A Big Heart, A Genuine Soul:
The Enduring Value Of Women’s Colleges
President Patricia A. McGuire
Trinity College, Washington, D.C.
(Now known as Trinity Washington University)
Delivered May 25, 1997 at Sweet Briar College’s graduation ceremony.
President Muhlenfeld, members of the Board of Trustees, families and distinguished guests, faculty and staff of Sweet Briar College, and most of all you, the Class of 1997 of Sweet Briar College: greetings and congratulations from your sisters at Trinity College in Washington! As Trinity celebrates her 100th year, we are honored to be part of Sweet Briar’s Commencement and to share this important moment in the years leading up to your Centennial as well.
Let me also take this opportunity to thank all of the seniors who participated in the senior video. You helped me immensely! Your warmth, your friendship, your caring, your love of Sweet Briar fairly leapt off the screen at me. You touched on all of my favorite topics: the value of friendship, the great opportunities that a women’s college provides; the self-confidence, the sense that you can do anything with this education.
Special thanks to your classmate Anne MacDonald whose words on the video inspired the title of my talk this morning: the type of person who attends a women’s college, she said, is someone with “a big heart genuine soul.” You are absolutely right Anne — our compassion our humanity and pervasive sense of spirituality indeed the qualities that will ensure worth vitality women’s colleges well into 21st century.
Imagine a time when people thought that if a woman went to college, she would ruin her health, as this female physician contended at the time of the founding of Smith College: Of women who go to college, she said, “Their nervous systems are wrecked by a process of stimulation for examinations, exhibitions and prizes, and by a regime which ignores the great natural laws which make [women] between the ages of fifteen and forty-five essentially a separate and higher order of beings than men…” [1]
Imagine a time when popular newspapers warned that if a woman went to college, she would turn our to be “…a boor or a bore, with brains developed at the expense of the heart…In place of a wedding ring, she conspicuously wears on the third finger of her left hand the class ring that took her father’s hard-earned dollars to buy. Her picture is published all over the country as the best gymnast of the year. When she returns from college, she finds her mother old-fashioned and even corrects her grammar in public. Often she visits her friends instead of coming home for the holidays…” [2] Such inflammatory articles were written to discourage the founding of Trinity College.
Imagine a time before role models, a time when the best that most women could aspire to was captured in this thought by Virginia Woolf: “…I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers…Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918…”[3]
If you have imagined all of that and said to yourself, “Thank heavens those days are gone,” I ask you to imagine again.
Imagine a world in which women are denied educational opportunities because of stereotypes about what women can or cannot do by virtue of their sex. Across the educational landscape of America, thousands of girls and women are denied such opportunities each day by teachers and schools that ignore women’s learning styles, tolerate chilly classrooms, and look the other way as thousands of girls report “hostile hallways”[4] in their high schools, and more than 40 percent of college women report sexual harassment.[5]
Imagine a world in which women are mocked and degraded and subjected to physical and emotional abuse in their careers because they have dared to try to “be all that they can be.”[6] The women at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds don’t have to use their imaginations on this one–they are just the latest proof that the women’s rights revolution is far from over.
Imagine a world where the majority of women labor each day to overcome unspeakable poverty and violence and despair. The worldwide gathering of women at the Fourth U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing gave eloquent testimony to the sad reality of women’s appalling economic and social conditions around the world, and the importance of education to improve the lives of women, their children and families.
These worlds we have just imagined are real worlds, images that collide with the joys and privileges of days such as this, but images that are the reasons why we have days such as this.
We celebrate this day to give you the courage and the strength and the passion and the intelligence to go forth to lead and to transform the worlds of women’s true reality. These are the reasons why we must continue to imagine and to ensure the worth and the necessity and the enduring value of women’s colleges.
In the first 150 years of their existence, women’s colleges transformed the lives of millions of women. But what of the next 100 years? What will women’s colleges do in the 21st Century to make it possible for women from those other worlds we just imagined to become as liberated, as confident, as powerful as you are today?
Recently, I had two experiences that illustrated, in a few brief hours, what women’s colleges have accomplished in the 20th century, and even more important, why we must work to ensure the continuing strength of women’s education for the next century.
In the first experience, I attended a luncheon in New York City hosted by a Trinity alumna, Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines. The presidents of Barnard College and Marymount Tarrytown College attended, along with about 20 alumnae of women’s colleges including Trinity. The achievements of the women gathered in the Hearst Board Room exemplified the great success of women’s colleges during the 20th century. The women included publishers and financiers, political movers and shakers, journalists, leaders in the world of art. As each told her story, we could hear the tinkling of thousands of shards of glass ceilings exploding. William Randolph Hearst never imagined that his board room would look like this–truly, a room of our own [7]–a room full of the women who have “arrived” and are quite comfortable in the board rooms and corridors of power. Many of them are also mothers and wives, community leaders and PTA activists–in short, women “doing it all” and having a great deal of fun and personal satisfaction along the way. They are eloquent witnesses to the power of women’s colleges.
On the way home from that heady scene, I had a very different experience. I was heading back to Washington on the Metroliner, and as I usually do when I ride the train, I was looking out the window and daydreaming. We passed a series of brick warehouses on the edge of a city, and I happened to get just a glimpse of a very different room from the one I had just left. The windows were flung wide open, as if to let the heat in the room warm the rest of the city. Inside, I could see row after row of female heads bending over what appeared to be sewing machines, with great huge bobbins of thread hoist on the side. The train rolled on past a sign that said “shirts and garments” and I realized that I had just seen another version of a room of one’s own, [8] the kind of room that millions of women are still condemned to inhabit in this nation and around the world: the factory, the sweatshop, the metaphor for places of unimaginable tedium and unbearable manual labor, places where the idea of equal pay for equal work seems just a college girl’s fantasy, places of mental and often physical cruelty where women and men, too, and too often even children must gather to eke out poverty-level wages to sustain a meager existence.
Two rooms full of women: two vastly different images. The first speaks to what women’s colleges have already done; the second cries out for fulfillment of our unfinished agenda.
We are here today because other women cared so deeply for us. Julia McGroarty, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, was such a woman in 1897 in Washington when she founded Trinity; Indiana Fletcher Williams was such a woman who left her entire estate in 1900 to found Sweet Briar. They are part of that great pantheon of our heroes that includes women like Mary Lyon of Mt. Holyoke and M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr and Sophia Smith of Smith College and Emma Willard–and dare I say a few very good men like Matthew Vassar and Elijah Fletcher (whose belief in women’s education inspired his daughter Indiana) and Henry Durant of Wellesley and Joseph Taylor of Bryn Mawr and James Cardinal Gibbons who assisted the founding of Trinity. They chose to invest in us; they founded colleges of our very own, places that would care about each and every one of us by name, true alma maters, places with big hearts and genuine souls. And these alma maters have made each one of us powerful.
Maybe none of us will do anything as great as found a college to make it possible for other women to be powerful. But we can do something equally great, which is to live the ideals of our college by remembering our sisters in the garment factories and urban ghettos and rural valleys beset with poverty. In the best tradition of the moral ideals of our colleges and the example of the women who came before us who made this day possible for us, we must reach out to others who do not have such riches; we must lift them as we climb.
But how will we do this in the new century? Successful as women’s colleges have been in educating women for great leadership and large service throughout our society, we encounter large pockets of doubt, of second-guessing, of gloomy forecasts when the subject of the future of women’s colleges comes up in any discussion outside of our small circle of true believers. You know the secret slanders, the “dinosaur” word, the polite turning away from your eager conversation about Rosalind Franklin’s role in discovering DNA, the sense of amazement in your listener’s eyes when you have the temerity to ask what all the fuss is about over the Final Four.
When you have been the star for so long, when you have gone to a college that puts you at center court, that coaches you as the hot prospect, that lets you drive hard for the goal–that teaches you not to live your life vicariously through some other person’s achievement, but to achieve for yourself–it’s no wonder you might be bemused when other people declare women’s colleges to be a dying breed. To which we say: NOT!
Women’s colleges will not thrive in the 21st Century because we are some kind of exotic theme parks, shrines of quaint customs and tributes to our glorious pasts. Women’s colleges will not continue to exist in the 21st century because we are hopeless romantics. Women’s colleges will not continue to exist because we’re afraid to change. Women’s colleges will not continue to exist because we don’t have any better ideas. Women’s colleges will not continue to exist in the 21st century because women can’t march shoulder-to-shoulder with men, because women can’t succeed in the presence of men, because women should know their place, because women need protection, because women are afraid of the real world. NOT!
Women’s colleges will continue to flourish in the 21st Century because we have an ambitious agenda for women that we can fulfill better than any other form of higher education. This agenda includes real access to educational opportunity; advocacy for women’s advancement; and continuing development of women whose caring and compassion can truly change our world.
First: Access to equal educational opportunity for women will continue to be more of a theory than a reality for millions of women in this nation and around the world. Today, the access issues are not generally found in specific barriers to admission, since most of those have been conquered. But the act of admission does not guarantee true access to equal educational opportunity. Many studies continue to document the fact that women are less likely to speak up in coeducational classrooms; that they are called on less frequently by professors; that they are intimidated into silence and afraid to show their capacity to achieve. On too many campuses, even where they are in the majority, the silence of women bespeaks the continuing denial of their educational opportunity.
Contrast this silence with the discovery of women’s voices in the classrooms and on the campuses of the nation’s women’s colleges, places devoted to the idea that every woman must learn to speak, to become an advocate for herself and for others, that every woman can learn to lead, to perform, to excel. Such places are not just about access for women; they are about success for women–and as such, they are truly the only places in higher education that devote each day, each class, each activity to the excellence and advancement of women.
As the 21st Century dawns, the special success that women’s colleges have had in the education of women in the sciences will be even more important in the Age of Cyberspace. Sweet Briar has been a leader among women’s colleges in scientific education, and we salute and encourage your continuing success in this regard. The education of women for technological proficiency and leadership must become an emphasis for all women’s colleges in the new century.
Second: The economic condition of women and children will continue to demand the advocacy and action of those leaders who have had the privilege of education in these places devoted in a special way to the advancement of women. The graduates of women’s colleges have always had a special care for issues affecting women and families. In the new century, this leadership must be even more focused on the ways in which our unique educational model can alleviate the degradation of women, especially the feminization of poverty, the impact of welfare reform, the scandalous deficiencies of our urban schools, and the continuing appalling effects of the racism and sexism of American society that renders Black and Latina women acutely disadvantaged on the bottom of the pay equity pyramid.
The most recent Census reports predict that by the middle of the next century, the non-white populations of this nation will become the majority, with growth in the Hispanic population being the most rapid, while the proportion of the white population declines precipitously. The economic condition of Black and Hispanic women will have an increasingly dramatic effect on the whole of American society; as women’s colleges already know so well, the education of women not only improves their own economic opportunities, but truly, the economic condition of their children and families as well.
Extending the reach of women’s colleges to women of all races and social classes must have primacy of place on our agenda if we want to make a real social impact in the new century. In the 21st Century, the nation’s women’s colleges should take the lead in healing the centuries-long rift between the women’s rights movement and the civil rights movement, and take up the cause of advocacy for all women as advocacy for the rights and human dignity of all people. In the 21st Century, we must retire the suspicion of elitism in favor of a passionate engagement with those issues affecting women that will determine the quality of the life for all people: equal pay for equal work; improved urban education; aid to families in need; protection of the rights of workers; stronger environmental protections including attention to phenomena like the surge of asthma among urban children.
The condition of those women in the garment factory in New Jersey will have a significant impact on the kind of society your children and their children will experience–for the better, if we can improve their lot, or for the worse, if we ignore them. If we keep this education all to ourselves, then we have little hope of a better world for the generations that will come after us.
Third: The third reason why women’s colleges will continue to succeed in the 21st Century will be because we have “A Big Heart, A Genuine Soul.” To accomplish the ambitious agenda before us in education, advocacy and action, we must have women of compassion, of intelligence, of grace and of humanity leading the way for the new generations. Women like you, Lucinda and Stacy and Anne and Katie and Katrina and Tyler and Melanie and the women I heard on the tape and who I now greet today; women like those who sat here before you, like my own Class of ’97 at Trinity, and the thousands of alumnae of the nation’s women’s colleges who came before us.
But how will we do it? With this large and ambitious agenda, women’s colleges cannot possibly flourish in the new century if we, their alumnae, do not attend to their needs. If we don’t care about our alma maters, who will? Even as others cared so much to make this education possible for us, so, too, we are challenged to ensure that this education continues for the women who will sit here far into the future.
We must give our support freely and with confidence in the future, not as an evil eye to ward off institutional change; not as a noose or a prod for our personal agenda; not as a down payment on eternal nostalgia. We must give as an investment in the lives of the women we will never meet, just as Indiana Fletcher Williams invested in you. You will care for the women who will sit here ten and twenty and 100 years from now, who will praise your name and thank you because of what Sweet Briar made possible in your lives. You will do it because of your big hearts, your genuine souls.
My final wish and prayer for you, the Sweet Briar Class of 1997:
May you never be far from the friends you have now. May your imagination catch fire with the spark of your knowledge. May your passion for truth keep you free and unafraid. May the voice you have discovered here grow even stronger with the years, giving hope to those who hear you, advocating justice for the oppressed and peace for our violent world. May you know the true companionship of deep faith, the healing power of forgiveness, the wisdom that is the reward for risk, for trust, for openness to learning each day.
May the love and light of this place called Sweet Briar set you well on your journeys, bring joy to your dark nights, be a beacon through the years, and illuminate your pathways all the days of your lives.
Footnotes
1: L. Clark Seelye, The Early History of Smith College: 1871-1910 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923) p. 34.
2: Newspaper clipping in the Trinity College Archives, quoted in Sr. Angela Elizabeth Keenan, SND, Three Against the Wind: The Founding of Trinity College (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1973) p. 105.
3: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Co., 1929, 1981) p. 37.
4: The phrase “hostile hallways” is taken from the 1995 report of the American Association of University Women on the condition of girls in schools.
5: Mary M. Leonard and Brenda Alpert Sigall, “Empowering Women Student Leaders,” in Carol Pearson, et al., eds. for the American Council on Education, Educating the Majority: Women Challenge Tradition in Higher Education (New York: MacMillan, 1989), p. 231.
6: “Be all that you can be” is the Army’s advertising slogan.
7: The phrase “A room of one’s own” and related paraphrases are taken from Virginia Woolf’s book by the same name; see footnote 3.
8: Ibid.
∞ Copyright 1997 by Patricia A. McGuire. All rights reserved.