Earliest Years at Vassar: Personal Recollections

by Frances Ann Wood

1865

In the main, the notices were dignified and commendatory:—"A munificent enterprise. With the progress of our civilization, the sphere of personal activity enlarges for women as well as for men, and education must keep pace with its progress…. The institution is intended to be all that the term college imparts; to be ultimately what Yale, Harvard, and Brown are to young men."

The New York Evening Post of 1860 says:—"It is not to be for a moment supposed that this plan of instruction involves a departure from the field of activity which nature has for the female sex, or of unfitting them for the duties which their own tastes as well as the requirements of society indicate them to perform…. No institution of note has yet ventured to admit females much further than into the mysteries of the rudiments." (Female delicacy, female industry, female mind, female college were terms hard worked in those days. A belief of sex in mind was universal.)

Now and then an attempt to be facetious was made. The New York Times in 1860 also had its say of the new enterprise as follows:—"What do you think of a woman's college? And why not? After Allopathic, Hydropathic, Homeopathic and patent pill colleges, universities and all that sort of thing, why not let the girls have one? For the life of me I do not discover any very valid objection, but objection or no objection, the thing is to be. By a bill introduced this morning, Matthew Vassar, William Kelly, James Harper, E. L. Magoon, B. J. Lossing, S. F. B. Morse and a dozen or more gentlemen among the Knowing and the Known are authorized to be the body corporate of a female college. The said college is to have full power to educate feminines and to grant them sheepskins the same as any other college is authorized and wont to do."

THE FOUNDER
1865

Ten members constituted the Faculty in 1865-68, seven men with the President, and three women—Miss Lyman, lady principal, Miss Mitchell, director of the observatory, and Dr. Avery, the resident physician. The seven chairs filled by men could boast degrees and titles, but there were none for women those days. There were no associate professors, no instructors in departments ranking teachers, simply Faculty and teachers for many years. Nowadays, the catalogue bristles with degrees, and not to have A.B. or something after one's name is the rare exception.

The teachers numbered twenty that first year; the second, the number had increased to thirty-four and of these nine taught music, the largest department in the college and—as we that were in it thought—the most important.

The first catalogue, issued 1865-66, shows the whole number of students as 353, all unclassified, owing to the inequalities of preparation. Among this number were many very far advanced in general scholarship, but who had certain exceptional deficiencies preventing their entering a regular class at once. By the end of the second year, however, all were graded. It is not strange that at the outset so many should be unfitted to enter, when hitherto no preparation for women to take a college training had been provided for in the land.