July 23, 1866

Having told her diary on March 27, 1863, of the “glorious emancipation for woman…the Vassar female college that is to be,” 19-year-old Christine Ladd told it of the argument she constructed to convince her family to send her to college.

“I have gained an important point with my grandmother. She says she thinks Auntie ought to send me to Vassar. She objected that at the end of four years I should be too old to get married. I assured her that it would afford me great pleasure to entangle a husband but there was no one [in] the place who would have me or whom I would have and out of this place I was destined never to go, gave her statistics of the great excess of females in New England and proved that as I was decidedly not handsome my chances were very small. Therefore since I could not find a husband to support me I must support myself and to do so I needed an education. Grandma succumbed.”

Christine Ladd, in her diary

A graduate in the Class of 1869, Ladd was, in 1878, among the first women allowed to attend lectures at Johns Hopkins University. She married Johns Hopkins mathematician Fabian Franklin in 1882, and Ladd-Franklin’s invention of the “antilogism” solved a problem in symbolic logic that dated back to Aristotle. Her fascinating career is described in the Vassar Encyclopedia.