Education: Vassar Women

“I considered,” said old Matthew Vassar when he founded Vassar Female College, “that the MOTHERS of a country mold the character of its citizens, determine its institutions and shape its destiny.”

Had Matthew Vassar last week revisited his campus at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., he would have found its future mothers, in bare legs and short skirts, pedaling bicycles to class, would have heard them sing:

Matthew Vassar’s dead & gone, Dead & gone, dead & gone. . . .

Oh, he made his wealth in beer, But we dare not drink it here.

Is that logical, my dear?

Not at all!

Vassar women have at various times been called irreverent, intellectual, rich, mannish, able, unpractical, snobbish, radical, dowdy, fast. But this week Matthew Vassar could have read a reassuring report on how Vassar women turn out in the long run. In celebration of its 75th anniversary, the college published a book (Vassar Women—$2.50) giving an account of itself and its graduates.

Its author was a typical alumna, Agnes Rogers, ’16, writer, onetime circulation promotion manager for Harper’s, second wife and collaborator of Author Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday). Mrs. Allen had ransacked the college records (including returns from questionnaires to 10,000 alumnae).

Undergraduate Vassar, reported Mrs. Allen, has changed greatly in the last 50 years. Girls no longer have to report to their teachers that they have taken two tub baths a week, nor entertain men in Engaged Parlor (“a kind of goldfish bowl”), nor go to chapel. They are almost a full year younger (17.8), two inches taller (5 ft. 5 in.), eleven pounds heavier (126), bigger around the waist, have nearly twice the lung capacity of the class of 1885. They may have men visitors in their rooms (afternoons), import Yale men for male parts in their plays, leave the campus weekends, even drink discreetly at Poughkeepsie bars. But Mrs. Allen says she failed to find a single Vassarite who ever went on one of the “gin picnics” which, according to college men, are a Vassar institution.

Traditionally sophisticated, Vassar undergraduates turn up their noses at “rah-rah” stuff, avoid exercise, have on their list of favorites Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, the Stork Club, Yale, the film You Can’t Take It with You, the New Yorker magazine.* Although Vassar is expensive ($1,855 a year), Mrs. Allen declares that “the snobbishness of wealth just does not exist there,” there are no sororities, one-fifth of the students get scholarships.

Vassar’s reputation for radicalism comes from such campus heroines as Inez Milholland, ’09, a black-haired Irish beauty who as an undergraduate soapboxed for woman suffrage, later led shirtwaist strikes in Manhattan, once rode a white horse down Fifth Avenue, died stumping for suffragism and socialism in 1915. But of all Vassar’s graduates, Mrs. Allen reports, 70% are Republican. Other statistics:

>Two out of three have had salaried jobs, one of three is now employed. >Favorite occupations: teaching, secretarial or clerical work, social work, research, writing. Among the alumnae are reliefers, a circus rider, three college presidents—Katharine Blunt (Connecticut), Constance Warren (Sarah Lawrence), Mildred McAfee (Wellesley)—a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Josephine Roche.

>Median salary: under $2,000. Top: $50,000.

>Nearly three out of four are married.

>One in 20 is divorced. (Average for the whole population: one in six.)

>Average number of children: two.

Mrs. Allen found that Vassar alumnae, almost to a woman, were proud of their college and what it had done for them, liked their work, took an intelligent interest in their husbands’ work (see cut, p. 45), got more fun out of reading, friends, sports, gardening and music than from bridge. Mrs. Allen also consulted their husbands. One husband’s comment:

“As a group [Vassar women] seem to be pugnacious feminists. … A dash of snobbishness comes in the intellectual line sometimes. . . . None of them I’ve met is dull, although in a few scattered cases it might seem a public duty to strangle them. As a group I’d rate them high in intelligence, sincerity and the good solid qualities that make good citizens, friends and especially wives.”

*A recent survey showed, to the college’s surprise, that Vassar girls spend an average of 43 hours a week studying, five hours more than 15 years ago.