Women's colleges in the United States are private single-sex U.S. institutions of higher education that only admit female students. They are often liberal arts colleges. There are approximately 29 active women's colleges in the United States in 2024, down from a peak of 281 such colleges in the 1960s.

History Origins and types

Education for girls and women was originally provided within the family, by local dame schools and public elementary schools, and at female seminaries found in every colony. Access to this education was however limited to women from families with the means to pay tuition and placed its focus on "ladylike" accomplishments rather than academic training. These seminaries or academies were usually small and often ephemeral. Founded by a single woman or small group of women, they often failed to outlive their founders.

The different trajectories of early women's schools complicate the claims of various colleges to have been the "first" women's college. A number of 18th or early 19th-century female seminaries later grew into academic, degree-granting colleges, while others became notable private high schools. Being a female seminary at an early date is therefore not necessarily equivalent to having been a women's college at that date.

Mary Lyon developed her ideas on how to educate women when she was assistant principal at Ipswich Female Seminary in Massachusetts. By 1837 she had convinced sponsors to support a new school—the first real college for women. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opened on November 8, 1837, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The town had donated the land and main building.See "The Founding of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary" (2022) online Lyon's layout of the campus provided a widely imitated model for the higher education of women by providing a physical environment that supported a rigorous and comprehensive curriculum equivalent to that of men's colleges. Lyon's innovative goals set her Seminary apart from other female seminaries of the period, offering a curriculum equivalent to those at men's colleges. All the students worked in one building with little privacy. There was close contact with the all-female faculty, and daily self reports on their personal strengths and weaknesses. The college cut staff to the minimum as the 100 or so students each performed one hour of work a day, handling most of the routine chores like cooking and cleaning and maintaining the grounds. Lyon rejected the goal of the men's colleges to promote individualism and independence and instead fostered the collective ideal of a united team of women could match the success of nearby men's colleges like Amherst and Williams. The curriculum allowed women to study subjects like geometry, calculus, Latin, Greek, science, philosophy, and history, which were not typically taught at female seminaries.Andrea L. Turpin, “The Ideological Origins of the Women's College: Religion, Class, and Curriculum in the Educational Visions of Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon.” History of Education Quarterly 50#2 (2010), pp. 133–58. online.The major study is Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma mater: Design and experience in the women's colleges from their nineteenth-century beginnings to the 1930s (U of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

Institutions of higher education for women were primarily founded during the early 19th century, many as teaching seminaries. As noted by the Women's College Coalition: The formal education of girls and women began in the middle of the 19th century and was intimately tied to the conception that society had of the appropriate role for women to assume in life. [This education]... was intimately tied to the conception that society had of the appropriate role for women to assume in life [preparing] girls for their future role as wives and mothers... [...] Academic education prepared girls for their role as community leaders and social benefactors and had some elements of the education offered boys. [...] Many early women's colleges began as female seminaries and were responsible for producing an important corps of educators.The Rise of Women's Colleges, Coeducation

Authors Irene Harwarth, Mindi Maline, and Elizabeth DeBra further note that the founding of women's colleges responded to a need for advanced education at a time when most institutions did not admit women.

Early proponents of education for women included Sarah Pierce (Litchfield Female Academy, 1792); Catharine Beecher (Hartford Female Seminary, 1823); Zilpah P. Grant Banister (Ipswich Female Seminary, 1828); Elias Marks (South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute, 1828); and Mary Lyon. Lyon was involved in the development of both Hartford Female Seminary and Ipswich Female Seminary. She was also involved in the creation of Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College, Massachusetts) in 1834, which was re-chartered as a college in 1912. In 1837, Lyon founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), which was chartered as a college in 1888. Harwarth, Maline, and DeBra note Mount Holyoke's significance as a model for other women's colleges in the U.S., and both Vassar College and Wellesley College were patterned after Mount Holyoke.

Vassar College was the first of the Seven Sisters to be chartered as a college in 1861. In 1840, the first Catholic women's college Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College was founded by Saint Mother Theodore Guerin of the Sisters of Providence in Indiana as an academy, later becoming the college. The college became co-educational in 2015.

Some early women's colleges failed to survive. These included Oread Institute, chartered as a college for women in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1849, and the Baltimore Female College, also founded in 1849 at St. Paul Street and East Saratoga Street in downtown Baltimore. The latter later relocated to Park Avenue/Park Place and Wilson Street in the Bolton Hill neighborhood under its longtime president Nathan C. Brooks, until closing in the late 1880s.

Another early women's school was the Moravian College, originally Bethlehem Female Seminary, founded as a female seminary in 1742 in Germantown and later moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It began to grant undergraduate degrees in 1863 and became the Moravian Seminary and College for Women in 1913. In 1954, it merged with the boys school, Moravian College and Theological Seminary, and became coeducational. The Moravians of Salem, North Carolina began what is now Salem College in 1772 in Winston-Salem.

Georgia Female College, now Wesleyan College opened in 1839 as the first Southern college for women.F. N. Boney, 'The Pioneer College for Women': Wesleyan Over a Century and a Half." Georgia Historical Quarterly (1988) pp: 519-532. in JSTORChristie Anne Farnham, The education of the southern belle: Higher education and student socialization in the antebellum south (1994)

While there were a few coeducational colleges (such as Oberlin College founded in 1833, Guilford College, in 1837, Lawrence University in 1847, Antioch College in 1853, Bates College in 1855), and Cornell University in 1865, almost all colleges and universities at that time were exclusively for men. The first generally accepted coordinate college, H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College (Tulane University), was founded in 1886, and followed a year later by Evelyn College for Women, the coordinate college for Princeton University. The model was quickly duplicated at other prestigious universities. Notable 19th-century coordinate colleges included Barnard (Columbia University), Pembroke (Brown University), and Radcliffe College (Harvard University). Twentieth-century examples include William Smith College (Hobart College) and Kirkland College, which was associated with Hamilton College.

While the majority of women's colleges are private institutions, there were a few public colleges. In 1884, the legislature of the state of Mississippi established Industrial Institute & College, (later Mississippi University for Women), the first public college for women in the United States. Other states soon followed. Georgia created Georgia State College for Women in 1889, North Carolina created North Carolina Women's College in 1891, and Florida converted its coeducational Florida State College to a women-only school in 1905. This is similar to the establishment of Douglass Residential College (Rutgers University), which was founded as the New Jersey College for Women in 1918 by Mabel Smith Douglass.

Other notable women's colleges include the Seven Sister colleges in the Northeast of the U.S., historically black female educational institutions, small Catholic women's colleges in the United States (SCWCs), and women's colleges in the Southern United States.

20th-century

World War II Early in 1942, during World War II, debate arose concerning the role of colleges and students during the War. The Selective Service age had been lowered to 18 and a few questions arose: which men would go to college, which ones into the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, or the U.S. Coast Guard, how the college students would be trained, and whether the colleges would be run by the military organizations or by educators?

The status of women and women's colleges also entered into the debate: "Urging a National Service Act for women, the American Council on Education's President George Zook said: 'It is clear that women students cannot expect to pursue college as usual while their brothers and male friends are rushed off ... Courses for women are going to be shortened and they are going to be directed toward preparation for specific types of war service. ... These War jobs are going to appear to college women to be hard and distasteful. Stronger words could be used for what many of the men are going through'."

Women's College Coalition The Women's College Coalition (WCC) was founded in 1979 and describes itself as an "association of women's colleges and universities – public and private, independent and church-related, two- and four-year – in the United States and Canada whose primary mission is the education and advancement of women."

Coeducation