Stephens College and Christian College, Women's Education on the Prairie

Two women's colleges took root in Columbia within a few years of each other, and their presence shaped the character of the city for nearly two centuries. Christian College was founded in eighteen fifty-one by the Christian Church, making it one of the oldest women's colleges west of the Mississippi River. It operated continuously through the Civil War, a remarkable fact in a border state torn between Union and Confederate allegiances.

Today it operates as Columbia College and enrolls both men and women, but its origins as a women's institution carried the conviction that women deserved the same quality of education as men, at a time when that idea was far from universally accepted. Stephens College began in eighteen thirty-three as the Columbia Female Academy, which makes it one of the oldest women's colleges in the country by founding date, though the current institution traces its continuous history from its formal reorganization and expansion in the later nineteenth century. It took the name Stephens College in eighteen seventy, honoring James L.

Stephens, who endowed the school with twenty thousand dollars. For much of the twentieth century Stephens was known for a distinctive curriculum that included theater, dance, fashion, and the arts alongside traditional academics. Its equestrian tradition goes back to the Prince of Wales riding club, formed on campus in nineteen twenty-six.

Together, Columbia's women's colleges reflect a tradition that put this mid-Missouri college town ahead of much of the country in the proposition that higher education for women was not charity or novelty but necessity. The University of Missouri itself began admitting women in eighteen sixty-eight, relatively early for a public land-grant institution.