Nancy / Louise

Louise and Nancy at Briggs Hall, South House, Parents Weekend, 1971

Harvard Crimson notes a history-making dive.

Nancy with grandaughter Kayli Yu in fall of 2022.

Louise’s Facebook picture, 1971.

Louise in Anarctica with H-R reunion string knapsack, and friend, in 2019.

Louise and Nancy 51 years later, spring 2023.

Nancy Sato talks to Louise Gessel about the origins of her lifelong fight for equity, starting in the athletics arena at Harvard.

“Standing up for others and what’s right keeps me going.”

So says Nancy Sato, the first female athlete to receive a Harvard varsity letter. It was a long journey.

In this episode of PasstheMic75, Nancy, an All-American swimmer and diver, tells classmate Louise Gessell about arriving at Harvard only to discover she couldn’t use the one regulation-sized pool with a diving board because it was a male-only facility.

Not for long.

Nancy pushed the athletic department to adhere to a new federal law, Title IX, mandating equal treatment for men and women on campus. “I realized, ‘Hey, things won’t change if you don’t speak up. It doesn’t matter what people will think of you.’”

But speaking up took courage. Women were a distinct minority at Harvard in 1971, and the administration let them know it. The numbers were daunting. For example Leverett House had 470 men and one woman.

“I don’t think any of us thought of ourselves as trailblazers,” Nancy says. “It was always just sorta like, ‘Wait a minute! We’d be doing better if we were doing this.’"

And Harvard did do better, though not without a lot of push and push-back.

When you listen to Nancy’s captivating story, you understand why she was named the first recipient of the Radcliffe College Alumni Association Award as Best Female Athlete at Harvard. 

As she relates: “When people said, ‘You can’t do this,’ we’d say: ‘Why not?’”