Extralaboratory Life: Gender Politics and Experimental Biology at Radcliffe College, 1894–1910

To reach the Radcliffe Zoological Laboratory, Lucy Sprague trekked from Radcliffe’s Fay House across Cambridge to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology where she climbed the stairs to a small, women’s only room on the fifth floor. She recorded her awareness of circumventing all-male spaces on Harvard’s campus whenever she ‘started off for college’ or ‘screwed up my courage to go to the laboratory’ in her diary from March of 1900 (Figure 1).2 The Dean of Radcliffe had even paid her a personal visit to enforce the college’s strict codes of gender segregation: ‘I was never to walk home through the Harvard Yard. For four years I walked down Massachusetts Avenue and up Quincy Street’.3 In her commutes to dissect specimens at the women’s laboratory – Sprague recalls one that left her drenched from rain – she navigated around established masculine spaces on campus, a vivid window into how gendered thresholds limited women’s access to sites of higher education in biology at the turn of the century. Gender politics between Radcliffe and Harvard Colleges shaped Sprague’s walks across campus. In 1894, Radcliffe incorporated as a women’s administrative unit – not an academic college – associated with the all-male Harvard College.4 As a coordinate institution, Radcliffe did not have the ability to build its own faculty, hire the women it educated or create a professional academic community that reflected its social and political commitments to women in higher education. Instead, Harvard faculty taught courses to Harvard men and then walked to Fay House to repeat them for Radcliffe women.5 Surprisingly, access to scientific facilities proved to be an exception to these patterns, with Radcliffe women commuting in the other direction to take biology, geology and anthropology courses in Harvard’s laboratories.6 Although unnoticed by scholars to date, the Radcliffe Zoological Laboratory, a space in the Museum of Comparative Zoology dedicated to the study of zoology (or animal biology), became an important site for training women in science.7 The history of Radcliffe’s Zoological