Editing Widener Library (section)

==Restrictions on women==
[[File:HarvardUniversity WidenerLibrary Reading c1915 cropped.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.5
|link=File:HarvardUniversity_WidenerLibrary_Reading_c1915.jpg|The main reading room in 1915. By World War{{nbsp}}II women were allowed enter "to use the {{shy|en|cy|clo|pe|dias}} and things like that there, if we stood up, but we couldn't sit down."{{hsp}}{{r|colson|pp=56–57}}
]]
The building originally included a separate [[Radcliffe College|Radcliffe]] Reading Room behind the card catalogs{{mdashb}}"barely large enough for a single table"{{mdashb}}to which female students were restricted "for fear their presence would distract the studious Harvard men" in the main reading room.

In 1923 a sequence of communications between Librarian [[William Coolidge Lane]] and another Harvard official dealt with "the incident of Miss Alexander's intrusion into the reading room",{{ran|B|p=37,86}}
and [[Keyes Metcalf]], Director of University Libraries from 1937 to 1955, wrote that early in his tenure a [[Classics]] professor "rushed into my office, looking as if he were about to have an apoplectic stroke, and gasped, 'I've just been in the reading room, and there is a Radcliffe girl in there!{{'"}} By then female graduate students were permitted to enter the stacks, but only until 5{{nbsp}}p.m., "after which time it was thought they would not be safe there".{{hsp}}{{NoteTag
|After his retirement Metcalf wrote that when planning the later [[Lamont Library]], "I was still old fashioned enough to believe that, if women [would be permitted to use it] we should probably not have the small, unsupervised reading rooms that we were planning."{{hsp}}{{r|metcalf1988|p=87}} 
}}

"Even the ever-present problem of inadequate lavatories worked to deny functional access to women", wrote Battles. "Patrons requesting directions to a women's restroom were routinely misled, denied access, or simply told that such things did not exist at a college for men such as Harvard."{{hsp}}{{ran|B|p=115}}

By World War{{nbsp}}II ([[Elizabeth Colson]] recalled years later) "we could go into the [Main Reading Room] and use the encyclopedias and things like that there, if we stood up, but we couldn't sit down",{{r|colson|pp=56–57}}
and only by special permission (which even female faculty members had to request in writing) could a woman work in the building in the evening.{{ran|B|p=112-4}}