With exteriors ranging from Victorian, ivy-covered red brick to modern, many-windowed white cement, Smith’s houses are a hallmark of the college. The 41 houses, scattered along Elm Street, Green Street, Central Campus and the Quad, are home to students from every class year, a unique feature Smith frequently advertises as a way to build close-knit communities.
In Smith’s early years, the college’s founders chose to model its residential buildings after houses rather than dorms, aiming to replicate a domestic lifestyle students were expected to assume after graduation. House mothers, women typically older than the students and often faculty members, served as matriarchs and house residents took part in daily upkeep, reinforcing a more traditional family structure.
As the 20th-century progressed and expectations for women changed, so did the houses. By the 1970s, student house presidents replaced house mothers, curfew and strict rules diminished, and house meals shifted to the dining hall system. Nonetheless, the housing system remains a feature that distinguishes Smith from other colleges and attracts many applicants.
Despite signifying belonging and community today, Smith’s house community was not always welcoming to all students, with a past of segregating or completely excluding Black and Jewish students.
Cynthia Gensheimer, a historian working on a book exploring the issue, “‘Jewish Girls in a Christian World’: Jewish Students at the Seven Sisters, 1895–1925,” explained in an interview with The Sophian that the discrimination primarily centered on the roommate matching process.
“It was easy theoretically for students of different backgrounds to coexist on a campus without really ever having to interact with one another, but if they were assigned to be in the same room, that could really cause problems,” she said.
An early example of these roommate contentions at Smith occurred in 1913, when Carrie Lee, a Black student from the class of 1917, was forced to find a room off-campus despite having been promised a student dorm.
When Lee arrived at her double room in Tyler Annex, her white roommate complained to the college about Lee’s race. Smith gave Lee’s roommate precedence, requiring her to go door to door in town until she found last-minute accommodation off-campus with Classics professor, Julia Carverno, who had housed Otelia Cromwell years prior when she too was denied on-campus housing because of her race.
Living off-campus was not unusual for Smith students in the 1910s — the cost of room and board on campus often exceeded the price of tuition. But that choice was typically up to the individual student, while Lee had no say in the matter.
Lee’s case caught the attention of Otelia Cromwell, who had met the Lee family previously and remained involved at Smith as an alumni, according to her niece Adelaide Cromwell’s book, “My Mothering Aunt.” In a letter to then College President Marion Burton she wrote, “To me this attitude seems not only unfair and unjust, but one which is at variance with the principles upon which the college was founded.”
Otelia Cromwell brought the issue to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which also tirelessly advocated for Lee’s right to a room. The case reached the Smith Board of Trustees, but members did not make a definitive decision until board member Ruth Baldwin stated that there was no written law forbidding a Black student from living on campus and threatened to resign if Lee was not given on-campus housing. In late October, nearly two months into the semester, Lee was assigned a single room in Albright House.
“The easiest thing for (Smith) to have done to dodge the question or skirt the issue would have been to assign (Black) students single rooms when they did allow them to be on campus,” Gensheimer explained.
Likely in an effort to avoid conflicts similar to Lee’s case, Smith often paired students with similar racial and religious identities together.
According to an article in the 2003 edition of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, a student’s religion was a major factor when pairing them with a roommate until around 1956, when Helen Louise Russell became the Dean of Students and removed it from housing forms. “Catholics were matched with Catholics, Jews with Jews and so on,” the article states. “But Russell quickly dropped religion from the questionnaire.”
Despite this claim, several Jewish alumni interviewed for the Smith College Oral History Project recalled still being matched with Jewish roommates in the 1960s.
“The first thing that I realized, before I even got (to Smith), when I got the letter with my roommate’s name, it became very clear that Jewish girls were paired together, which today would be unthinkable,” said Carol Berde ’64.
In an interview for the same project, Joan Gass ’64 echoed Berde’s experience.“I was given a roommate, she was Jewish. My sister was given a roommate, she was Jewish,” she said.
In light of alumni recollections, religious identity may still have been considered in housing decisions even after its reported removal from the questionnaire. Today, assigning students based on race or religion is not only unfathomable, according to Director of Residence Life Hannah Durrant, but illegal.
“We can’t make housing decisions based on particularly race, but also religion,” Durrant said. “The only way we would know it is if somebody self-disclosed in the ‘anything else you want to share with us’ (section) but we wouldn’t use that information in making a housing decision.”
Durrant said students typically provide this information when a specific house offers religious accommodations, such as the kosher and halal dining options at Cutter and Ziskind.
Similarly, students of color can apply to live in affinity houses Yolanda King and Granville, as well as Hopkins, which residents understand as an affinity house even though it is not officially designated by Smith.
Comparatively, Smith’s housing practices are more welcoming now, but a glimpse into the past reveals the exclusionary history it is built upon and the discriminatory experiences students had to overcome to get to a better point today.
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