar families seemed to have a much roughertime socially [fitting in] than I did"). In order to codethis category, a respondent had to write about peopleother than herself (since there was a separate cate-gory for writing about one's own class). Thus, al-though none of the raised working-class respondentsmentioned other working-class students, they didoften write about themselves. The raised working-class women also did not explicitly mention middle-class students. Almost 4% (3.8) of the raisedmiddle-class women did mention middle-class stu-dents, as did one of the raised upper-class students.

Perceptions of Social Class: Markers of Class

While some women's perceptions of the upperclass were confined merely to taking notice, others'included specific mentions of exclusivity (e.g., cliquesor other exclusive practices) or pretense (acting ar-rogant or concerned with outward appearance), butagain, this did not vary significantly by social classbackground: 36.4% of raised working-class, 37.8% ofraised middle-class, and 36% of raised upper-class


participants (X2 = .02, n.s.) mentioned exclusivity orpretense. While the rate of mentioning exclusivity orpretense did not vary by class background, the detailsof women's responses did reflect their own socialclass positions. As one woman from a working-classbackground said, "[There were] cliques. There weregroups I could never have been a part of." One mid-dle-class respondent said, "I always had the sensethat some girls cliqued together based on similar verysociety-centered backgrounds." Another said, "Oneweekend I got snowed in at the home of a wealthyclassmate. A young woman in the house party gotdrunk and punctuated her speech with 'you know,our kind of people.' I felt I was in disguise." Awoman from an upper-class background noted thatshe was "struck by the conscious pretense at Har-vard." Another raised upper-class woman said, "Myfamily was 'upper crust' and I tended to hang outwith others like me."

Noticing exclusivity was not the only way inwhich women took note of the upper-class cultureand people at Radcliffe and Harvard. Other respon-dents pointed to other, more painful aspects of up-per-class culture (such as the ways in which it wasconstraining, or provided material but not necessarilyemotional resources). These ranged from the auto-matic— and sometimes unwarranted — associationsbetween Harvard and elitism (which may make peo-ple feel bad about saying they went there) to the re-alization that "money can't buy everything." Onewoman from a middle-class background noted,

I came to Radcliffe extremely naive about socialclasses in genera l . . . . People kept saying or imply-ing that a "Cliffie" [a Radcliffe student] must befrom the upper classes, which I've heard even moresince leaving college (oh, you went to Harvard? Youmust be a real snob). At Radcliffe I met other stu-dents whose life experiences till then did distinguishthem from mine, and thought of myself as ordinaryin comparison, but did not feel like a second-classperson . . . . The negative attitude toward Harvardand Radcliffe among the general intellectual public[has made me] cautious about mentioning I wentthere.

Another middle-class respondent said,

Daughters of wealthy and/or famous parents hadhad a wider range of experience prior to arriving atRadcliffe than I had, and they had the opportunityto pursue a wider range of activities while at Rad-cliffe . . . . Money and social access never appearedto be a concern. However, upper social class did notguarantee happiness or freedom from family prob-lems—this was very obvious.

Another marker of social class was the distinc-tion between public and private high school gradu-ates at Radcliffe. Public vs. private secondaryeducation was a salient aspect of the social class storyfor some (12.4%) of the participants. As with all ofthe other categories we have presented thus far,there were no differences by social class backgroundin noticing the distinction between public and privatehigh school graduates (X2 = .40, n.s.), although thewomen's own backgrounds made a difference inwhere they placed themselves in this distinction.Among the responses provided by women fromworking-class backgrounds were: "When I enteredRadcliffe, the salient distinction for me was whetherone came from a public or a private school back-ground. People from private schools were definitelyother" and "Girls from private schools did not easilybecome friends with those from public schools."Women from middle-class backgrounds (most ofwhom themselves, by definition for this research pro-ject, had gone to public school) provided answerssuch as, "I was aware of a large prep school popu-lation" and "[T]here were certainly 'preppie' circles. . . [who] did seem to be a world of their own. Therest of us were pretty egalitarian though there weresubtle groupings like Eastern vs. other places, richvs. middle class, private vs. public school." Onewoman from an upper-class background said,

There was a division between the girls who had at-tended boarding schools and those who attendedhigh schools. Those on each side were conscious ofthe differences the other exhibited in speech, dress,and expectation. To some extent, but not entirely,the girls who had gone to boarding school dated theboys who joined the clubs at Harvard. I am afraidthat those girls may have given less thought to ca-reers. If so, I'm in that group.

Consequences of Social Class: Feelings Connectedto Class

So far, we have provided a broad picture of howwomen who attended Radcliffe perceived social classto matter, or not, while they were there. As we haveseen, the rates at which women perceived a numberof different aspects of the social class environmentdid not vary by class background, though sometimesthe content of their answers did reflect the back-grounds from which they came. We did assess oneconsequence of the social class environment at Rad-cliffe that seemed somewhat more related to socialclass background. This was the extent to which


women described negative feelings related to theirperceptions of class. Almost a third (27.3%) of theraised working-class women's, 18.9% of the raisedmiddle-class women's, and 12% of the raised upper-class women's answers included some description of"feeling bad" that often articulated a relationship tothe dominant upper-class culture (x2 = 1.29, n.s.).One raised working-class woman answered the ques-tion this way: "My perceived inferiority in dress,style, and ability to engage in profound and scintil-lating conversation left me with a lack of confidencethat is still a part of me." Importantly, some raisedworking-class women noted both ways in which theyfelt superior to upper-class students, as well as waysthey felt bad. Often this sense of superiority focusedon issues of character, as in this "nobler" woman'sresponse:

Coming from a [rural New England] public highschool and parents who were not college graduates,I felt I was: 1) nobler than the preppy students; 2)out of my league; 3) an interloper; 4) a character ina novel; 5) an admissions mistake.

Consistent with this sense of being "nobler than thepreppy students," Ostrove and Stewart (1994) re-ported on a woman from a working-class backgroundwho, reflecting on the participation of students fromHarvard and Radcliffe in the Civil Rights movement,said that other students were headed to Washington,D.C. "to drink and they were going to party and theywere wondering who else was going and these werenot noble reasons for participating in my humblemind, for participating in a political movement" (p.294).

Some middle-class women's responses reflectedtheir closer (but for some not close enough) proxim-ity to the upper class: "I always felt I didn't cut itwith the elite. I was close but not really of it. Thatfelt hurtful to me. I can't imagine it wasn't hurtfulto others." Another raised middle-class woman said,"In no other place before or after did I feel so keenlythat I belonged to a specific social class and that Ihad no ability to interact with the upper classes."

For women from upper-class backgrounds, theirposition within the upper class, and the extent towhich they wanted to separate themselves from theirbackground, related to their feeling bad about them-selves. As one woman said, "Kids from eastern prepschools ... seemed so much more sophisticated, eventhough I had gone to a private school also . . . . Ioften felt like an outsider and I'm sure others didtoo." Another woman from an upper-class back-

ground described the feelings of constraint associ-ated with being a part of that culture at Radcliffe:

[My] first two years I was a preppy ... and went to[social club] plays and dated an 'Owl Club' guy . . . .Very restricting. Very safe . . . Thank God, aftersophomore year, broke out, made other friends. Toolittle too late, realized how restricting and damagingthe first life was.

DISCUSSION

When asked directly about social class at Rad-cliffe more than 30 years after their graduation,women from the Class of 1964 clearly articulated thatit was a salient aspect of their college experience. Itappears that most women, regardless of class back-ground, "perceived social class" in some way: theystated that it was important, they discussed the classbackgrounds of their classmates (particularly theones from upper-class backgrounds), and they men-tioned their own social class backgrounds.

"Evo features of social class were fairly commonamong the women's responses: exclusivity and thedistinction between public and private high schoolgraduates. In many ways, these represent markers ofthe upper class more than of social class in general.Domhoff (1983) has noted that a hallmark of upperclass culture and institutions is exclusivity: upperclass young people receive "exclusive" educations,adults belong to "exclusive" clubs, families throw "ex-clusive" debutante balls. Indeed, a major function ofthe socialization of upper-class people is to isolatethem from the rest of society. As Ostrander (1984)noted, many upper-class families sent their childrento private schools so they could be "separated fromordinary people" (p. 85). It is not surprising that thispattern was carried out by upper-class students atRadcliffe and was noticeable to the Radcliffe women.The maintenance of class position is a valued andstrongly encouraged aspect of upper-class life. Therecan be strong sanctions against deviation from thispath for upper-class children, and insuring the gen-erational transmission of social status is an importantfunction of the women in upper-class families (Os-trander, 1984). Some Radcliffe women from upper-class backgrounds were unwilling to pay the price ofsuch exclusivity. As one woman from an upper-classbackground said, "I had friends from every differentsocial class at Radcliffe. Some of my friends re-stricted their social life to people of their economic


class and background, but I did not. They missedout."

It is interesting, then, that while women frommiddle-class backgrounds made up the majority ofthe Radcliffe class, and women from working-classbackgrounds were the most "different," it was as-pects of the upper-class culture and lifestyle therethat were most salient to the women. This empha-sizes the importance of paying attention to the class-based nature of the environment, and/or to theculture of the institution (for discussions of the cul-tures of different educational institutions, see Ste-wart & Ostrove, 1993; Ryan & Sackrey, 1984;Zwerling, 1976).

We did not find that noticing class or particularclass markers—what we have been referring to as"perceptions of social class"—was a function of classbackground. According to standpoint theory (Hard-ing, 1991; see also hooks, 1984; Brown, 1991), the"view from the margin" (in this case, presumably,working-class background) is more detailed, morecomplicated, "stronger," than the view from the cen-ter. McGuire's distinctiveness theory also predictsthat those in the "minority" are more likely to men-tion spontaneously their "distinctive characteristic"in their self-descriptions (for empirical support of thetheory, see Cota & Dion, 1986; McGuire, McGuire,Child, & Fujioka, 1978). The other side of this argu-ment suggests that privileged positions make it moredifficult (or less necessary) to "see" or differentiateamong members of less privileged groups (see, e.g.,Fiske, 1993). If this is so, why did women from allthree social class locations (standpoints) hold com-parable views? Perhaps the environment at Radcliffewas so saturated with social class cues that socialclass was unusually salient. Alternatively, perhaps wecircumvented the spontaneity of the "view from themargin" by explicitly asking about social class. Theremay be a difference between what people are ableto notice or talk about when asked and what they(are able or forced to) notice when they are in themiddle of the situation. As one respondent from anupper-class background insightfully noted,

I never thought too much about it then because Iwas, am, in I guess you would call it, the elite socialclass. I had attended a prestigious girls' boardingschool. My family was 'upper crust' and I tended tohang out with others like me . . . . The boys I likedwere in clubs and I was popular. So I didn't muchthink about others.

It is also possible that women's ability to perceivesocial class at Radcliffe retrospectively is a functionof their current class position, although previouswork with this group (Ostrove, in preparation) foundthat social class effects were a function of class back-ground and not current class. In addition, there areno currently working-class women in the sample(though there is some range in their current incomesand in the relative status of their own and their part-ners' occupations). It may be important in futurework to look more specifically at the role that current"marginal status" in any domain may have on classconsciousness.

In any case, the consequences of socialclass—how women felt about themselves when re-flecting on the social class environment of Rad-cliffe—seemed somewhat more likely to varyaccording to class background. The distinction be-tween perception (what people notice) and conse-quence (how it makes them feel), therefore, may bean important one. Generally, we found more evi-dence for an injurious impact of the Radcliffe envi-ronment for those women who came from lessprivileged backgrounds. However, we note that forsome women a sense of greater personal virtue,grounded in hardship and hard work, tempered thesense of inadequacy and deviance they experiencedat Radcliffe.

One interesting question that emerges fromthese findings is the following: What is it that leadsor allows people to notice social class if it is not(only) their own social class position? What accountsfor the difference between the woman just quoted,who noticed very important things about social classeven as she acknowledged that there was a way inwhich her very background "protected" her fromhaving to notice them, and other women who saidthat class was not important? Or between womenfrom working-class backgrounds, some of whom saidclass shaped their experiences at Radcliffe more thananything else, others of whom said it was irrelevant?

It is of course possible that the themes andtrends we found in these data about how women per-ceived and experienced social class during college arespecific to graduates of the prestigious, New Englandcollege we studied. It will be useful in the future toask these kinds of questions of both women and menwho attend many different kinds of institutions ofhigher education. In addition, there may be impor-tant distinctions between what people can notice


when asked retrospectively and what they spontane-ously attend to "in the moment."

In general, though, because social class is a pow-erful force in shaping our assumptions about andviews of the world, it is particularly important forpsychologists to study it from a variety of differentperspectives. Social class is a feature of our environ-ments whether we notice it or not, and is thereforean important component of the psychological studyof social context. There is much more to learn aboutthe psychological implications of social class positionand the social class environment in the lives of bothwomen and men.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The work for this paper was supported by agrant from the University of Michigan Office of theVice President for Research, by a grant from the Na-tional Institute of Health (MH19391T32), and by theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur FoundationResearch Network on Socioeconomic Status andHealth. Data from several waves of the RadcliffeLongitudinal Study are archived at the Henry A.Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College. Weare grateful to the women in the Radcliffe Longitu-dinal Study for their generous and thoughtful contri-butions to this project over many years.

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