page_title: Smith College
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Smith College / History
caption_attribution_description: English: American Elm Tree at College Hall on the Smith College campus, Northampton, MA. Photo was taken in June 2012.
context_page_description: Smith College is a private liberal arts women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest institution within the Seven Sisters. Smith is also a member of the Five College Consortium, along with Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Smith was the first historically women's college to offer an undergraduate engineering degree. Smith alumnae include notable authors, journalists, activists, politicians, philanthropists, actresses, filmmakers, academics, CEOs, two First Ladies of the United States, and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, Emmy Award, MacArthur Grant, Peabody Award, and Tony Award.
context_section_description: The college was chartered in 1871 by a bequest of Sophia Smith and opened its doors in 1875 with 14 students and 6 faculty. When she inherited a fortune from her father at age 65, Smith decided leaving her inheritance to found a women's college was the best way for her to fulfill the moral obligation she expressed in her will:
  I hereby make the following provisions for the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men.
  By 1915–16, the student enrollment was 1,724, and the faculty numbered 163. Today, with some 2,600 undergraduates on campus, and 250 students studying elsewhere, Smith is the largest privately endowed college for women in the country.
  The United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, was training grounds for junior officers of the Women's Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve (WAVES) and was nicknamed "USS Northampton". On August 28, 1942, a total of 120 women reported to the school for training.
  Smith has been led by 11 presidents and two acting presidents. (Elizabeth Cutter Morrow was the first acting president of Smith College and the first female head of the college, but she did not use the title of president.) For the 1975 centennial, the college inaugurated its first woman president, Jill Ker Conway, who came to Smith from Australia by way of Harvard and the University of Toronto. Since President Conway's term, all Smith presidents have been women, with the exception of John M. Connolly's one-year term as acting president in the interim after President Simmons left to lead Brown University.
  Laurenus Clark Seelye 1875–1910
  Marion LeRoy Burton 1910–1917
  William Allan Neilson 1917–1939
  Elizabeth Cutter Morrow 1939–1940 (acting president)
  Herbert Davis 1940–1949
  Benjamin Fletcher Wright 1949–1959
  Thomas Corwin Mendenhall 1959–1975
  Jill Ker Conway 1975–1985
  Mary Maples Dunn 1985–1995
  Ruth Simmons 1995–2001
  John M. Connolly 2001–2002 (acting president)
  Carol T. Christ 2002–2013
  Kathleen McCartney 2013–present
  On December 10, 2012, the Board of Trustees announced Kathleen McCartney had been selected as the 11th president of Smith College effective July 1, 2013.
  The campus was planned and planted in the 1890s as a botanical garden and arboretum, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The campus landscape now encompasses 147 acres (59 ha) and includes more than 1,200 varieties of trees and shrubs.
  In April 2015, the faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.
caption: One of the oldest American Elm trees on the Smith campus.[16]
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