Mount Holyoke College: Mary Lyon's Radical Wager
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
In eighteen thirty-seven, a teacher named Mary Lyon did something that most of American society thought was either absurd or dangerous: she opened a rigorous college for women.
Lyon had spent her career watching talented young women get turned away from serious academic institutions. She was determined to change that. She spent years touring Massachusetts, raising money in small amounts from farmers, tradespeople, and laborers, because wealthy donors were largely skeptical. Eventually she gathered enough to build the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, which opened on November eighth, eighteen thirty-seven.
Lyon's vision was specific. She admitted only mature young women and required rigorous entrance exams in English grammar, mathematics, geography, and American history. She kept tuition at sixty dollars per year, roughly a third of what comparable schools charged, because she believed higher education had to be accessible to women of modest means, not just the daughters of the wealthy. Students took on domestic work to help keep costs down, which critics mocked as domestic servitude; Lyon called it practical education.
The school became a template for women's higher education in America. It is the oldest of the Seven Sisters, the group of elite women's colleges that would include Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe. Among its most famous early students was Emily Dickinson, who attended for a single year, eighteen forty-seven to eighteen forty-eight. She returned home without graduating, but the experience sharpened her fierce independence.
Alumnae went on to reshape American public life: Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, as Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor; Virginia Apgar, whose Apgar Score became the global standard for evaluating newborns. Mount Holyoke remains a women's college today, having declined several times to go co-educational, insisting that the original wager Mary Lyon made in eighteen thirty-seven is still worth keeping.
