It is one of the tour’s ironies that not very long ago women would have found many of the featured sites off-limits.

Until 1943, Radcliffe students were not permitted to attend classes with Harvard students, even though Radcliffe had been officially incorporated in 1894. And until 1967, female students were barred from Lamont Library for fear that making the secluded stacks co-ed might distract students from their studies and encourage romantic trysts.

Brekke created the tour with help and direction from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and from Jane Knowles, acting director of Schlesinger Library.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Brekke had worked at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate, where she gained lots of experience lecturing on domestic and family life, slavery, and her own specialty, American women’s history. Her background not only prepared her for creating a Harvard women’s history tour, it also showed her what an acute need there was for such a project.

Brekke found that while there was information available to the public on individual women at Harvard, the full story of the role women had played throughout the history of the institution had yet to be told. She also felt it was the right time for such a project.

Another inspiration for the project came from the 1998 conference "Gender at the Gates," jointly sponsored by the Warren Center and the Schlesinger Library. The conference was the kick-off event of a yearlong effort to encourage new research on the history of women at Harvard.

Inside the Agassiz House lobby, graduate student Linzy Brekke pauses next to a mural from the Radcliffe Idler Club's 1909 production of The Merchant of Venice. The entirely female cast appears in both male and female costumes.

"I think the tour will help make the point that there have always been women at Harvard. It’s a perspective that needs to be integrated into people’s consciousnesses," Ulrich said.

Knowles agreed. "As an archivist, I’ve been very concerned with preserving the history of Radcliffe, and this is a wonderful way to do that and, hopefully, to open some eyes," she said.

Brekke said that in about one month the text of the walking tour will be published as a brochure that will be available at Harvard's Events & Information Center.

During the summer, Brekke began sampling local tours for ideas, especially those concentrating on women, such as the Boston Women’s Heritage Tour. She also started digging into the Schlesinger Library and the Harvard University Archives, looking for items that would convey the big picture as well as tell compelling stories.

"I think people have been surprised by what I’ve found," Brekke said. "A lot of people assume that women got here in 1972 when female students moved into the Yard."

Brekke’s research showed that the impact of women on Harvard goes back to the very beginnings of the institution’s history. One of the first to make her mark was Lady Ann Radcliffe, an English aristocrat whose gift to the newly formed college of 100 pounds sterling in 1643 came only a few years after the bequest of John Harvard and was important in setting the school on a solid financial basis.

Anne Hutchinson, called "the American Jezebel," had no direct connection with Harvard, but her presence in Harvard Square in 1637 must have been a hot discussion topic among those engaged in setting up the new college. Believing that God made revelations directly to her, Hutchinson rejected Puritan authority and held religious meetings in her Boston house. She was tried for heresy and sedition, which so polarized the colony that Puritan leaders decided to move the trial to a remote location: Harvard Square. She was found guilty and banished from the colony, finding asylum in Rhode Island.

One of the first poets to praise Harvard in verse was a woman – Phyllis Wheatley, a West African brought to Boston on a slave ship. Educated by her owners, she began writing poetry at age 12. In 1767 she wrote "To the University of Cambridge, in New England." Her 1773 collection of poems, the first book published by an African-American, was praised by George Washington and Voltaire.

Brekke looks over a Radcliffe Yard diorama inside Fay House.

Other notable women on the tour include Anne Sever, whose donation paid for Sever Hall, designed by H.H. Richardson in 1878, and Eleanor Elkins Widener, whose 1914 bequest – in memory of her son Harry Elkins Widener, who was drowned on the Titanic – paid for Widener Library.

Other women left an artistic mark. Sarah Wyman Whitman, a 19th-century artist in stained glass ranking with Lewis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge, designed in 1895 the "Brimmer" and "Honor and Peace" windows in Memorial Hall.

A large portion of the tour deals with Harvard’s sister school, Radcliffe, which began in 1879 as "The Harvard Annex." Deliberately located a substantial distance from the Yard to avoid the appearance of co-education, the new institution provided a venue for Harvard professors to repeat their lectures to an all-female audience.

Led by such figures as Elizabeth Cary Agassiz and Ada Comstock, Radcliffe weathered much scorn and ridicule from many Harvard faculty and administrators. Nevertheless, its students persevered in their academic studies, Brekke said, because they sincerely believed in the ideal of excellence that Harvard represented.

"A lot of early Radcliffe students came from a tradition of excellence within their families, and they wanted the same opportunities as their brothers to prove themselves worthy," Brekke said.

Brekke’s tour also honors those women whose contributions to Harvard were more utilitarian, though no less indispensable. Generations of women cleaned and tidied student residences at Harvard, earning the nickname "Goodies." The only remaining records of many of these hard-working women are notations in ancient account books, but a few have been immortalized in poetry by grateful former students who published their tributes in the Crimson.

Brekke will begin the walking tour on Friday, Oct. 29, at noon in front of Boylston Hall. All are invited.