The Higher Education of Women: A Timeline to 1900
|
Year |
Event |
Personages/Circumstances |
| 1821 | Opening of Troy (N.Y.) Female Seminary | Emma Willard as prime mover |
| 1823 | Opening of Hartford Female Seminary | Catherine Beecher as prime mover |
| 1836 | Georgia Female College chartered in Macon, Georgia, by Methodists | First women’s college;opened in 1839; now Georgia Wesleyan |
| 1837 | Opening of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, South Hadley, Mass. | Mary Lyon the prime mover |
| 1837 | Newly opened Oberlin College enrolls women | Evangelist Charles Grandison Finney a prime mover |
| 1841 | Academy of the Sacred Heart opens in NYC; now Manhattanville | First Catholic college for women |
| 1855 | Elmira Colleges opens in upstate NY | |
| 1855 | University of Iowa admits women | Followed by other state universities: Indian; Missouri; Michigan; California |
| 1861 | Vassar College opens in Poughkeepsie, NY | Matthew Vassar, a brewer, principal benefactor and namesake |
| 1865 | Cornell University opens with policy to admit women | |
| 1868 | Wells College opens in Aurora, NY | |
| 1869 | Girton College opens as a women’s college within Cambridge University | |
| 1870 | Sophia Smith will provides for college in Northampton, Mass. | Smith College opens in 1875. |
| 1875 | Wellesley College opens in Boston suburb | Pauline and Henry Fowle Durant the prime movers |
| 1879 | President F. A. P. Barnard calls on Columbia trustees to support co-education | Uses three successive annual reports to press cause. Opposed by most faculty and students. Unsuccessful. |
| 1879 | “Harvard Annex”/Radcliffe opens in Cambridge, Mass | Arthur Gilman prime mover; women taught separately by Harvard faculty |
| 1880 | Bryn Mawr College opens in suburban Philadelphia | Explicitly modeled after Johns Hopkins to provide graduate training for women |
| 1881 | American Association of University Women (AAUW) organized in Boston | Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) follows |
| 1886 | Columbia awards PhD to a woman, Winifred Edgerton, in astronomy | Circumstances explicitly “exceptional” and not considered a precedent. |
| 1888 | Mt. Holyoke secures charter as a women’s college | |
| 1889 | Barnard College opens 4 blocks from Columbia College, initially in ‘Annex-like” arrangement | Annie Nathan Meyer a prime mover. Relationship altered in 1900, with Barnard having its own faculty and trustees |
| 1891 | Women admitted to Columbia graduate programs in the humanities and pure sciences. | Columbia’s medical school and law school closed to women until 1917 and 1926 respectively. |
| 1900 | Graduate programs in most universities open to women, who account for 10% of PhDs awarded. | |