Breaking the Daisy Chain

Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Radcliffe. When the first was founded by a Massachusetts teacher named Mary Lyon in 1837, she called it a "peculiar institution"; it was designed solely for the post-secondary education of women. In the 1920s the colleges banded together as the Seven Sisters, partly to present a united front for fund raising. Elaine Kendall (Mt. Holyoke '49) sees all of them as Peculiar Institutions (Putnam, $8.95). Her "informal history" of the Seven, both affectionate and critical, scans their strange beginnings, early growth and difficult future.

From the outset, each sister was clearly unique. After Mary Lyon, "the founders of the Seven proceed in a descending spiral of unlikelihood," says Kendall. Sophia Smith, for example, inherited a fortune from a skinflint bachelor brother and intended to open a school for deaf-mutes until she was told that there were not enough of them to fill one. After rejecting a proposal that she make a bequest to Amherst--she believed that professors there were subversives bent on controlling central Massachusetts--Smith settled on starting the college, which opened in 1875. Matthew Vassar, a Poughkeepsie brewer, simply wanted to be remembered, and was persuaded that the women's college he was to found in 1865 would be something "more lasting than the pyramids." In his private diary, the brewer speculated on his future reputation: "The founder of Vassar College and President Lincoln--two noble emancipationists, one of women."

Much of Kendall's work is a social history of an age when a woman's intellectual capacity was not highly regarded. So few women were prepared for college that there were years when Vassar granted only one or two diplomas. Newspapers argued the wisdom of ignoring "great natural laws" and overstimulating female nervous systems by "examinations, exhibitions and prizes." At Smith as late as the 1890s no men were allowed at dances ("from the gallery it looks like a butterfly ball," wrote an observer) and at Mt. Holyoke male guests at promenades were given printed cards with suggested topics for conversation such as "Truth," "Friendship" or "Progress." Vassar women bridled at a sermon comparing them to a field of lilies: "The sole aim of the lily was to minister to the esthetic nature of the manly oak." In 1895, according to Kendall, the women's college movement was staggered when a survey showed that more than half the graduates remained single. This was of no matter, however, to M. Carey Thomas, the redoubtable lesbian president of Bryn Mawr from 1893 to 1922. Arguing that women should have both marriage and a career, she commented tartly: "Our failures only marry."

A difficult time for single-sex colleges began in the 1960s. When men's colleges started going coed, siphoning off some of the best women students, the Seven Sisters had to take a new look at their original charters. Radcliffe elected to become part of Harvard; Barnard tightened its ties with neighboring Columbia, and Bryn Mawr with Haverford; Vassar took in men. Only Wellesley, Smith and Mt. Holyoke remained colleges for women. There is currently a new wave of interest in them, fueled in part by their courses in women's studies, but Kendall believes it is temporary, and that ultimately no single-sex school can survive in the U.S. The interesting question now is not which women's college came first, she says, but which will be the last to go.

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