The Seven Sisters: Legacy and lessons in women’s education

Examining the legacy, intersectional challenges, and evolving impact of historically women’s colleges.

Photo by Abigail Rabbitt/The Barnard Bulletin

By Abigail Rabbitt

April 2, 2025

The 38th annual Women’s History Month is a time to celebrate and reflect on the profound impact that historically women’s colleges have had in shaping women’s rights and redefining academic spaces for women. Among these institutions, the Seven Sisters, including Barnard College, stand out as spaces of empowerment, resilience, and academic excellence. 

A group of private liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States, the Seven Sisters — comprised of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley — were founded between the early 19th and 20th centuries. Although the original purpose of the Seven Sisters was to provide an alternative to the Ivy League for women, these colleges have evolved into institutions where women and non-men can challenge societal norms and flourish in a supportive and rigorous community, each offering a unique experience to its students. As time has passed, Vassar became co-ed in 1969, and Radcliffe merged with Harvard in 1999, leaving five of the original Seven Sisters as women’s colleges today. 

The foundation of these colleges often had a transformative vision for women’s roles in society. Sophia Smith, the founder of Smith College, used her inheritance to establish the women’s college. In her will, Smith expressed her belief that through women’s education, “[women’s] weight of influence in reforming the evils of society will be greatly increased, as teachers, as writers, as mothers, as members of society, their power for good will be incalculably enlarged.” Similarly, Bryn Mawr College, the first women’s college to offer graduate degrees, was founded by Quakers, causing values of freedom of belief and conscience to be instilled in its foundation. 

Barnard College emerged when a young woman named Annie Nathan Meyer petitioned Columbia University to provide academic opportunities for women, rallying support from faculty and the broader community. She wrote an essay in The Nation saying, “[i]n this ‘dark, gray city,’ this huge, growing, striving, ambitious city with its many means of satisfying life's demands, there is one lack — the lack of a college where women may attain a complete education without leaving their homes and families.” 

However, while these institutions were groundbreaking in their provision of higher education to women, they were also products of their time, consequently reflecting the privileges and biases of the predominantly white, elite society from which they emerged. As these institutions became synonymous with the white, upper-class ideal of womanhood, they excluded women of color and marginalized voices within the educational system.

The experiences of notable figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and June Jordan at Barnard highlight some of the limitations of the Seven Sisters, especially in addressing race and class within the context of women’s education. Hurston, a renowned writer and anthropologist, was the first Black graduate of Barnard College. During her time at Barnard, Hurston was determined “to show the white folks I had brains,” but famously described her experience in her book, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” as feeling overwhelmed or “surged upon” and “overswept” by the isolation of being the only Black student in a sea of white classmates. Her words speak to a larger critique of how these prestigious institutions failed to fully address the social realities and struggles that Black women, in particular, faced in their pursuit of education.

Jordan reflected on her time at Barnard in her essay, “Notes of a Barnard Dropout,” delivered at the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s (BCRW)’s first Reid Lecture in 1975. She stated, “nothing at Barnard, and no one at Barnard, ever, once, formulated and expressed, the necessity, the political necessity, if you will, for the knowledge they required you to absorb.” Jordan underscores a profound gap in the educational philosophy at the time, a philosophy that often treated academic achievement as a detached, neutral pursuit rather than one tied to the struggles for justice and equality outside the college gates. This disconnection from the struggles of the world, particularly those of marginalized communities, displays how Barnard’s curriculum was structured to simply reinforce the oppressive systems that exclude or overlook the experiences of Black women and working-class women. 

The Seven Sisters, including Barnard, laid the foundation for women’s education in America, but they were not immune to the flaws of an elite, racially homogenous academic system. The struggle for inclusivity, diversity, and a more intersectional understanding of women’s experiences within these institutions remains ongoing.

As we continue to reflect on the legacies of these colleges during Women’s History Month, we are reminded that institutions like Barnard are not simply repositories of knowledge — they are active, evolving spaces where the work of social justice, race, and equity must continue. While these colleges empowered and continue to empower generations of women, they also present us with the challenge of ensuring that their legacies are continually redefined to reflect the full spectrum of human experience and to meet the needs of a diverse, changing world.

Today, the Seven Sisters continue to evolve, and as we look to the future, we honor the voices of women like Jordan and Hurston who challenged these institutions from within. Their work compels us to ask: How can these institutions continue to serve as spaces of empowerment, not just for some, but for all? The answer, undoubtedly, lies in the ongoing journey toward inclusivity, representation, and activism within the walls of these elite institutions as they move forward with a broader understanding of what it means to be truly empowering in the 21st century.