The 1885 opening of Bryn Mawr College, represented the beginning of the end for traditional pedagogy and campus design for women’s colleges. Although its original scheme drew on Smith College’s design principles, the boundaries imposed in Northampton were cast off in the development of the new college. Molded by a woman experienced with Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and German universities, Bryn Mawr provided its students with a distinctive blend of university and women’s college. In this way, it separated from the architectural and governance practices that had typified the higher education of women and adopted for women the academic environment, scholarship, and behaviors of men. Specifically, Bryn Mawr dissolved the characteristic architectural tradition of the women’s colleges, with its goals of protection, control, and subjugation—not long after its conception, its more egalitarian quadrangles were claimed in the designs of the other members of the Seven Sisters campuses. These educational and design innovations would not have been possible without the efforts of Martha Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr’s first dean and later president. In 1877, Joseph Wright Taylor and a number of his colleagues on the Haverford College board decided to found a Quaker college for women, “for the advanced education and care of young women and girls of the higher and more refined classes of Society.” Located on a thirty-two-acre tract neighboring the Pennsylvania Railroad and five miles from Haverford, the Bryn Mawr campus was in its early stages designed by Addison Hutton (fig. 1). A Quaker architect who had just designed Barclay Hall at Haverford, Hutton was instructed to build in a way to tone down any excesses or fanciness. Bryn Mawr’s founder and ... ... middle of paper ... ...ings to the 1930s. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. 105-34. Langdon, Emily A. “Women’s Colleges Then and Now: Access Then, Equity Now.” Peabody Journal of Education 76, no. 1 (2001): 5-30. Merriam, Ruth Levy. “The Remodeling of the Deanery.” In A History of the Deanery, Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1965. 1-24. McPherson, Mary Patterson. "A Century of Building at Bryn Mawr." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 3 (1998): 399-415. Vickery, Margaret Birney. “The Little Band of Pioneers: Girton College.” In Buildings for Bluestockings. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1999. 1-40. Wein, Roberta. “Women’s Colleges and Domesticity, 1875-1918.” History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1974): 31-47. Welch, William H. “Contribution of Bryn Mawr College to the Higher Education of Women.” Science 56, no. 1436 (1922): 1-8.
Volume III: P-Z. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Print. The. James, Edward, Janet James, and Paul Boyer. Notable American Women, 1607-1950.
“National Women’s Conference.” Off Our Backs 8, no. 1 (1978): 2-3. Accessed February 12, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25792578.
As mentioned above, women’s role were unjust to the roles and freedoms of the men, so an advanced education for women was a strongly debated subject at the beginning of the nineteenth century (McElligott 1). The thought of a higher chance of education for women was looked down upon, in the early decades of the nineteenth century (The American Pageant 327). It was established that a women’s role took part inside the household. “Training in needlecraft seemed more important than training in algebra” (327). Tending to a family and household chores brought out the opinion that education was not necessary for women (McElligott 1). Men were more physically and mentally intellectual than women so it was their duty to be the educated ones and the ones with the more important roles. Women were not allowed to go any further than grammar school in the early part of the 1800’s (Westward Expansion 1). If they wanted to further their education beyond grammar, it had to be done on their own time because women were said to be weak minded, academically challenged and could n...
Born in 1863 to a Presbyterian minister and his wife, she grew up in a very tight-knit family as the oldest of five children. In 1880, the family moved to Massachusetts where they settled and built a home. Mary’s father wanted the best for his daughter, and designed and supervised Mary’s education until she graduated in 1882. Upon graduation, Mary attended Smith College with an advanced standing as a sophomore. In 1893, Mary’s sister passed away and Mary dropped out of college for a season, taking her classes through private lessons at home. Mary returned to Smith College in 1884 as a senior and graduated with a concentration on philosophy and classics. In 1886, two years after graduation from college, the Calkins family went to Europe for a holiday that lasted for sixteen months. Mary continued to expand her knowledge of the classics and upon returning to America, her father arranged an interview with the President of...
Ferguson, Mary Anne. "My Antonia in Women's Studies: Pioneer Women and Men-- The Myth and the Reality." Rosowski's Approaches to Teaching 95-100.
Haverford College did not begin as the institution that it is today. A group of concerned Quakers constructed the secondary school on the premise that it would provide a fine education for Quaker young men. On its founding day in 1833, the Haverford School's notion of a "liberal and guarded education for Quaker boys" became a reality. Jumping forward in time to 1870, a decisive change was on the horizon: the faculty and students had voted to go coed. However, the Board of Managers did not concede and Haverford remained single sex for over a century after the students and faculty had spoken. It wasn't until 1980 that a freshmen class comprised of both men and women entered Haverford. Yet it is the decade prior to 1980 that is the topic of this paper. The series of about 10 years before a Haverford female student would unpack her belongings in her room to settle down for four years of an intense and demanding education, both in and out of the classroom, was a time of much reevaluation and consideration on the part of the students, administration, and faculty.
Hymowitz, Carol, and Michaele Weissman. A History of Women in America. New York: Bantam, 1978. Print.
Roebuck, Julian B., and Komanduri S. Murty. Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Their Place in American Higher Education. Westport: Praeger, 1993. Print.
Susan Faludi unfolds a world of male domination and its interrelationships within its confines and places women in the center of her story. Indeed it truly took an extremely self-confident woman to even entertain the idea of entering an all-male academic college like the Citadel, whose front gate practically reads like that of a young boys fort that makes the bold statement, “No girls allowed they have coodies.” Shannon Falkner was a strong willed woman with an immense amount of confidence to completely omit her gender on the Citadel application to enter this college. As if gender was not an issue, or should have never been an issue in
A college education is something that women take for granted today, but in the 1800’s it was an extremely rare thing to see a woman in college. During the mid 1800’s, schools like Oberlin and Elmira College began to accept women. Stone’s father did a wonderful thing (by 19th century standards) in loaning her the money to pay for her college education. Stone was the first woman to get a college education in Massachusetts, graduating from Oberlin College in 1843. Her first major protest was at the time of her graduation. Stone was asked to write a commencement speech for her class. But she refused, because someone else would have had to read her speech. Women were not allowed, even at Oberlin, to give a public address.
Hoffman, Nancy. "A Journey into Knowing." Tradition and the Talents of Women. Ed. Florence Howe. Chicago: Univ. of Illinois. 1991.
2. In order to understand the recent trend towards coeducation, the evolution of the women's college as a response to the lack of access to higher education must first be explored in depth. The women-only institutions that preceded the women's college and were highly popular from the 1820s on were known as "academies" or "seminaries" (Harwarth 1). While they did teach core academic subjects to their pupils, seminaries were seen by many progressive educationalists as an inadequate way to deal with the lack of quality education for females. Such seminaries lacked the governance of a board of trustees that provides educational institutions with permanence, credibility, and direction through the form of a mission statement and economic support in the form of an endowment. Because validity was seen as an essential step towards guaranteeing women a level educational playing- field, women's colleges followed the organizational mold cast by men's colleges, including forming board of trustees, actions that institutionalized and therefore made important the goal of equal education for women. It was this tenet of equality upon which women's colleges were founded, specifically at this time period the equality of access to higher education. The will of Sophia Smith, founder of Smith College in 1875, stated that that it is "with the design to furnish my sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges for young men" (Harwarth 4).
Vassar was Grace’s choice for college. Most women in the 1920s were getting their education to meet a husband; Vassar offered courses “designed ‘to raise motherhood to a profession worthy of [women’s] finest talents and greatest intellectual gifts.’” (Williams, 2004) In contrast, Grace took her studies seriously by concentrating in mathematics
Zubatsky, David. The History of American Colleges and Their Libraries In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries: A Bibliographical Essay. Page 17. Web. Accessed 25 Jan 2014. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/3878/gslisoccasionalpv00000i00140.pdf?sequence=1
Women have had quite a few hurdles to get over since the 1950's. In 1958 the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men was 35 percent. (Friedan,