HISTORY OF WOMEN AT CORNELL

A very decided majority of both trustees and faculty are in favor of this great experiment [coeducation]; as for myself, I have the utmost confidence in its success.

                                                                        — Ezra Cornell

In 1870, Jennie Spencer hoisted up her skirts and, with a sigh, trudged up the hill to Cornell’s campus.  As the first woman matriculate of Cornell University, Spencer played an important role in the University’s history.  Three years later, Emma Sheffield Eastman became the first female graduate.  One hundred twenty-five years later, women make up almost half of the total student population.  They no longer consider themselves “coeds,” or any less capable than their male counterparts of embarking on a challenging educational and career path.

Beginnings were a bit difficult.  Although Ezra may have had the most earnest pro-women opinions, Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first President, and the Board of Trustees weren’t as eager to go against the “sex-sectarianism” of the day.

Cornell and White opened the University in 1868, and in 1872, it became the first major Eastern institution to admit women with men.  It soon became a pioneer in establishing financial aid specifically for women.  Although women were not officially enrolled until four years after men, Ezra had all intentions of including both sexes in his vision of the perfect institution: both his daughters had gone to Vassar and his wife, Mary Ann, was in favor of women’s education. 

Despite this early goodwill, however, the University treatment of women clearly showed bias in favor of men, reflecting American societal views, at the time, of women’s education.  Americans in general vehemently opposed coeducation, fearing that the process would feminize men, lead women astray from the path of “true womanhood,” and create “hard-minded” women.  An early Cornell brochure assured concerned parents that college life was not for every young woman but those who have “real taste for study and desire for knowledge, who aim to prepare themselves so that in case of adversity, they may be sure of good self-support, and who have a fixity of purpose and definitiveness of aim necessary to carry them through a thorough course of advanced study” would be suited for college life.  Despite medical reports labeling women incapable of strict education because of the stress it would place on their “weak constitutions”, Cornell proceeded with its “great experiment.” 

A few years later, Henry Sage pledged a quarter of a million dollars for the establishment of a women’s dormitory, Sage College.  The cornerstone reads:

In return for this gift Cornell University is pledged to provide and forever maintain facilities for the education of women as broadly as for men.

The faculty had mixed opinions on women’s education. Professor Goldwin Smith was so passionately opposed to the idea of women’s suffrage, much less women’s education, that the school’s liberal policies made him seriously reconsider his commitment to Cornell.  Sage College, completed by the fall 1875, was an elegant building capable of housing 120 women, but it was the university’s “white elephant” in the early years.  At that time, most women (and men) lived in boarding houses nearby.  However, women were soon required to live in Sage Hall.  In 1884, White protested the Trustees’ (including Henry Sage) decision to install a “matron” to supervise the women.  White wanted to treat all his students equally; a women’s chaperone undoubtedly represented unequal standing.  A curfew that began then wasn’t lifted until 1962.

Regardless of restrictions, women formed their own organizations, teams, and clubs, including the first chapter of a national sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, in 1882.  In 1895, Caroline Baldwin Morrison was the first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science degree at an American university.  However, progress in women’s acceptance as professors at the University was weak. Anna Comstock, a nationally recognized naturalist, was denied full professorship for twenty years until 1920.  In 1911, Martha Van Rennselaer and Florence Rose became the first female full professors; they later formed the College of Home Economics (renamed the College of Human Ecology in 1969).  The first full-time female professor in the College of Arts and Sciences was not appointed until 1960, ten years after clubs were desegregated sex-wise.  Nonetheless, the 1951 yearbook still featured sixty pages of men’s sports coverage compared with one for women’s athletics. 

The mixed successes of the first seventy-five years of Cornell paved the way for the changes that occurred during the 1970s.  Cornell offered coeducational housing for the first time. The University also offered some of the first women’s studies classes in the country.  Under the auspices of Jennie T. Farley Ph. D. ’70, the Women’s Studies Program, the first of its kind, began at Cornell in 1972.  Although only twenty percent of Cornell’s full professors today are women, the University continues to make efforts to increase the number and quality of women faculty.

In October of 1976, the Board of Trustees organized a conference on the status of women in colleges, inviting all Ivy League administrations to discuss women-related issues in the collegiate setting.  This historic convention was the first of its kind, thus marking the Trustees as allies of women’s rights at Cornell.

In 1990, the President’s Council of Cornell Women, composed of prominent and dedicated alumnae, was formed by then-president Frank H. T. Rhodes to serve as a network and to involve alumnae in improving the experience of women at Cornell. The meetings bring leaders in all professional fields to campus as well as offer an opportunity for undergraduates to network and learn about careers.  In addition, the University has an Advisory Committee on the Status of Women which also looks out for issues involving Cornell women.

Today, nearly half (48.2%) of the student body consists of women.  There are eighteen sororities, eighteen women’s sports teams, approximately thirty groups on campus devoted to women’s issues, a Women’s Center, a strong Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, and abundant opportunities in every field of study and non-academic interest.  Women at Cornell today continue to uphold Ezra Cornell’s vision of excellence as women and as equal and active members of a diverse student body.

Notable Cornell Women

Emma Sheffield Eastman, Class of 1873 - Cornell’s first female graduate.

Martha Carey Thomas, Class of 1877 -  first foreigner and first female to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich.  While serving as the President of Bryn Mawr College from 1894 to 1922, Thomas advanced the quality of female education and was an active leader of the suffrage movement.

May Preston, Class of 1880 - first woman to earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Florence Kelley, Class of 1882 - Also a graduate of the University of Zurich, Kelley was a renowned social reformer who participated in Hull House.  Her studies of labor conditions in Illinois prompted protective legislation for women and children and led to her appointment as Chief Factory Inspector for the state.  She was a leader of the National Consumer’s League and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Caroline Baldwin Morrison, Class of 1895 - first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science at an American university.

Susanna Gage - Gage never received formal recognition as an educator and was not an official member of the faculty, but she was a highly regarded embryologist, as well as one of the first women to work in laboratory physics.  Her name was listed alongside her husband’s in American Men of Science.

Anna Botsford Comstock, 1880s - respected engraver who illustrated her husband’s entomology texts.  Her research lifted the nature study movement to an academic level in schools across the nation.

Kate Gleason, 1880s - businesswoman and a pioneer in developing low-cost standardized housing for suburban expansion.  She was the first woman to serve as the president of a bank and was also the first woman in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Jessie Fauset, Class of 1905 - teacher, writer, poet, and literary editor for Crisis, a publication of the NAACP.

Pearl S. Buck, Class of 1925 (master’s of English) - only American woman to win the both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize.

Barbara McClintock, Class of 1927 - received all of her training as a geneticist at Cornell.  In 1970, she won the National Medal of Science.

Constance E. Cook, Class of 1943 - elected to the New York State Assembly and a leading advocate of abortion reform legislation.

Barbara B. Bergmann, Class of 1948 - became a professor of economics at the University of Maryland.  She was a “recognized authority on the economic impact of discrimination against all women and a member of the National Commission for International Women’s Year”.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Class of 1954 - first woman faculty member of the Columbia University Law School and second female Supreme Court Justice.

Judith W. Younger, Class of 1954 - first woman in the administration of the Cornell Law School.  She was a respected authority on the legal aspects of sex discrimination.

Jennie Farley, Class of 1954 - professor at the ILR school, Jennie was one of the founding mothers of the Women’s Studies program at Cornell.

Susan Brownmiller, Class of 1956 - founder of a radical feminist group in New York City.  Brownmiller is the author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.

Janet Reno, Class of 1960 - first woman appointed to the position of Attorney General of the United States.

Toni Morrison, M.A. Class of 1963 - first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mae Jemison, Doctorate of Medicine 1981 - On September 12, 1992, Jemison became the  first woman of color in space.

Karen Obel, Class of 1988 - director of the V-Day College Campaign to celebrate women and demand the end of all forms of global violence against them.