When Priscilla Nash Conger '44 went to "check out the guys," she didn't guzzle at the Grille or scam at the Spaghetti Club.
Instead, she attended Bach concerts at Symphony Hall. And one fateful night, her musical forays paid off. In the tuxedo-clad ranks of the Harvard Glee Club, she found love at first sight.
"I picked one out from the back row of the third basses," Conger recalls. "I just thought he was wonderful."
Although there were some twists and turns in the path to romance, the rest is history. Priscilla and Alan D. Conger '40, who married just two months after Priscilla's college graduation, will celebrate their 50th anniversary this August.
The Congers' story is in some ways in typical one for the Class of 1944. Despite World War II, many Harvard and Radcliffe students managed to find romance and form lasting relationships during their time at the College.
According to an alumni survey of the Harvard class, 84 percent are married and only 19 percent have ever been married more than once. The median anniversary year of those still married is the 44th, and one tenth of the class members are celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year. Five percent more are celebrating more than 50 years of marriage.
But the war affected all elements of student life, and romantic relations were no exception. Couples were both aided and hurt by wartime transformations like the institution of co-ed classes, which changed the nature of relationship between the sexes at Harvard forever.
Constraints
Of course, relationships of the era came with constraints students today have never known.
"We had to check into our dorms by a certain hour...and you had to write where you were going," remembers Sylvia Maynard '44. "The dorm mother was in loco parentis."
"Relations with boys were more formal and had to be by special arrangement," Maynard says. "You didn't just happen to casually meet boys around the dorm or brushing your teeth or things like that. Dates were arranged and people dressed up for them."
When men and women did meet, it sometimes required bending Harvard and Radcliffe's single-sex rules.
For instance, Mary Anne Wall Hyde '44 met her husband Albert F. Hyde II '43 when he crashed a tea for Radcliffe first-years "to look over the crop of freshmen."
Romance was not only more formal but less physically intense than today, one women remembers.
"We kissed and cuddled and did some things," says Ellinor Benedict And social more left little room for youngpeople to experiment sexually. Read more in News
