On the first day of May in 1925, the budding writer Zora Neale Hurston attended a dinner party that followed a magazine awards ceremony. At the event, Hurston mingled with the usual “Negrotarians,” a term she coined to describe wealthy and influential White people who took an interest in Black life from a “humanitarian” lens. Following the dinner, she was approached by Annie Nathan Meyer, one said “Negrotarian,” who was so impressed by the gifted and amusing Hurston that she offered her a place at the women’s college she had founded a few decades earlier. In the fall a few months later, the 34-year-old enrolled at Barnard College as the school’s lone Black student.
The year that she graduated, Zora Neale Hurston published an essay titled “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” She muses on her racialized self, and in one section writes:
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
In her years at the college, Hurston found herself being treated as “Barnard’s sacred black cow,” as she explained in one letter to Meyer:
The girls at Barnard are perfectly wonderful to me… They literally drag me to the teas on Wednesdays and then behave as if I am the guest of honor—so eager are they to assure me that I am desired there.
Nevertheless, despite the isolation and overcompensation, Hurston enjoyed her years at Barnard and in 1928, she graduated with a degree in Anthropology, beginning the prolific research and writing career she is known for today.
When Barnard was founded in 1889, it was one of over 120 women’s colleges that century opened to provide women access to higher education. Institutions like Barnard and its other Seven Sisters, in particular, were created to serve a particular and narrow class of privileged, White elites. The number of women’s colleges reached its peak in the 1960s with 168 schools, but following the boom of co-education that followed soon after, the number fell to 28 colleges by 2022. Despite this, the power and prominence of women’s colleges continues. Their graduates continue to win Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, and US presidential nominations, and since 2016, application numbers at a number of women’s colleges have been on the rise, resulting in higher enrolment numbers and lower admission rates.
But as the world changes, along with the experiences and needs of women, women’s colleges will need to change too. These institutions were founded to address the lack of gender parity in colleges and universities, but in recent years, young women are more likely to be enrolled in college and to possess a four-year college degree. What’s more, hard-earned steps in social progress has made this larger pool of new applicants more diverse than the initial populations these schools were created for. Even the question of what it means to be a woman and who should be allowed entry within women’s colleges is changing as mainstream understandings of gender continue to be disrupted.
When Zora Neale Hurston arrived at Barnard, she entered a space not created for her and in which she sought to stay the same while expecting others to meet the moment. Over the centuries, women’s colleges have needed to evolve to make way for students like Hurston and beyond, and for this moment, what should the role of a women’s college be? Who should they serve? And what responsibilities should they bear?
Ninety years after Zora Neale Hurston began her first year at Barnard, I began mine. In my first year, I lived in a four-person room on the sixth floor of Brooks Hall in the main campus quad. One night, a few months in, I took a study break to fill my water bottle in Reid Lounge when I walked past a room filled with Black women sitting, chatting, laughing. There could not have been more than 20 people in the room, but it was the largest group of Black women I had seen since arriving at Barnard and I was awestruck. I walked into what I later learned was the Zora Neale Hurston Lounge and I attended my first meeting of the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters, also known as BOSS.
BOSS defined my time at Barnard. In the weekly meetings, we had conversations on topics that ranged from class, to colorism, to Nicki Minaj versus Cardi B. I later became the Community Outreach Chair, finding ways for our members to collaborate with other organisations on the wider Columbia campus, as well as arranging opportunities to serve alongside local groups in Harlem such as food banks and tutoring programs. Then, in my senior year, I served as BOSS President during its 50th anniversary year, when our board brainstormed how to move the club forward in our mission and language to reflect the range of gender identities expressed in our membership beyond cis-gender women.
My time in BOSS transformed not only how I saw myself, but in the years since, those experiences have provided me with a potential roadmap for what attending a women’s college might look like in our continually evolving world.
In BOSS, space was made for discourse around our similarities and our differences. Within this space created for Black women, I became more cognisant of the other identities I held that further privileged or marginalized how I moved in the world. Women’s colleges have an opportunity to do the same, expanding opportunities for teaching and learning through classes, conferences, and organisations that include considerations of how gender also intersects with other social identities.
Similarly, BOSS expanded my understanding of women’s issues and how converging forms of oppressions result in the disproportionate discrimination of women. Working with urban gardens, for examples, exposed me to how food justice was a women’s issue given how women are more likely to be made responsible for making food available to their families. In this current moment, women’s colleges remain focused on the same (valid) themes of women in STEM and representation in sports, while other issues go ignored. Labor, for example, is a feminist issue given how predominantly-female industries are left un-unionised, and women’s colleges can be examples of change by recognising the unions on their own campuses.
Lastly, my own shortcomings and biases as a cis-gendered woman meant that as much as I wrestled in BOSS in how to create a more inclusive space, it was the students that followed who changed the name of BOSS to stand for the Barnard Organization of Soul and Solidarity and included language around empowering women, non-binary, and trans students on campus. Historically women’s colleges can do the same, continuing their missions to provide safe, high-quality educational experiences to gender minorities in everything from who is admitted these schools, to the language and images used in promotional materials.
The further away I get from my time at Barnard, the more I appreciate the experience. Attending a school that validated and affirmed who I was built and maintained in me a confidence that follows me until today. Even if the reality is that Barnard wasn’t created for students like me, or Zora Neale Hurston, or many others, it did what all good institutions do — it evolved.
The missions of our schools can still be met in environments that looks nothing like the ones in which they were constructed in, we just have to be brave enough to meet the moment. All schools have a duty to be the places where students feel safe and seen enough to thrive and be their utter best, and that is where our responsibility lies. We need to grow and change. We need to move and meet.
Of course I loved reading this. For me the dislocation of Barnard was deeply about class and region. I just read bell hooks writing about an essay June Jordan wrote on leaving Barnard. Let’s track it down!