Trinity College first admitted women as students
in 1864 to bolster enrollment during the Civil War, but did not
grant them degrees. The first women to be granted degrees by Trinity
were the Giles sisters, Theresa, Persis, and Mary. All of their
classes were held privately with professors in the afternoons or
during faculty members' free periods, until their senior
year, when they were allowed to attend lectures on metaphysics
with the men. In the spring of 1878, the faculty recommended the
Giles sisters for "full and regular graduation to the degree
of Bachelor of Arts."
When Trinity College moved to Durham in 1892, women were admitted,
but only as day students. In 1896, Washington Duke pledged $100,000
for Trinity's endowment, provided the college would "open
its doors to women, placing them on an equal footing with men." A
dormitory was built and named the Mary Duke Building, in honor
of Duke's daughter. The number of female students gradually
increased to a total of 235 in 1923.
Among the provisions of the Duke Indenture in 1924 was the creation
of a coordinate college for women as part of Duke University. When
the new university's Gothic buildings opened on West Campus
in 1930, almost all of the residential and social spaces on East
Campus were reserved for the Woman's College. (The exceptions:
Southgate remained a male dorm, and classes held on East were coeducational.)
In 1929, only a year after Duke awarded its first Ph.D. degrees,
Rose M. Davis became the first woman to earn a Duke doctorate,
in chemistry.
www.lib.duke.edu/archives
—Tim Pyatt '81,
University Archivist
|