Article 3: Did the Women’s Colleges Founded in the Progressive Era Represent a New model?: Connecticut College for Women as a Case Study

In July 1910, Elizabeth Wright told her fellow members of the Hartford College Club, “If the girls are to have only one college, let it be a good one” (Wright 1910a). Later that month, Wright wrote Professor William North Rice of Wesleyan University to say that, “the time has come,” “when the girls of Connecticut should have a first class college, second to none” (Wright 1910b). Wright was correct. The time had indeed come for a high quality college for women in Connecticut, but the time had also come for a college that, when it opened for classes in September 1915, was not simply a copy of other successful women’s colleges. The time had come for what Connecticut College’s founding president Frederick Sykes would label “the next step in women’s education” (“Women’s College President Talks” 1913).