A Savvy Woman with a Bold Vision

Fourteen students. Six faculty members. Four hundred eighty seats in the hall where they gathered for their first convocation.

Those numbers, from the opening of Smith College in September 1875, suggest Sophia Smith’s deep ambition to create a college that would educate thousands of students and be “a perennial blessing to the country and the world,” as she wrote in her will.

Sophia Smith was the first woman to found a women’s college, rather than a seminary or a preparatory school. There has been debate about whether Smith developed the vision for the college herself or merely followed advice from her minister, John M. Greene, according to the Smith College website. Yet the college also commissioned a 1999 book, The Strange Disappearance of Sophia Smith, by Quentin Quesnell—Roe/Straut Professor Emeritus in the Humanities—that shows evidence of Sophia Smith’s own choices and agency in her philanthropy.

“Quesnell reveals that Greene, who outlived Sophia Smith by almost 50 years, spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy during his last 30 years … asserting his own role in founding the college and rewriting pertinent documents,” according to NewsSmith, a former Smith College publication. Greene’s daughter, Louisa, published his posthumous memoir in 1926. It continued the pattern of celebrating Greene’s role to the exclusion of Sophia Smith, according to Laurie Sanders ’88, co-director of Historic Northampton.

Sanders believes it’s time to give Smith her due. “It’s so relevant to the kinds of questions we’re asking today in terms of unrecorded lives, lost histories, erasure, the lack of credit that women get in so many professions,” she says.

Born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, in 1796, the fourth of seven children to wealthy farmer Joseph Smith and his wife, Lois, Smith grew up a few miles from Northampton and attended a so-called “dame school” where she was educated in someone’s home. Her family was active in business and politics. Later, a cousin and her husband living across the street sheltered enslaved people seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad.

She never married, had no children, and used an ear trumpet by age 40 due to poor hearing. Still, she read widely; went on shopping trips; visited Washington, D.C.; and built a fancy house with a grand piano. By 1859, she received magazines that wrote about the importance of women’s education, including profiles of Vassar, which began as a women’s college founded by Matthew Vassar, and Wellesley, which opened as a seminary for women.

Did her reading and observations of girls secondary schools give her the idea for a women’s college, or was it John M. Greene? “Maybe,” Sanders allows of the latter, “but we have no real evidence of that. We only have him saying that’s what happened.”

Rather than bending to anyone’s will, Sanders says, Smith grew into her own as a savvy donor with great strength, intellectual curiosity, and resolve. Smith sought counsel from others but ultimately was specific in her will about her intent for the college. She had the foresight to outline what the college would teach, including mathematical and physical sciences and ancient and modern languages, but also “such other studies” that would benefit women in the future.

Sophia Smith couldn’t have imagined that Smith College would educate such a diverse array of undergraduates, including international students, women of color, queer and gender-nonconforming students, and first-generation college students, says Kelly Anderson, a lecturer in the study of women and gender and in archives. “I think she’d be delighted that we could dream so big.”

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.