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•——— Recto Runninhead ———• 35 ———— Chapter Three ———— Vassar’s Crisis and Cora’s Humiliation p By a strange coincidence, in 1884 Vassar College was drifting too.1 “Drifting” actually understates the problem; in that year, Vassar was in the grip of a serious crisis. Poor management and declining enrollments were dragging the nation’s premier educational institution for women closer and closer to the edge of bankruptcy; by the spring of 1884, the administration and trustees were afraid they would not be able to fill enough beds in the large Main Building to keep the college open past the fall semester. News coverage was intense, and after she arrived in Poughkeepsie, Cora clipped at least a dozen articles about the crisis, saving them in her scrapbooks. (Unfortunately, all of the clippings she saved were trimmed so closely that the exact dates and names of the newspapers are unknown.) Women are now admitted to 120 of the colleges in the United States, and that is the reason Vassar college has of late years suffered somewhat financially. It used to have almost a monopoly of the women students. Most of these 120 colleges were single-sex, particularly on the East Coast, while others, including the new land-grant colleges in the Midwest and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, were coeducational. The most aggressive competition was coming from new women’s colleges , particularly Smith, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Wellesley, outside Boston. Cora’s own state of Iowa offered excellent college-level education for women at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, while the already-famous University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was also coed. (As if that weren’t enough, many finishing schools for young ladies called themselves colleges but allowed for easier admittance, and offered less rigorous programs of studies.) [ 35 ] 36 •——— verso runninghead ———• In a panic, Vassar’s president, the Reverend Samuel L. Caldwell, placed a blizzard of classified recruiting advertisements in sixty newspapers and magazines across the Northeast and Midwest in May and June 1884 to try to fill the many empty dormitory rooms in Vassar’s Main Building and cover the bills for running the huge operation, which included its own steam heating and gas lighting system.2 Founded in 1861 by the wealthy Poughkeepsie brewer Matthew Vassar, it was the first college in the country (and as far as I know, in the world) to provide a top-flight Ivy League education to academically gifted young women. By the 1880s, Vassar had evolved over the twenty years of its existence into an internationally famous brand concept known to newspaper The Keck’s mansion and infirmary at 611 Brady Street, in 1901. Courtesy of St. John’s Methodist Church, Davenport, Iowa. •——— chapter three ———• •——— Recto Runninhead ———• 37 readers as “the first great educational institution for womankind” and “the pioneer institution for the higher education of women.” When Cora referred to “glorious Vassar” in her diary, she spoke from the bottom of her heart along with thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of ambitious young women in cities, small towns, and rural backwaters across the United States. Vassar inspired the creation of England’s first college for women, Royal Holloway College, which opened its doors in 1886.3 Thomas Holloway, the college’s founder and main benefactor, was heavily influenced by a Vassar trustee, the Reverend William Hague, in the design of his new female educational institution. Mr. Holloway had made his fortune in the patent medicine business as the manufacturer of Holloway’s Ointment and Holloway’s Pills and was, of course, looking to overcome that barrier to his family’s social advancement with his gift. I just can’t seem to get away from the patent medicine angle in this story—it was a fundamental part of nineteenth-century life. The public eye was always focused on Vassar. Its fame spawned a genre of insulting antiwoman humor in America’s newspapers that imitated the popular jokes being made about naive and unattractive bluestocking Boston girls; any scandal connected to it was guaranteed to sell newspapers like hotcakes. On a more positive note, several best-selling series of books were written about life at Vassar to inspire the aspirations of young women readers, one called Two College Girls, by Helen Dawes (class of ’78), and another The Three Vassar Girls, by Lizzie Champney (class of ’69). These were similar to the popular books written for the general public about the mischievous doings of young men studying at Yale and Harvard...

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