This article was originally published in the April 2025 print edition.
When Smith College’s inaugural 14 students entered the college in 1875, higher education for women was considered an experiment.
Attending college as a woman in the late 19th century meant delaying the entrance into polite society and the expected roles of wife and mother by four years. Many were concerned that spending extended time away from home among intellectual peers would evoke a feeling of discontent toward domestic life in women.
“It was not suffrage or industry that exercised progressive women, but education, college education like that for men,” wrote a member of Smith’s first class, Kate Morris, in “The Smith College Monthly.” “We who tried it were the radicals of that time, in the forefront of queer women who did something new.”
Smith was not the first women’s college in the United States, but former President Laurenus Clark Seelye sought to make it unlike any other.
“Let the requirements for admission be determined not by the number of students desired but by the demands of the highest intellectual culture,” he stated at his inauguration in July 1875. At that point, only one student had passed Smith’s entrance exam.
Smith’s goal as an institution was to provide an education that would be equal to those offered to men at colleges like Harvard University and Amherst College.
“We certainly bore a burden from which girls entering college today are relieved,” Morris wrote. “Namely, the doubt whether the college was going to be a real college or only a women’s college — that is, something inferior to a man’s college.”
In order to display the seriousness of the institution, Smith required academic achievements similar to those expected at colleges exclusively for men. Among those requirements was an extensive knowledge of mathematics, history, English, Latin and Greek. Only 15 of the students who initially applied to Smith were considered up to its academic standards, hence the small size of the original class.
Despite these high expectations, Smith was still an up-and-coming college. The campus consisted merely of College Hall, Dewey Hall and the President’s House, the first being the only building to stand in its original spot as of 2025.
Morris reminisced on her class’s first night at Smith and how it displayed the college’s humble beginnings. “It is true we went to bed that first night with candles stuck in potatoes, the college linen got marked ‘Smith Colledge’[…] and the housekeeping […] did not arrive till the second term,” she wrote.
According to Morris, all classes were held in a single small room, a grand piano sufficed for the entire music department and, at the start of the school term, the library contained just one volume: Webster’s Dictionary.
The number of students, buildings and books grew exponentially from the college’s first year, and by 1879, the entering class consisted of over 100 students from a plethora of different states and social classes across the United States.
The first class, though unconventional, has been celebrated throughout the past 150 years as trailblazers with nicknames like “The Seventy-Niners” and the “Immortal Fourteen” or “Immortal Eleven” to reflect the fact that three members of the original class did not graduate.
Like many Smith graduates since 1875, students from the original class went on to pursue further educational goals and earn distinguished careers.
Five of the original students became teachers at middle and high schools: Mary Bonney, Adelaide Edwards, Mary Adkins, Harriet Palmer, Mary Whiton and Mary Gorham, who was also Smith’s first librarian. Harriet Palmer, as well as Henriette Leonard and Julia Gulliver, became accomplished translators. Julia Gulliver also pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy and served as president of Rockford College for 17 years.
Eleanor Cushing and Kate Morris served as presidents of the Alumnae Association for some time,eventually becoming the namesake for Cushing and Morris houses, respectively. Sylvia Spaulding wrote political pieces for The Woman Citizen, a suffragist magazine, and Anna Palmer studied music at the Boston Conservatory.
By 1879, when the first class graduated Smith, the “Boston Evening Journal” praised the accomplishments of the students and stated, “Smith College can no longer be called an experiment.”
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