Table 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).

Reviews

If one measure of a college’s impact on American life is the writers and artists it has produced, then what to say about Barnard College, whose alumnae include Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Anna Quindlen, Erica Jong, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Delia Ephron, Greta Gerwig, Jhumpa Lahiri, Twyla Tharp, Mary Gordon, and Joan Rivers—and thousands more? Robert McCaughey’s A College of Her Own tells the complex, inspiring story of a singular institution whose alumnae changed the world.
*Jennifer Finney Boylan, Barnard College*

McCaughey combines his knowledge as a historian of American higher education with his deep personal experience at Barnard and Columbia to provide a richly textured account of Barnard College and its role as one of America’s leading women’s colleges and preeminent liberal arts colleges.
*Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History and former president of Barnard College*

A College of Her Own is an exemplary institutional history and contribution to NYC social history. Indeed, it is one of the most thorough and engaging accounts of a liberal arts college. McCaughey provides a masterful depiction of the segmented social hierarchies of the city and their complex interactions with those who attended the college, those who ran it, and those who supported it.
*Roger L. Geiger, author of American Higher Education Since World War II: A History*

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.
*Rosalind Rosenberg, author of Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics*