History
The college was chartered in 1871 by a bequest of Sophia Smith and opened its doors in 1875 with 14 students and six faculty. When she inherited, at age 65, a fortune from her father, Smith decided that leaving her inheritance to found a women's college was the best way for her to fulfill the moral obligation she expressed in her will: "I hereby make the following provisions for the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men." By 1915–16 the student enrollment was 1,724 and the faculty numbered 163.
Today, with some 2,600 undergraduates on campus, and 250 students studying elsewhere, Smith is the largest privately endowed college for women in the country. The campus was planned and planted in the 1890s as a botanical garden and arboretum, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The campus landscape now encompasses 147 acres (0.6 km2) and includes more than 1,200 varieties of trees and shrubs.
The United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, was training grounds for junior officers of the Women's Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve (WAVES) and was nicknamed "USS Northampton." On August 28, 1942, a total of 120 women reported to the school for training.
Smith has been led by 10 presidents and two acting presidents. For the 1975 centennial, the college inaugurated its first woman president, Jill Ker Conway (Elizabeth Cutter Morrow was the first acting president of Smith College and the first female head of the college, but she did not use the title of president), who came to Smith from Australia by way of Harvard and the University of Toronto. Since President Conway's term, all Smith presidents have been women, with the exception of John M. Connolly's one-year term as acting president in the interim after President Simmons left to lead Brown University.
- Laurenus Clark Seelye 1875–1910
- Marion LeRoy Burton 1910–1917
- William Allan Neilson 1917–1939
- Elizabeth Cutter Morrow 1939–1940 (acting president)
- Herbert Davis 1940–1949
- Benjamin Fletcher Wright 1949–1959
- Thomas Corwin Mendenhall 1959–1975
- Jill Ker Conway 1975–1985
- Mary Maples Dunn 1985–1995
- Ruth Simmons 1995–2001
- John M. Connolly 2001–2002 (acting president)
- Carol T. Christ 2002–present
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)