Introduction

Abstract As a student at Mount Holyoke in the late 1960s, I was aware that the college was America’s first publicly endowed institution for women’s advanced education, and also that it was founded as a religious institution. The exact nature of the original religious vision was vague, but I knew there had been such a vision and that it persisted, somehow, in the communal character of campus life and in the expectations of personal achievement my teachers transmitted. On my first day as a student at Mount Holyoke, President Richard G. Getell made an oblique reference to this original religious vision in a speech he delivered to new students that proclaimed us the new generation in a long line of “uncommon women.” The exact meaning of the epithet uncommon was unclear to me, and I recall some jokes about it after the speech. The president had referred to our SAT scores, which he expected us to live up to, and to our virginity, which he expected us to keep, but he also meant something else by “uncommon,” something spiritual and historic, although he was not very explicit. I had the sense of just having acquired a pressing but obscure responsibility, along with a peculiar female ancestry, whose spirits I imagined lurking in the rafters of the auditorium. The feeling of belonging to something I did not well understand sometimes recurred when I passed the grave of Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, on my way to classes or the library.