Gossip Girl season 1889 promo pic?

Though Barnard today is often seen as an almost overly liberal and accepting environment, that wasn’t always the case. The Barnard Library is hosting a series of panels to address Barnard’s history, the first of which, “Guess Who’s Coming to Barnard?” happened on Monday evening. It was led by Professor Bob McCaughey and Mollie Galchus ’16, and discussed the founders’ vision for Barnard as opposed to what it turned out to be. Barnard Bears Betsy Ladyzhets and Mia Lindheimer take a look at what kind of bold, beautiful women Barnard’s founders envisioned back in the 1880s.

Imagine: the year is 1889. There are only forty states in the U.S. The world does not yet know the destruction of world war, the speed of subway trains, or the wonder of modern pizza. Adolf Hitler is born at Braunau am Inn, a small town on the border of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria. The Moulin Rouge Cafe opens in Paris. The Coca-Cola brand is originally incorporated as the Pemberton Medicine Company in Atlanta, Georgia. And, in New York City, Barnard’s first class of 14 students began to meet in a rented brownstone on Madison Avenue.

But who were these students, and how were they selected for Barnard? What did the founders have in mind when they created this college? And did Barnard stay true to the founders’ vision for the next hundred years, or even in the next thirty? These questions and more were answered last Monday evening.

The Barnard Guitar and Mandolin Club – very high society

Annie Nathan Meyer, the woman often credited as Barnard’s founder, was in fact part of a group of women who collectively decided to form a “Columbia University annex for women” in 1888. Of course, when they spoke of “women,” they were thinking of a very specific type of women: namely, a handful of Manhattan socialites within a concentrated cluster of Madison Avenue addresses and a hefty amount of servants. Women who made it through high school during that time often didn’t feel the need to go to college, or went out of the city to pursue the only options available to them. Meyer wanted Barnard to be “a college for girls who are currently going to Smith, Bryn Mawr, or Wellesley, but in New York.” One of her founding friends called Barnard a place for “the women who are too rich to go to college.”

Class of 1906 picnic. Wish we could see the grass stains on their white dresses.

Meyer and her colleagues even had a feeder school in mind: Brearley, an all-girls private day school on the Upper East Side. Think Gossip Girl’s Constance-Billard (it was loosely based off Brearley), but in the late 19th century. These founders envisioned Barnard as an elite women’s college that would prepare elite girls for a life of society and a marriage to a prosperous man. They also didn’t want girls to have to travel far to attend Barnard, hence the college’s original Madison Avenue location.

At the panel, Mollie Galchus put that information into perspective by showing tables and charts she’d put together by examining census data on Barnard’s early classes. All of Barnard’s first students lived in New York City, on the Upper East Side, and had multiple-servant households – same as the college’s trustees.

Hewitt keeping it classy

All of that changed, however, as Barnard grew. By the early 20th century, women were commuting to Barnard’s new Morningside Heights location from nearly three hours away. They journeyed from New Jersey and even, god forbid, Queens and the Bronx.

And these women weren’t exactly high society, either; many of them came from middle class families, many of them were first- or second-generation immigrants, and, to the dismay of some of the founders, many of them were Jewish. Immigrant and Jewish girls often had the high test scores and strong academic records required to get into Barnard, but the admissions board was careful not to take too many of either group. One question on the Barnard application asked if the applicant’s father had ever changed his last name.

Too many people to keep track of for Gossip Girl. Not elite enough. (1935 commencement.)

Around this time, Meyer and her co-founders decided MoHi was just too far from the Upper East Side, and started turning their board meetings into tea parties, where they plotted ways to keep Barnard elite. They weren’t talking about academic elitism; Barnard still had a slim acceptance rate. Their problem was that girls from the wrong social circles were mixing with high class girls.

There was an easy fix, though: the trustees hiked tuition up by $100. Living in Brooks, the only residence hall at the time, cost roughly 10 times as much as tuition. (Brooks was the most expensive dorm in the country at the time.) If smart, but tragically lower-class, women got into Barnard, they wouldn’t be able to afford it, and if smart but from far away, women would likely have to make a long commute to get to classes. After all, as one of the alumna attending the lecture astutely remarked, “Nothing’s worthwhile unless you can exclude someone!”

But not everyone in charge was as elitist as the Board of Trustees. Silas Brownell, the Board Chairman at the time, argued: “Barnard was not founded to make money or to get incomes…Barnard should not be limited to people of means and position. It should open its doors and leave them open to the deserving and aspiring masses.” It dawned on the administration slowly that Barnard should be a place for intelligent, talented, hard working girls to get educations.

Original Milbank ft. the Jungle (a fond title for this small cluster of trees)

Barnard’s class size rose dramatically in the 1920s, perhaps as a result of more conservative trustees leaving the Board, or perhaps simply as a result of more girls gaining the ability to afford higher education. These girls went on to become teachers, upper-middle-class workers, and advocates – positions that the original founders surely never considered for Barnard’s graduates.

There was also evidence of a sense of strong community growing among the Barnard students. Professor McCaughey told a story about one Jewish girl who, as a result of her ethnicity, was excluded from Columbia’s one co-ed fraternity. In support of that girl, the other Barnard students banded together to form their own sorority, of which every Barnard student in the class was a member.

“Ye Taming of Ye Shrew”, with an all female cast. Very Barnard.

Annie Nathan Meyer would probably look at today’s Barnard and be shocked at what she saw. Today’s Barnard is a place students from hundreds of unique backgrounds — many of them not high-class, or rich, or New York City-based — to proudly call home. Today’s Barnard is also a welcoming place, an accepting place, and, most importantly, an empowering place. Today’s Barnard is far from what its founders envisioned, but it’s still educating intelligent, hardworking, talented young women. Hopefully that never changes.

The other two panels in the series, entitled “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Gildersleeve?” and “Those Were the Days?: The McIntosh Era”, will be held on Monday, November 23rd and Monday, December 14th, respectively at 6pm in Lehman 201.

Classy Barnard ladies via the Barnard Archives