Bryn Mawr College, Where Women Could Earn a Ph.D.
Pennsylvania
Bryn Mawr College sits on a wooded hill in Lower Merion Township, just west of Philadelphia, and for a century and a half it has been doing something that sounds unremarkable today but was genuinely radical in eighteen eighty-five: offering women a rigorous, research-level education equivalent to the best men's universities in the country.
The college was founded by Joseph Wright Taylor, a Quaker physician from New Jersey who believed women deserved intellectual formation of the highest standard. He left the bulk of his estate for the college's establishment and carefully selected its founding faculty to ensure it would offer not just undergraduate instruction but genuine graduate work. When Bryn Mawr opened in eighteen eighty-five, it became the first women's college in the United States to offer graduate instruction leading to the Ph.D. No other women's institution had done this. The doctorate was an exclusively male credential at every American university. Bryn Mawr broke that barrier.
The person who transformed the institution's national reputation was M. Carey Thomas, who became dean in eighteen eighty-four and president in eighteen ninety-four, a post she held until nineteen twenty-two. Thomas had wanted a university education herself and had been denied a degree by Leipzig because she was a woman. She then applied to the University of Zurich, passed her examinations in linguistics, and received her doctorate summa cum laude in eighteen eighty-two. She returned to build at Bryn Mawr the institution she had been refused elsewhere. Under her leadership the college established the first graduate fellowships for women in the United States and drew students from across the country.
The college's alumni list carries names from across a century of American intellectual and cultural life: the poet H.D., the poet Marianne Moore, the geneticist Nettie Stevens who determined that sex chromosomes determine biological sex, and Katharine Hepburn, class of nineteen twenty-eight, who arrived as a teenager and graduated one of the most formidable women in American theater and film.
