October 1866

The feminist writer, lecturer and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall visited Vassar in preparation for her influential book, The College, The Market, and the Court: or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law, a collection of her lectures, given over a number of years and published 1867. Although still thinking that the best hope for the education of women might be coeducation, she was very favorably impressed by the college and by the thoroughness with which it had been planned. “Ten Years,” an appendix to her book, surveyed the improvement in women’s education over the preceding decade, devoting nearly ten pages to Vassar. “The art gallery,” she wrote, was “such as no college in the country possesses,” and the “curriculum is such as we find adopted at all colleges, except that far more time is devoted to science than is usual at Yale or Harvard, and room is left for music.”

On this visit, Dall noted, Matthew Vassar asked her “to talk with him about a culinary and household college for the proper training of housewives, which he still wishes to erect.”

Caroline Wells Healy Dall, The College, The Market, and the Court: or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law

“I have had the pleasure of hearing a lecture from Mrs. Dall on ‘Sunshine.’ The lecture was not particularly original, but I was pleased with the lady and glad to have seen her.”

Christine Ladd ’1869, in her diary