Women’s Higher Education Henry M. Pierce’s Address to Rutgers Female College’s Second Graduating Class 1868

19 cent Women Baccalaureate Women's Education

Broadside

Pierce, Henry M. Address to the Second Graduating Class of the Rutgers Female College, 1868, was delivered to the second graduating class after the institution received a new charter authorizing it to confer collegiate degrees upon women. Founded in 1839 as Rutgers Female Institute, the New York school became Rutgers Female College under an April 11, 1867 charter granting it the rights and powers of a college or university, except the authority to grant professional degrees. Pierce had used his address to the first graduating class in 1867 to discuss women's intellectual equality and the education appropriate to a college for women, declaring that the institution’s transition from Institute to College marked the change that had occurred in women’s education during the preceding quarter century. This second address, delivered the following year, belongs to the college’s earliest period of degree-granting instruction and is inscribed by its president.

Pierce, Henry M. Address to the Second Graduating Class of the Rutgers Female College; Delivered in the West Presbyterian Church, (Rev. Dr. Hastings’,) on Sabbath Evening, May 31st, 1868. New York: Agathynian Press, 1868. Inscribed on the inside end page, “Compliments of H. M. Pierce, President.” 16 pages. Original blue wrappers, 9¼ x 6 inches. Rutgers Female College occupied 487–491 Fifth Avenue by this period, and its 1867–1868 catalogue records a collegiate curriculum that included algebra, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural philosophy, languages, and other academic subjects. The presentation inscription directly associates this copy with Pierce during his presidency and the college’s second graduating year.

Rutgers Female College’s 1867 charter placed the institution among the nineteenth-century schools attempting to provide women with collegiate rather than solely seminary instruction; contemporary and later records identify it as the first institution in New York City where women could earn the Bachelor of Arts degree. Pierce’s 1868 address therefore dates to the immediate implementation of the college charter rather than a later commemoration of that transition. No condition defects are specified in the supplied description. President Pierce’s presentation copy preserves an address delivered directly to the second class of women graduating under Rutgers Female College’s newly established collegiate status.

Item #16202

Price: $385.00