At 25, staying home with her two children while her first husband served in the Marine Corps during World War II, ­Susan Storey Lyman decided a change was in order.

She had “proven an unreliable volunteer and the Red Cross would accept no more of my blood,’’ she wrote in an autobiographical essay the Harvard Alumni Gazette published in 1987.

“I began to think, this is ridiculous. I’ve got to do something more constructive with my time,’’ she recalled in a 1979 interview with The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper.

The answer lay in attending Radcliffe College, which had accepted her before she decided to get married. College officials thought otherwise, though, and “challenged my right to admission seven years later, questioning my intellectual ability after years of ‘idleness’ as the result of choosing matrimony and motherhood,’’ she wrote.

Persevering, she was finally allowed to attend and began an association with Radcliffe and Harvard University that lasted for decades.

She went on to serve as the Radcliffe College marshal, direct the Radcliffe College Fund, chair the college’s Board of Trustees, and advocate for preserving Radcliffe’s independence. “Radcliffe is here to stay,’’ she told The Crimson in 1977 in the wake of what was called a “nonmerger merger’’ agreement with Harvard.

Mrs. Lyman, who also was the first woman to chair the board of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, died Dec. 29 in the Brookhaven at Lexington retirement community. She was 97 and her health had been failing.

“She was not the typical Radcliffe girl for 1949,’’ The Crimson noted in its 1979 profile, referring to Mrs. Lyman’s graduation year.

In her Harvard Alumni Gazette essay, Mrs. Lyman agreed: “I was ecstatic if somewhat uneasy myself about my prospects for survival.’’

Her Radcliffe years were very different than those of most classmates. She attended political science classes “flanked by my two children,’’ and her professor, the noted Soviet Union scholar Merle Fainsod, “would descend after his lecture to shake their small hands with gentle, concerned approval.’’

Mrs. Lyman was a junior when she had her third child.

“Pregnancy on campus was a somewhat shocking condition, and Radcliffe could find no precedent for excusing me from sports,’’ she wrote, but a Harvard Medical School physician intervened to get that obligation waived.

Agassiz House, where a room would be named in her honor years later, was among the sanctuaries available for a student who was simultaneously a mother of two and an expectant mother of a third. “The dining room staff became personal friends of both mine and my children in the room in Agassiz shaped like a smile,’’ she wrote.

“But being a mother and a commuter denied me much of the college experience, dorm life, and extracurricular activity,’’ she added. “I am not denied, however, a sense of deep satisfaction in achieving my degree and the lasting friends made during those Radcliffe years.’’

Born in 1919, she was a daughter of the former Susan Jameson Sweetser. Her father, Charles Moorfield Storey, was a lawyer who took on the administration of Mayor James Michael Curley while serving on Boston’s Finance Committee. As his daughter would years later, Mr. Storey once led the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

The third of five children, Mrs. Lyman grew up in a spacious Victorian in Jamaica Plain that at various times also was home to some of her cousins, along with dogs, cats, and a parrot. “She used to say, ‘I remember one year we had five pianos, five dogs, and five ­Susans,’ ’’ said her son, Ronnie of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

He added that “mostly she had a very unsupervised childhood,’’ which included owning a pony that she rode everywhere, “frequently bareback, frequently barefoot.’’ She told stories of once riding her pony up the front steps of her house and into its expansive front hallway.

Artistically talented, in her late teens she provided line drawings for the chapter headings in one of the many books published by Frances Parkinson Keyes.

Mrs. Lyman graduated from Winsor School, a girls’ prep school in Boston, and then married Samuel Parkman Shaw Jr. in 1939, rather than attend Radcliffe. During the time her husband was a Marine in the Pacific, her older brother Anderson Storey, with whom she was close, died during a bombing mission while serving as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and the following year she married Ronald T. Lyman Jr., who was a general partner for many years with the Boston Investment firm Scudder, Stevens & Clark. He died in 1990.

After her son Charles Storey Shaw took his life, Mrs. Lyman founded a regional organization that is now part of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which in 2001 honored her contributions.

Mrs. Lyman also was a founder in the mid-1950s of the Beacon Hill Nursery School. After graduating from Radcliffe, she attended the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration and received a master’s in education from Harvard University in 1963.

In the early 1970s, she was acting dean of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, which is now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

For her extensive work at Radcliffe and Harvard, Mrs. Lyman received the Alumnae Recognition Award in from the Radcliffe Alumnae Association, and in 1984 was awarded the Harvard Medal, which recognizes extraordinary service to the university.

At one point, her second husband decided to breed Hereford cattle at a farm in Henniker, N.H., and with him she studied beef husbandry at Cornell University.

Her son said the beef husbandry diploma “was the only one I ever saw hanging on a wall in any of the houses we lived in.’’

In addition to her son, Mrs. Lyman leaves her daughter, Jane Shaw of Medford; two stepdaughters, Jennifer Lyman Littlefield of Cambridge and Mabel Lyman of Belmont; a brother, James Storey of Boston; three grandchildren; five step-grandchildren; and six step-great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. May 13 in Kings Chapel in Boston.

“My eyes do not mist — no, not yet, for the impetus Radcliffe provided,’’ Mrs. Lyman wrote in her Harvard Alumni Gazette recollections.

Nevertheless, she added, Radcliffe and Harvard were key parts of her life that were woven into family tradition.

“Radcliffe presided over my mind-birth,’’ she wrote. “All my childhood, my Pa ruminated, head resting on the back of his leather chair, wafts of pipe smoke signaling upwards to a point on the ceiling where he gazed, eyes glazed with his happy nostalgia of the beauty of intellectual activity and the glories of Harvard.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard-@globe.com.