“That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me ‘Baby’, and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellermans,” said Frances “Baby” Houseman, as the fictional character opened the movie Dirty Dancing.
Baby was named for the first woman in the U.S. Cabinet, Frances Perkins, a Mount Holyoke alumna. Did Baby really go to Mount Holyoke in the fall as planned or did she run off and marry Johnny Castle, the bad boy dancer who stole her heart that summer? One does not know, because frankly, it is a work of fiction. I hope she went to Mount Holyoke in the fall, as her dad, Dr. Jake Houseman (played by one of my favorite actors Jerry Orbach) so proudly boasted. Mount Holyoke is particularly beautiful in the fall.
Pennant, courtesy of Donna Albino (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~dalbino/)
While Mary Lyon, Mount Holyoke’s founder, was a student at Byfield Female Academy in Massachusetts, her mentor, Joseph Emerson, introduced her and Zilpah Grant to an environment where women were treated as intellectual equals. Both Lyon and Grant went on to teach at Adams and Ipswich Academies where they incorporated this element into their own teaching. It was during this time that the idea for a low cost female academy evolved. Lyon was unhappy that the expense of attending Ipswich was prohibitive for the daughters of many New England farmers. She began soliciting an endowment to establish a women’s seminary (a seminary in Mary Lyon’s day and age was a secular school for women, not the religious training institution of contemporary meaning). She wanted her seminary to be specifically for middle class women and to make it affordable, domestic labor was provided by the students.
Lyon traveled to New York and Detroit talking to fellow educators about her plans. In 1834, she left her job at Ipswich, started a committee, and hired an agent to help raise funds for her school. Two years and $15,000 later, Lyon’s dream became a reality. Chartered in 1836, Mount Holyoke Seminary opened on November 8, 1837 at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Training women to become strong teachers was its primary mission.
Mary Lyon’s last year of full-time teaching was 1847-48 and she died the following year. By the late 1800’s, it had become necessary for Mount Holyoke Seminary to evaluate its educational status in order to keep up with the changing American society. Mount Holyoke Seminary became a full-fledged women’s college. The admission standards were changed in order to attract a more diverse student body. Four-year graduation requirements were established. The college began hiring professors rather than teachers. Science and literary courses were added and new buildings were constructed.
By 1900, Mount Holyoke was a progressively developing women’s higher education institution. Mount Holyoke set the example that would be followed by six other women’s colleges: Vassar (1861), Wellesley (1870), Smith (1871), Radcliffe (1879), Bryn Mawr (1885), and Barnard (1889). Two of these “Seven Sisters” colleges were started as co-ordinates to men’s colleges. Radcliffe began as the co-ordinate to Harvard and Barnard was Columbia’s co-ordinate (today both have been subsumed by their coordinate). Vassar became coeducational in 1969.
Collegewomen.org is a newly launched website to chronicle the history of the institutions. For a short time in the early 1900s, Mount Holyoke was home to a group of local sororities (a post about them is on my to-do list). Wellesley has several Greek-letter “societies.” Barnard College, where Alpha Omicron Pi and Alpha Epsilon Phi were founded in 1907 and 1909, respectively, once had a thriving sorority system. In 1913, an edict prohibited the organizations from initiating any new members. The system died. Today a number of sororities have chapters at Columbia University. The photo below is from the collegewomen.org website.
Alpha Omicron Pi, circa-1910-1912. (photo from collegewomen.org)
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2015. All rights reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
