A College of Her Own

In 1889, Annie Nathan Meyer, still in her early twenties, led the effort to start Barnard College after Columbia College refused to admit women. Named after a former Columbia president, Frederick Barnard, who had advocated for Columbia to become coeducational, Barnard, despite many ups and downs, became one of the leading women's colleges in the United States.

A College of Her Own offers a comprehensive and lively narrative of Barnard from its beginnings to the present day. Through the stories of presidents and leading figures as well as students and faculty, Robert McCaughey recounts Barnard's history and how its development was shaped by its complicated relationship to Columbia University and its New York City location. McCaughey considers how the student composition of Barnard and its urban setting distinguished it from other Seven Sisters colleges, tracing debates around class, ethnicity, and admissions policies. Turning to the postwar era, A College of Her Own discusses how Barnard benefited from the boom in higher education after years of a precarious economic situation. Beyond the decisions made at the top, McCaughey examines the experience of Barnard students, including the tumult and aftereffects of 1968 and the impact of the feminist movement. The concluding section looks at present-day Barnard, the shifts in its student body, and its efforts to be a global institution. Informed by McCaughey's five decades as a Barnard faculty member and administrator, A College of Her Own is a compelling history of a remarkable institution.

“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.”

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

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).

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