In 1637 the Great and General Court of Massachusetts appointed six magistrates and six ministers to oversee a college, founded the year before (and named Harvard in 1639). At the same time an English farmer, Henry Adams, was preparing to sail to America.

Nearly 340 years passed: 10 generations. Today that farmer's great- (times seven) granddaughter is the first woman president ever of Harvard's Board of Overseers, 32 prominent representatives of business, government and education. Mrs. Gilbert has been an elegant liberation movement all her own. She first cracked the all-male hegemony of the Overseers in 1970, and now six women are members. Throughout these encroachments, the statue of old John Harvard did not leave its pedestal, as some feared. The explanation may be that Helen Gilbert's blood mingles old Crimson (Radcliffe '36, A.B. in biology) and proper Bostonian blue.

The daughter of Abigail Adams and Robert Homans (and a great-great-great-granddaughter of President John Adams, whom she resembles), Helen grew up in Boston's Back Bay and on Beacon Hill. "But society's sort of given up on me," she says. "I don't do lunch club things or play bridge. When I came out my family asked me if I wanted a party or a horse. I took the horse." She chose college for a typically Bostonian reason: "No female member of the Homans family had married as far back as the record went," she explains, "and Pa said, 'You must go to college and get a job, because I can't leave you enough money.' " She picked Radcliffe so she could live at home.

"If I were a student there now, I don't know if I could grapple with co-ed living," she admits. "I can't remember how naïve I was." Right after graduation, she broke tradition to marry a Harvard Law graduate, Carl J. Gilbert, later board chairman of the Gillette Co. They have one son, Thomas Tibbals Gilbert, 27, now a second-year resident in family medicine in Rochester, N.Y. As the boy grew up, Helen Gilbert found she had a natural talent—and zest—for fund-raising. Not that she always succeeded. Once, soliciting for the New England College Fund with Father Raymond J. Swords of Holy Cross, she recalls, "On our first stop, we got tossed out so fast we didn't know what to do until our next appointment. So at 10 in the morning we went bowling." When Love Story was playing, she joked that she wanted to set up an Ali MacGraw Fund. "Just think," she says, "we would have raised millions as the audience exited, tears in their eyes, and dropped in a buck."

Radcliffe remained her special joy. "I have loved it," she says, "and it doesn't make any difference to me whether I serve as a pastry cook or the acting president." Radcliffe decided on the latter when president Mary Bunting took time off in 1964-65 to become the first woman member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Helen Gilbert enjoyed herself greatly. "I'd meet with school officials and say, 'I wonder how we can rock the boat this week.' I don't think we did any harm, but I don't believe we got too far ahead either." (Radcliffe thought otherwise. In 1969 the college dedicated a new Gilbert residence in her honor.)

She has a frank explanation for her selection to head the Overseers until June. "Maybe they felt that if they could stand me for a year, it would be a good place to give a woman a break." She once wondered what her distinguished Adams forefathers would think. A relative replied, "Can't you hear them saying, 'That's no place for a woman to be!' "