Women's Colleges

Early Development of Women's Colleges

The precursors to women's colleges in the United States were seminaries. Some of the early schools for girls focused on the domestic arts, religion, etc. It was not until 1821, when Emma Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, that a women's institution offered a curriculum on par with that offered in men's colleges. The Troy Female Seminary's curriculum included mathematics, science, modern languages, Latin, history, philosophy, geography, and literature. Graduates of the Troy Female Seminary opened their own schools based on the Troy model across the nation.

Another pioneer, Catherine Beecher, was one of Willard's students. As an advocate of higher education for women, she founded the Hartford Female Seminary in 1823. Two other seminaries that influenced the development of higher education for women were the Ipswich Female Seminary and the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, which later become Mt. Holyoke College, both located in Massachusetts as well. Oberlin College signaled the beginning of the era of the college-educated woman when, in 1837, they awarded the first baccalaureate degree to a woman.

By 1890, there were more girls than boys graduating from high school. Women's colleges were most influential in the east and south. In the midwest and the west, coeducation was the norm as the public land grant institutions were founded. In these regions, women's colleges were not founded as an access remedy but rather as another educational option for women that would prove to be more integrated than the separate and isolating experience women were enduring at larger public universities like the University of California, Berkeley. Another format for offering higher-education opportunities to women was to attach or “coordinate” a female college to an institution for men. This allowed women access to higher education without having to admit them to men's colleges.

[Page 1567]At the peak of their development, there were nearly 300 women's colleges operating throughout the United States. Among the earliest, most long lasting and influential was a group of seven, single-sex, liberal arts schools in the Northeast that came to be known as the Seven Sisters. Four of these opened following the Civil War: Vassar (1865, New York), Wellesley and Smith (1875, Massachusetts), and Bryn Mawr (1884, Pennsylvania). Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith were all endowed institutions and each was based on the Mt. Holyoke model, the original “Sister.” All four were private. Two other colleges-Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Barnard College, begun in 1889 in New York City-were each affiliated with or attached to an established university serving only male students: Radcliffe was associated with Harvard University, and Barnard with Columbia University.

The Seven Sisters often drew on each other's alumnae for faculty and consulted each other on matters of policy. The official affiliation of the seven institutions originated at a conference held at Vassar College in 1915 to discuss ways to increase revenues. Subsequent conferences led to the name “Seven Sisters” being associated with the group. One explanation for the name relates to a Greek myth about the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione. Another explanation credits the name as being generated from the schools’ parallel to the men's colleges’ Ivy League.

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