Word: vassar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Communist Party Congress that opens in Moscow this week. It was written by Patricia Blake, a longtime student of the Russian scene who came to TIME as a consultant on Soviet affairs in 1968. She was assisted by Reporter-Researcher Sara Medina, who earned a degree in Russian at Vassar College and has worked on many stories involving East bloc countries...