The Vassar Miscellany changed from a quarterly to a monthly journal, appearing nine times annually.
1877
Journalist, abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Mary A. Livermore gave an informal address she called “Superfluous Women” in the Chapel. Mrs. Livermore’s explanation of the superfluity of women in America, the Vassar Miscellany explained, was that “while there are six per cent more male children born into the world, war and drunkenness, to which evils we are so little exposed, have always destroyed a large proportion of men. . . .The solution which Mrs. Livermore suggests seems to be the only practicable answer to the question…women need to be trained to self-support and independence.”
Laura Johnson Wylie ’77 gave the valedictory address—“perfect in finish and exquisite in sentiment” according to The Vassar Miscellany—and Emma Culbertson ’77 spoke on women in medicine as 45 members of the Class of 1877 received the bachelor’s degree at Commencement. “Her words,” The Miscellany said of Culbertson’s address, “could give us no new or startling ideas, but all felt that they were spoken by a true woman, a woman of whom Vassar is proud. It was not the essay itself which was enthusiastically applauded, but the essay as delivered by Miss Culbertson.”
Among the first women admitted to graduate study at Yale, Wylie was also among the first group to receive, in 1894, the Yale Ph.D. Yale’s publication of her doctoral dissertation, “Studies in the Evolution of English Criticism,” in the same year, was the first such publication by the university of a dissertation by a woman. Returning to Vassar in 1895, Wylie became head of the English department in 1897. She and her colleague Gertrude Buck pioneered in the modern development of an English curriculum that conceived of literature as an organic bonding of art and scholarship and of action and analysis. Wylie taught in the English department until her retirement in 1924.
Dr. Emma B. Culbertson received her A.M. from Vassar in 1881, the same year she earned her M.D. from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. A practicing phyisican in Boston from 1883 until her retirement, she was attending surgeon to the New England Hosipital for Women and Children and, the first woman to be admitted to the American Academy of Medicine, she served that organization as a vice-president. In “The Best Preparation for a Woman Physician,” which appeared in The Vassar Miscellany in 1896, she wrote, “The field for women in medicine is constantly enlarging and there will be ample room in the next fify years for all who come fitly prepared. Indeed it would seem that the woman physician is to be a very important factor in the sociological evolution of the twentieth century.”
Professor James Orton, who had begun a third expedition into a previously unexplored region of the Andes the previous October, died at the age of 47 on a schooner on Lake Titicaca, from exhaustion and lingering injuries incurred during a mutiny among his escorts.
“Among the distinguished visitors this fall we mention Lyon Playfair, M.P., Mrs. Bright, sister-in-law of John Bright, and Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell.” Vassar Miscellany.