In carefully picking the first classes of women to matriculate at many graduate schools, Harvard created a powerful group of women who would go on to succeed in a variety of fields. However, many women have only realized this after much reflection.

“If you had asked me in 1963 when I went to Harvard, or in 1964, if Betty Friedan and all that full array of women and their voices were important to me, then personally, I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘I don’t think so,’” Lack said.

However, Lack said that she now looks back and sees that these forces must have had some impact with the issue of putting women on campus.

“We were really accomplished. We have all have done extraordinarily well, and I’m so proud of my own path,” said Lack, speaking about herself and her female classmates. “I’ve been empowered by [my education], but I don’t know that there was a sense of empowerment at the time.”

Even though Lack said she believes that the real women’s revolution came after she graduated, Kennedy felt that there was a sense of individual empowerment in many female students, more so than at other institutions.

“[My female classmates] had a sense that they were going to do things,” she said. “They were there to be educated.”

Others believed themselves to be in the minority when it came to desiring independence from social norms.

“I don’t think that many women I knew at Harvard felt the need to be empowered. We had roles created by our family background and society. I never followed those rules,” Pollet said. “I struggled to break barriers.”

Graduates of the Class of 1963 were a part a growth in the number of degrees conferred to women across the University and the addition of the Harvard name may have opened doors, but these opportunities were not realized until much later-and some have yet to be achieved.

“In retrospect, there’s been a lot of rewriting of history as though Harvard were a really feminist place in the early 60s,” Dollenmayer said. “There’s still a lot of work to do today, in my opinion.”

—Staff writer Brianna D. MacGregor can be reached at bmacgregor@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @bdmacgregor.