Smith College Housing

Early Smith Housing, 1875-1880

When Smith College first opened its doors to students in 1875, there were few precedents for how a women’s college should build its dorms. Unlike the two already existing women’s colleges, Mount Holyoke and Vassar, the Smith trustees decided to abandon the model of a large building with many individual student rooms. Instead, they took over a house that had belonged to a local family, Dewey House, in order to give their students a domestic space. Dewey House, designed by Thomas Pratt in 1827 for Charles A. Dewey, was a three story home with a front porch, parlor, large dining room, and a bedroom for each of the incoming students.[1]
Smith went with the more domestic model of housing in its early years for two reasons. First, the trustees were concerned that by building a large dorm, they would not be able to afford to hire academically rigorous instructors.[1] Second, there was growing concern in the news and amongst the general public that the type of dorms provided by Vassar and Mount Holyoke encouraged female students to form close bonds verging on the romantic and made students unhealthy and unladylike through academic strain.[1] Seelye, Smith’s first president, hoped that by keeping students in homes with a cultured matron keeping an eye on them that they could gain an education while keeping within the bounds of Victorian femininity. Sarah W Humphrey was the first matron of Dewey House, charged with ensuring the students would not overstrain themselves in their studies.[1] In 1877-1879, Smith constructed its first purpose built dorms, all keeping in the style of domestic Victorian architecture, Hatfield, Washburn, and Hubbard Houses, all designed by Peabody & Stearns.

Boarding Houses and Student Culture, 1880-1910

In the 1880’s, Smith began to accept more students than it could house on campus. Students began to move off campus into local boarding houses, loosely regulated and approved by the college.[1] Many of these boarding houses were Invitation Houses, or houses where students had to be invited to enter by the current residents.[1] Other boarding houses in Northampton were based less on social networks and more on budget. For students who could afford more expensive housing there was the Plymouth, which had large suites, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a dining hall with a stage.[1] Since the housing was based largely on budget and on who one knew, Smith housing became highly economically segregated and cliquish.[1]
As students’ house identity became increasingly telling about their economic and social background, bedrooms became the site of elaborate teas, spreads, and chafing dish parties.[1] In the 1890’s, as students were increasingly moving off campus and as Seelye’s ideal of a domestic life for his students was becoming further from the reality, Smith hired the Brocklesby firm to build four new houses, Morris, Lawrence, Dickinson, and Tyler. Although these houses still used the gables, large central staircases, and domestic public spaces typical of New England homes, each house roomed sixty women, departing sharply from the domestic ideal.[1]

Ada Louis Comstock: 1910-1926

In 1910, Seelye’s long presidency came to an end and Marion LeRoy Burton took his place. In 1912, Burton hired Ada Louis Comstock to be the new dean of students and she continued in the position into the presidency of William Allan Nielson. During her time as dean of students, Comstock made it her goal to reform the housing at Smith. Comstock believed that Smith needed to create a democratic environment where students could socialize with each other regardless of economic background, and she saw the housing system as the chief impediment to her goal.[1] In order to ensure that students of all backgrounds mixed, Comstock convinced the college to acquire several large homes on Elm Street and to build large dormitories, creating the ten dorms that made up the Georgian, red-brick Quadrangle. These new dorms departed sharply from earlier Smith houses with large elegant gathering spaces on the first floor and on the upper floors small cubicle-like rooms lining the central hall.[1] The design was motivated only partially by Smith’s concern for creating a democratic social life. The design was also created to combat the longstanding fear that if students spent too much of their social life unsupervised in private bedrooms that their close female friendships might form into dangerous lesbian bonds.[1]

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz (1984). Alma Mater : Design and experience in the women's colleges from their nineteenth century beginnings to the 1930's. New York: A.A. Knopf.
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