About Mary Comes to the College with William

In September 1918, twenty-four women enrolled at the College of William and Mary making it the first state-supported four-year college in Virginia to admit women. This blog will follow the first academic year women were admitted to the College of William and Mary--90 years later. Mary Comes to the College with William begins with the endorsement of the proposed legislation to make the College co-ed by the College's Board of Visitors on February 12, 1918, and will continue to publish through June 1919-the end of the first academic year women were enrolled.

As Laura Parrish noted in her M.A. thesis When Mary Entered with Her Brother William: Women Students at the College of William and Mary, 1918-1945, by 1918, "Virginia was the only state in the union which was not providing its women residents the opportunity to obtain four years of public higher education. There were several two-year normal schools, but women desiring more than these had to offer, including graduate and professional education, had to attend either private colleges or other states' universities, both expensive alternatives." Further, "William and Mary had been a small college for many years, but admission of women began a period of unprecedented growth in the student population, academic departments, faculty, and the physical plant."

This blog will build on previous online exhibits created by Swem Library's Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) about the first women students at the College of William and Mary, "The Petticoat Invasion": Women at the College of William and Mary, 1918-1945 and The Martha Barksdale Papers. My thanks to Susan Riggs, Lisa Goldstein, Laura Parrish, and the work of the various students who helped make these online exhibits possible. Naturally, much of the same factual information will be presented, we simply hope to present it in a new manner as well as adding reproductions of even more content. A brief introduction to women at the College, including some of the sources we will be using for this project, is available at the SCRC Wiki.

Credit for the inspiration for this project is owed to the blog WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier, which is providing transcripts of the letters of Harry Lamin from the first World War 90 years after they were written. After hearing about that blog I began thinking about content held here in the SCRC that might lend itself to a similar method of delivery. I thought. And thought some more. Finally, the 90th anniversary of the admission of women to the College of William and Mary came to mind and the idea for this blog was born. Coincidentally, in recent months the need to update the look of the exhibits already online had been discussed. While the information about women students at the College of William and Mary as presented remains as useful to researchers as ever, the web design does show its age after over a decade on the web.

I am very fortunate to have the work of previous online exhibits and published sources to draw upon and look forward to bringing even more material from the SCRC's collections to our audience here in the months ahead.

Update: Jordan Ecker, a graduate student in the American Studies Program and an apprentice here in the Special Collections Research Center for the 2007-2008 academic year, will be contributing a number of posts in the year ahead including her first for April 24, 1918, where she compares the reaction of William and Mary's student body to the decision to go co-ed to that of her alma mater, Drew University, which went co-ed in the 1940s. My thanks to Jordan for her interest in this project and we look forward to her perspective!

Update (9/18/2008): Kate Hill, a graduate student in the Department of History and an apprentice in the Special Collections Research Center for the 2008-2009 academic year, will also be contributing a number of posts for the academic year ahead including her first which is additional work on the post for the first day of classes for the 1918-1919 school year, September 19, 1918. Welcome Kate!


Update (2/2009): Jeffreen Hayes, a graduate student in the American Studies Program and an apprentice in the Special Collections Research Center for the 2008-2009 academic year, is also contributing posts for the academic year that remains ahead including her first published on February 11. Welcome to Jeffreen for rounding out the trio of graduate students working on this group effort!


Amy Schindler, University Archivist