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A College of Her Own offers a comprehensive and lively narrative of Barnard from its beginnings to the present day. Through the stories of presidents and leading figures as well as students and faculty, Robert McCaughey recounts Barnard's history and development.
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. “What’s a New York Girl to Do?”
2. East Side, West Side: A Tale of Two Cities
3. Becoming Barnard
4. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Gilderesleeve?
5. Barnard in the Twenties
6. Lean Times: Depression, War, and Other Distractions
7. The McIntosh Era
8. Into the Storm
9. Saying No to Zeus
10. Barnard Rising
11. New York, New York
12. Going Global
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Robert McCaughey is professor of history and Janet H. Robb Chair in the Social Sciences at Barnard College. His previous Columbia University Press books include Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (2003) and A Lever Long Enough: A History of Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science Since 1864 (2014).
Summary
In 1889, Annie Nathan Meyer, still in her early twenties, led the effort to start Barnard College after Columbia College refused to admit women. Named after a former Columbia president, Frederick Barnard, who had advocated for Columbia to become coeducational, Barnard, despite many ups and downs, became one of the leading women’s colleges in the United States.
A College of Her Own offers a comprehensive and lively narrative of Barnard from its beginnings to the present day. Through the stories of presidents and leading figures as well as students and faculty, Robert McCaughey recounts Barnard’s history and how its development was shaped by its complicated relationship to Columbia University and its New York City location. McCaughey considers how the student composition of Barnard and its urban setting distinguished it from other Seven Sisters colleges, tracing debates around class, ethnicity, and admissions policies. Turning to the postwar era, A College of Her Own discusses how Barnard benefited from the boom in higher education after years of a precarious economic situation. Beyond the decisions made at the top, McCaughey examines the experience of Barnard students, including the tumult and aftereffects of 1968 and the impact of the feminist movement. The concluding section looks at present-day Barnard, the shifts in its student body, and its efforts to be a global institution. Informed by McCaughey’s five decades as a Barnard faculty member and administrator, A College of Her Own is a compelling history of a remarkable institution.
Additional text
A College of Her Own gives us a deeply researched, vividly written, bracingly candid account. McCaughey shows how a small, chronically undercapitalized, mostly Protestant college for women came to leverage its affiliation with one of America’s greatest research universities and to embrace the religious, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity of its urban location to become the most selective women’s college in America.
