Edith J. Randolph Clagett Evans

Attended Graduate School at Bryn Mawr College. A little about its history: A Brief History of Bryn Mawr College

When Bryn Mawr College opened its doors in 1885, it offered women a more ambitious academic program than any previously available to them in the United States. Other women's colleges existed, but Bryn Mawr was the first to offer graduate education through the Ph.D.—a signal of its founders' refusal to accept the limitations imposed on women's intellectual achievement at other institutions.

A Quaker Legacy

The founding of Bryn Mawr carried out the will of Joseph W. Taylor, a physician who wanted to establish a college "for the advanced education of females." Taylor originally envisioned an institution that would inculcate in its students the beliefs of the Society of Friends (popularly known as Quakers), but by 1893 his trustees had broadened the College's mission by deciding that Bryn Mawr would be non-denominational. Bryn Mawr's first administrators had determined that excellence in scholarship was more important than religious faith in appointing the faculty, although the College remained committed to Quaker values such as freedom of conscience.

The college's mission was to offer women rigorous intellectual training and the chance to do to original research, a European-style program that was then available only at a few elite institutions for men. That was a formidable challenge, especially in light of the resistance of society at large, at the end of the 19th century, to the notion that women could be the intellectual peers of men.

M. Carey Thomas' Academic Ideal

Fortunately, at its inception, the college was adopted as a moral cause and a life's work by a woman of immense tenacity, M. Carey Thomas. Thomas, Bryn Mawr's first dean and second president, had been so intent upon undertaking advanced study that when American universities denied her the opportunity to enter a Ph.D. program on an equal footing with male students, she went to Europe to pursue her degree.

When Thomas learned of the plans to establish a college for women just outside Philadelphia, she brought to the project the same determination she had applied to her own quest for higher education. Thomas' ambition—for herself and for all women of intellect and imagination—was the engine that drove Bryn Mawr to achievement after achievement.

The College established undergraduate and graduate programs that were widely viewed as models of academic excellence in both the humanities and the sciences, programs that elevated standards for higher education nationwide. Under the leadership of Thomas and James E. Rhoads, who served the College as president from 1885 to 1894, Bryn Mawr repeatedly broke new ground. It was, for example, the first institution in the United States to offer fellowships for graduate study to women; its self-government association, the first in the country at its founding in 1892, was unique in the United States in granting to students the right not only to enforce but to make all of the rules governing their conduct; its faculty, alumnae and students engaged in research that expanded human knowledge.