SEVEN SISTERS: THE ELITE, HISTORIC WOMEN’S COLLEGES THAT PARTNER THE IVY LEAGUE

The Seven Sisters consortium is a collection of prestigious, highly selective liberal arts colleges from across the north-eastern United States that currently or historically have been exclusive to female students only. The seven member colleges came together in 1926 to begin an informal association that would meet annually thereafter. The association is comprised of those seven colleges that long considered themselves to be peer sister schools. These schools have also enjoyed a long, close relationship with Ivy League universities that, in the past, had been open only to male students. As such, the Seven Sisters are often perceived to be the sister schools to those Ivy League universities.

ABOUT

The seven colleges, namely: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellessley and Vassar, are amongst the earliest women’s colleges in the United States. All these renowned institutions were founded in the 1800s. They were at the vanguard of the progressive movement to establish a formal education system for young women at a time when universities and colleges had been the exclusive preserve of young men. These colleges remain at the forefront of the progressive education movement and are considered amongst the Little Ivies or Hidden Ivies today.

Prior to their foundation, a host of female schools had been founded across the country throughout the 1700s and 1800s, typically with a high school of sorts attached to provide educational opportunities to young women. For the most part, these were female seminaries – teacher training colleges intended to produce teachers to meet the burgeoning demand of a rapidly developing United States, with a growing population, expanding numbers of families seeking governesses and tutors for their children and an emergent trend towards universal education and the proliferation of childcare facilities, primary and secondary level schools.

In many cases, these seminaries were established by religious orders or communities seeking to affirm faith-based ideas within their congregations and, ultimately, the children under the charge of the young women graduating from these schools. Particularly, these seminaries would produce a steady stream of women to support the missionary work of the sponsoring religious groups. To some extent, these seminaries also acted to prepare young women for married life and family life. Many offered academic curriculums that were not on a par with that being studied by young men. Indeed, many of these institutions were, essentially, finishing schools. As with many educational institutions at the time, particularly the so-called “Dame Schools”, they tended to have a short history as students followed educators who might set up their own facility or the relevant institution fell out of favour with its community, landlord, benefactor, or customer base for various reasons. Few early schools had sufficient resources or brand recognition to carry on as a going concern.

Nonetheless, these institutions had established a precedent and gave impetus to those who sought to establish viable schools and colleges for women on an equal footing to those that existed for men. A number of seminaries had become notable for the quality and rigour of their academic programmes, giving young women a grounding in the liberal arts and affording educated female graduates opportunities to pursue a career in academia by joining faculty. Leading luminaries in the movement included Mary Lyon who played an instrumental role in the early years of Hartford Female Seminary (which garnered a particular reputation as an incubator of great female writers and thinkers) and Ipswich Female Seminary. Ipswich attracted a number of children from great New England families to its boarding high school and seminary and subsequently became an incubator for ideas and approaches which would become influential in the women’s college movement, with many Ipswich graduates founding or leading some of the best-known women’s colleges. Lyon would also play a role in the foundation of Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in 1834 before establishing Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, now known as Mount Holyoke College and one of the Seven Sisters.

Mount Holyoke College would receive its charter in 1888 and would continue to grow from strength to strength, attracting the daughters of established families seeking a grounding in liberal arts. Despite the school’s progressive leanings, tuition fees meant that such opportunities were accessible only to those of means from wealthier families which resulted in these institutions developing a reputation as bastions of privilege, alongside their male-only peers. Indeed, Mount Holyoke, particularly, became revered as the preferred choice amongst upper class low Protestant families and regarded as a pillar of conservatism.

Predating Mount Holyoke’s charter were Vassar College, chartered in 1861, Wellesley College, chartered in 1873, Smith College, chartered in 1871, and Bryn Mawr College, chartered in 1885. These colleges were established independently of other colleges or universities and maintain their independence today. Barnard College and Radcliffe College were established on a different footing, sanctioned by and supported by brother universities. In Barnard’s case, the college was founded under the direction of faculty at Columbia University with that university being the awarder of degrees (co-signed by both institutions) but with Barnard maintaining a separate governance structure and oversight of its own treasury and finance. Radcliffe was established independently of its brother institution – Harvard University, but retained the same faculty and course material. Radcliffe and Harvard would increasingly cooperate on common matters, ultimately charting a course which would result in Radcliffe merging fully into Harvard and suspending its participation in the Seven Sisters conferences. Nonetheless, the name lives on in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is commonly used to apply to women’s only sports programs and initiatives at Harvard. At the time of the establishment of the Seven Sisters conference in the 1920s, both Barnard and Radcliffe were considered to be sufficiently independent to be counted as sisters of the other member schools, unlike other colleges such as Pembroke College (a constituent women’s college established under the direction of Brown University), the College for Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and Douglass College (attached to Rutgers University which, at that time, was a private institution considered to be a peer of those illustrious schools which would go on to form the Ivy League). Evelyn College (an ephemeral women’s college associated with Princeton University) had closed before the inauguration of the Seven Sisters.

The truly independent colleges would, however, form close relationships between themselves and with their Ivy League counterparts akin to coordinate colleges. The rise in demand for academically rigorous liberal arts colleges that catered to women and that would allow for studies towards a degree had forced male-only institutions to take note. Many would establish constituent or coordinate women-only colleges offering a comparable course of study and access to the same faculty and materials. This approach being largely modelled on the European fashion of women’s colleges within a collegiate or federal university framework. Examples of this might include the historically women’s constituent colleges of the University of Oxford: Lady Margaret Hall, St Anne’s College, St Hilda’s College, St Hugh’s College, and Somerville, the University of Cambridge’s constituent women’s colleges: Girton College and Hughes Hall, Royal Holloway College (a member of the federal University of London and, at one time, considered the elite women’s institution when Oxford and Cambridge were male-only), Queen Elizabeth College of King’s College London, Westfield College of Queen Mary University London and the constituent colleges of Durham University: St Aidan’s College, St Hild’s College (which later merged with the The College of the Venerable Bede to become The College of St Hild and St Bede), St Mary’s College and Trevelyan College. Many of these colleges are now co-educational.

Other American male-only universities and colleges would seek to formalise relationships with independent women’s colleges. Many women’s colleges had already come to be associated with particular men’s colleges, often attracting the daughters of faculty of one or the other or sisters of men in attendance. Similarly, women might be invited from one particular college to attend formal and informal events alongside the men of the other.

Thus:

Barnard College was the sister to Columbia University (and to Bard College which itself became a constituent college of Columbia University before reverting to being independent).
Bryn Mawr College was the sister to both the University of Pennsylvania and to Princeton University after Evelyn College closed and to nearby Haverford College with whom it participates in the Bi-College Consortium. The University of Pennsylvania had its own College for Women and Swarthmore College was co-educational from the outset. The relationship between Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Penn and Swarthmore has since been formalised under the Quaker Consortium, allowing cross-matriculation and access to shared resources and programmes. Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore also participate in the Tri-College Consortium.
Mount Holyoke College was founded as a sister seminary to the Andover Theological Seminary (a male-only religious seminary that shared its campus with Phillips Academy – Andover before it merged into the Yale Divinity School at Yale University). The college has historically been considered the sister school to Dartmouth College and to Bowdoin College and, to a lesser degree, Middlebury College.
Radcliffe College was the historic sister school to Harvard University and, to a lesser extent, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s relationship with Harvard resulted in the college, ultimately, merging into the university.
Smith College enjoys a close relationship with Amherst College and Yale University.
Vassar College has always been associated with Yale and once maintained a formal affiliation agreement with the university which culminated in discussions regarding a merger in the late 1950s and through the 1960s.
Wellessley College has been regarded as the sister school to MIT and, to a lesser extent, Harvard.

Whilst the Seven Sister colleges are today viewed as being the peers and sister schools to the prestigious Ivy League universities, this assumption is erroneous. Many of the Seven Sisters do not have a formal relationship with a specific Ivy League university and are not geographically close to any Ivy League campus. Some of the Ivy League universities had their own constituent women’s college or, as in the case of Cornell University, were always co-educational. Furthermore, the Seven Sisters’ foundations predate the establishment of the Ivy League in 1954. In fact, the Seven Sisters had been meeting as the Seven College Conference since the inaugural event of 1927 and their relationship with the Ivy League universities was not the basis for the formation of the association, nor were these relationships exclusive.

Indeed, a number of other institutions shared close relationships with the Seven Sisters and with other colleges and universities dotted about their respective geographic regions. Where formal alliances did not exist, relationships between colleges, particularly with respect to how the student bodies interacted, have changed and been replaced over the passage of time. Prior to the establishment of conferences and associations which have since cemented school reputations (the Seven Sisters conferences, the Ivy League, the New England Small College Athletic Conference et cetera), many of the better-known colleges and universities viewed one another as peer schools and much cooperation would take place between them. The practice of “Ivy-hopping” referred to visiting various of these schools to attend formals or to meet with men or women accordingly – especially amongst the fraternities and sororities that existed on their campuses. The Seven Sisters, the Ivy League universities, the NESCAC schools and a select few others (Rutgers, Syracuse, Union, Skidmore, MIT, Colgate, Lehigh, Swarthmore, Stevens, Holy Cross, Bard and others) all featured on this circuit. As did, to a lesser extent, schools like NYU, Northeastern, Rochester, WPI, RPI, Lafayette, Bucknell, the Pennsylvania Consortium for the Liberal Arts colleges (including Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, Juniata, Muhlenberg, Ursinus, and Washington & Jefferson) and the New York Six schools (including Hobart, William Smith and St. Lawrence).

The below illustration is a perfect representation of this practice. The map titled ‘World of Ivy‘ was published in a 1958 edition of the “Ivy Magazine”, submitted by a student at Columbia – David Rosand, who would later achieve acclaim as a prominent art historian. The Ivy Magazine was a short-lived periodical published in the 1950s (the first edition being printed in 1956) by Yale undergraduates and circulated amongst the student bodies of the eight Ivy League schools and other select institutions, including those mentioned in the graphic. This piece identifies a number of schools as constituent members of the World of Ivy, including the Seven Sisters and a selection of other prestigious women’s colleges, small and selective liberal arts colleges and Ivy Plus schools. Rosand’s map marks the following institutions: Amherst College, Barnard College, Bennett College, Bennington College, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, Connecticut College, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”), Mount Holyoke College, Pembroke College, Phillips Academy Andover (“Andover”), Phillips Exeter Academy (“Exeter”), Princeton University, Radcliffe College, Sarah Lawrence College, Skidmore College, Trinity College, University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) Vassar College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Williams College, and Yale University (shown here as “New Haven, Conn.” with the stylised letter “Y”).

The trend towards coordinate colleges was not limited to the Seven Sisters either. Other coordinate colleges, many considered to be as prestigious as the Seven Sisters, included:

College of Saint Benedict, opened in 1913 under the auspices of the Benedictine Saint John’s University.
Evelyn College, founded in 1887, affiliated to Princeton University before it closed in 1897.
H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, founded in 1866 and attached to Tulane University as the first coordinate college model in the United States before fully merging.
Jackson College for Women, established in Massachusetts in 1870 and considered the sister to Tufts University with whom it would merge.
Mary Baldwin University, one of the Seven Sisters of the South, opened in 1842, which has a reasonably close relationship with Hampden-Sydney College.
Moravian Female Seminary, established in 1742 and associated with Moravian College before they formally merged to form Moravian University (the Seminary’s high school division merged with Moravian Academy).
Ohio Wesleyan Female College, founded in 1853 which merged into its brother institution – Ohio Wesleyan University.
Pembroke College, founded in 1891 at Brown University with whom it has since fully merged.
Randolph-Macon Women’s College founded in 1891 as the corresponding women’s college to Randolph-Macon College. The college is today known as Randolph College and is co-educational.
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, founded in 1840 and sharing a long legacy of being a sister school to Wabash College before it became co-educational.
Skidmore College which has long been the sister school to Union College, once a member of the Big Four.
Scripps College, which was established as part of the Claremont Colleges in 1926.
Spelman College, founded in 1881 and enjoys a close formal relationship with Morehouse College.
Sweet Briar College, opened in 1901 and an historic preferred sister school to the all-male Hampden-Sydney College. When Sweet Briar faced closure it even considered transferring its students to Hampden-Sydney. It is one of the Seven Sisters of the South.
Tift College, began in 1849 and was the sister to Mercer University with whom it has now merged.
University of Mary Washington, founded as a teacher training college in 1908, was regarded as the sister college to the University of Virginia when it was male-only.
Westhampton College, established in 1914 as a sister to University of Richmond before the two merged in 1990.
William Smith College which was the traditional sister school to Hobart College with whom it has effectively merged as Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

In recent years, Northeastern University has merged with Mills College to give the university a presence on the West Coast, however they did not previously share a coordinate college relationship. There are also many women’s colleges that are not coordinate colleges or sister schools to other institutions that are highly reputed and selective. The so-called Seven Sisters of the South includes several traditional women’s colleges that have traditionally been the preferred choice for young women from the great families and schools of the South and which were considered to be peers to the Seven Sisters schools.

After the establishment of the Seven Colleges Conference, those Historically Women’s Colleges (HWC) of the Northeast that were not members of the Seven Sisters, were sometimes derogatorily, and in jest, referred to as the “Ugly Cousins” amongst Ivy-hoppers and their ilk. The Seven Sisters themselves refer to a select cadre of similar liberal arts colleges and HWCs as “cousins”, particularly Haverford College, Swarthmore, Agnes Scott, Skidmore, Wheaton and a number of others.

Despite that many of these women’s colleges had built solid reputations as excellent and challenging academic institutions for women, they struggled to match the quality of the education and the breadth of facilities and programmes on offer at their corresponding men’s colleges. Driven by a need to increase the funding available to attract teaching staff and faculty equal to that of their peers, the presidents of an existing association – the Four College Conference sought to expand their network and to establish a common fund to be disbursed towards salaries and research funding. The Four College Conference had begun in 1915 at the invitation of the president of Vassar College who convened a meeting with the presidents of Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley. Their conference met annually for the purposes of advancing standards in women’s education and ensuring that women could access an educational programme as good as that available to men at the nation’s best colleges and universities.

Inviting the presidents of Barnard, Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe to join the association the Four College Conference became the Seven College Conference in 1926 with its first conference taking place the following year (and every year since). In those early years, it became clear to the participating schools that achieving this common fund would prove difficult due to the substantial different in the resources of women’s colleges compared to their peer men’s only schools. A crisis of funding was emerging and the seven presidents recognised that fundraising was essential to their ongoing viability. Attracting donations and growing their respective endowment funds were mission critical or they would need to seek merger partners as had many of their peers. The group would also need to press the case for public support for women’s colleges.

The Seven Sisters name was adopted in the early years of the conference as a reference to The Pleiades, a Greek myth telling the story of the seven sister goddesses: Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Merope, Sterope and Taygete, a nod to the status of the seven colleges, their relationship to one another and the classic foundation of their liberal arts programmes. The group would also begin to discuss a host of other matters of common interest, including the development of Greek life, Greek games, administration, admissions approaches, academic curriculum and so forth. Despite that the conference has since reduced to an effective membership of six, one of which is co-educational, it retains the Seven Sisters name.

The annual conference rotates amongst the members who take turns to act as host and has continued to expand its mission and purpose to meet the changing demands of the education sector and the needs of students. In recent years, the group has actively pursued initiatives to expand the diversity of its student bodies and to better accommodate applicants from minority backgrounds and those who identify as women. These measures have allowed the schools to better attract academically gifted candidates and to raise their reputation as highly selective liberal arts colleges. Years of intensive fundraising efforts have ensured that these colleges have substantial endowments allowing them to offer greater access to scholarship funding. Smith and Wellesley, in particular, have endowments that dwarf those of the other Seven Sisters. As such, these two schools have been able to become the most selective and have, as such, come to be viewed as especially academically prestigious. Mount Holyoke remains the most socially-exclusive albeit a long way from the conservative, moneyed identity of its past.

Five of the Seven Sisters remain open only to applicants who identify as women, at least at undergraduate level. Vassar College became fully co-educational in 1969 when a proposed merger with Yale was rejected. Nonetheless, Vassar continues to participate in the Seven Sisters conferences and initiatives. Radcliffe College has suspended its participation following its full merger into co-educational Harvard and the cessation of its liberal arts college programme. The other schools have considered becoming co-educational at various points throughout their history but most have explicitly rejected doing so, favouring exchange and co-operation with other colleges instead.

Mount Holyoke and Smith are both members of the Five College Consortium alongside Amherst, Hampshire and the Amherst branch of the University of Massachusetts. They also participate in the 12 College Exchange Programme scheme alongside Vassar, Wellesley, Amherst, Bowdoin, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Trinity, Wesleyan, Wheaton and Williams). Wellesley is a member of the Boston Consortium the Eastern College Consortium (alongside Vassar and Wesleyan) and the 568 Presidents Group. Bryn Mawr is a member of the Bi-College Consortium with Haverford, the Tri-College Consortium alongside Haverford and Swarthmore and is a member of the Quaker Consortium (which includes those same schools and Penn), the Pennsylvania Consortium for the Liberal Arts and the Selective Liberal Arts Consortium (as are Smith and Vassar). All of the Seven Sisters (except Radcliffe) are members of the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges and the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (Radcliffe and Smith are not members). All of the women-only Seven Sisters are also members of the Women’s College Coalition. They are all members of the Oberlin Group and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. Many are additionally members of the Annapolis Group and the Questbridge funding consortium. The Seven Sisters colleges are often considered a part of the wider “Ivy Plus” community (a select group of leading schools that are considered to be the peer schools to the Ivy League with varying degrees of formal cooperation under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Consortium) with most of the schools participating in programmes under the Ivy+ umbrella, such as the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium and the Ivy Plus Writing Consortium.

Although the Seven Schools moniker has entered the public imagination as being a byword for the female Ivy League, the seven schools do not participate in a full athletic conference under the framework of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA). Barnard teams are amalgamated into Columbia sports and Ratcliffe is represented by Harvard (thus making them actual Ivy League schools), although the Harvard women’s team has historically competed in the Eastern Association of Women’s Rowing Colleges (EAWRC) under the Radcliffe name. Bryn Mawr’s primary conference is the Centennial Conference, Mount Holyoke participates in the Liberty League and New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC), Vassar also participates in the Liberty League and Wellesley is an associate member. Smith and Wellesley also participate in NEWMAC. Wellesley is a member too of the New England Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association (NEISA). Nonetheless, since 1980, a Seven Sisters conference of sorts does exist with various non-NCAA sanctioned competitions in the sports of association football (soccer) (competition ended in 1997), basketball (competition ended in 2010), crew, cross country, hockey (field) (competition ended in 2009), lacrosse (competition ended in 2007), squash, swimming & diving, tennis and volleyball (competition ended in 2014). Athletics events under the Seven Sisters banner began in November 1980 when Barnard College invited Bryn Mawr College, the College of New Rochelle and Vassar College to compete in a four-way basketball competition. The College of New Rochelle was crowned the winner. The following year, in 1981, Mount Hokyoke College, Smith College and Wellesley College joined the tournament and agreed terms to compete in a variety of sports as the Seven Sisters. Radcliffe College (through Harvard University) was invited to participate but declined and Barnard College continued to compete as Columbia University. The College of New Rochelle was not invited to join the new format. Haverford College and Swarthmore College were invited to participate on an associate basis being formally regarded as cousins of the Seven Sisters. A number of other institutions were also invited to participate on an ad hoc basis, particularly Agnes Scott College, Elms College, St. Catherine University, Simmons College and University of Saint Joseph. Connecticut College, Kenyon College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mills College, Skidmore College, Trinity College, University of Notre Dame, Wheaton College and Wilson College have also participated on occasion. Some of the Seven Sisters colleges also enjoy reciprocal and cross-registration programmes with some of these associated colleges.

Graduates of the Seven Sisters colleges are invited to join the Seven Sisters Alum Association alongside their own respective college alumni groups. If you are a graduate of one of the Seven Sisters colleges or have any experience of these schools, our community would be grateful if you could share your insights with us in the comments section below. We welcome contributions from others who didn’t attend so why not let us know what you think about these schools too.