The story
Founded by Sophia Smith in 1871.1
Early history
The college was chartered in 1871 by a bequest of Sophia Smith and opened its doors in 1875 with 14 students and 6 faculty. At age 65, when Smith inherited a fortune from her father, she decided that 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.
The campus was planned and planted in the 1890s as a botanical garden and arboretum, designed by noted American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. By 1915, the student enrollment was 1,724, and the faculty numbered 163.
During the 1920s, two students at the college went missing: junior Alice Corbett disappeared on November 13, 1925, and was never found; freshman Frances Smith disappeared on January 13, 1928—her body was recovered from the Connecticut River months later.
By 2010, the school had 2,600 undergraduates on campus and 250 students studying elsewhere. The campus landscape now encompasses 147 acres (59 ha) and includes more than 1,200 varieties of trees and shrubs. Smith is the largest privately endowed college for women in the United States.
United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School
The United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College 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.
21st century
In April 2015, the faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.
On September 15, 2022, the Board of Trustees announced Sarah Willie-LeBreton had been selected as the 12th president of Smith College, effective July 1, 2023.
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In June 2025, a conservative watchdog group sued the school for alleged Title IX violations, arguing that the school's policy of admitting transgender women but not transgender men discriminated against biological females who changed genders.
In March and April 2026, some 50 Smith College students, led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were involved in protests that included the unauthorized encampment and occupation of College Hall, the main administrative building on campus, demanding that the college divest its endowment from companies they said were linked to weapons used by Israel in the Gaza conflict. College administrators granted SJP a meeting with the college president in exchange for ending the encampment and later rejected the divestment proposal, citing a lack of mission alignment, societal impact, and community consensus, alongside a negative financial impact concern.
Presidents
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 Ruth Simmons left to lead Brown University.
Table notes:
From Wikipedia’s article on Smith College, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5